CCBill

CC Bill! Oh boy, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. CCBill is an extensive payment gateway with all the bells and whistles that people expect to see from reputable companies like PayPal. Except, unlike PayPal, they won’t breathe down your neck if you’re peddling smut. On the contrary, they actually respect the adult industry. They cater to porn webmasters with a ton of optimizations and setups that make them the best natural fit for your industry, possibly. Keep in mind; you only need a payment portal if you’re actually charging for a service, even if you’re just running paid memberships. The only way to charge without using one of these bad boys is through cryptocurrency and even then, a direct transaction means you offer no escrow or buyer protection. People aren’t going to like that.

As for what makes CCBill so amazing? Well, take a look at their website for a few minutes and you’ll see what I saw. They cover all their bases. They tell you everything you need to know. They go into extreme detail about how their services work and you can even check out the entire API on how the damn platform works and how it’s integrated into your site and with external tools.

I hate it when these kinds of sites advertise flashy statements on their landing page, then force you to sign up in order to find out more. No, fuck that. I want all the information in advance and that’s exactly what CCBill is offering on their site. You get an inside look into how they operate with every single fine print blown up to a large font, so you don’t miss anything. You know exactly what you’re getting into with CCBill. They are truly a professional alternative to PayPal and I’m pretty sure their site isn’t signing any checks that their ass can’t cash.

Adult Business Friendly

They aren’t specifically catering to adult businesses exclusively, but they have entire sections on their site devoted to smut business practices. It’s kind of like a wing of their operations that’s especially customized for the type of work you’re engaged in. They also make it really clear that they consider this industry to be high risk. If you were selling casual videos that are not pornographic, like say, modelling pictures of babes in their lingerie, then you wouldn’t be considered high risk. This is important, because it changes the terms drastically.

The most important thing to note about running a high-risk business is that the card processors like VISA and MasterCard have their own internal rules about who they allow to actually use their services given a high-risk scenario. The biggest limitation seems to be geographic. So, if you want your users to be able to use VISA cards through CCBill on your site, you have to be registered in the United States, Canada or Europe. MasterCard has the same limitations.

There are other fine print rules you have to go through and I’d advise that you don’t just take my word for it. There’s a lot more reading to be done here than I could cover in a single review. Suffice it to say that even though CCBill is trying to cater to the adult industry, the actual card companies have their own sets of laws that they have to abide by and there’s nothing CCBill can do about it. We should, at the very least, be grateful that we have an alternative. Chances are, if you tried to do the same thing with PayPal, they’d just show you the door, depending on what you’re actually selling.

Customizability and Extensibility

I wasn’t kidding when I said that CCBill comes with everything you could expect to get from PayPal and then some. All of the payment forms and integrations on your site are perfectly customizable and optimizable. In other words, you can play around with the way that you charge people in order to reduce the chances of them changing their minds half-way through a purchase. In this way, CCBill is actually a bit better than PayPal.

They have entire sections on their site that deal with bounce rates and improving your payment gateway visuals and methodology. They’re straight-up encouraging you to improve your goddamn marketing approach, through the actual way that you charge your customers. I urge you to check out these sections in detail, because they cover a lot of ground. They want you to get those payments, come hell or high water.

Complicated Integration Process

This is a bit of a catch 22, because, on the one hand, it’s really easy to integrate CCBill into your website, but on the other hand, the whole point of rolling with CCBill is to use all of the expert level integrations that they’ve got on offer. So, one way or another, you should actually go out of your way to make shit more complicated for yourself and make use of the advanced shit. I really think you should hire a freelance developer for a month or so to get all of this shit right, especially if you’ve got a more complicated commercial site going.

Let me give you an example to show you what I mean. Setting up a payment button with a cart and basic payment so you can sell pictures of babes in bikinis is a day’s worth of work. It could take up to a week if there are complications. But, let’s say that your site has social media functionality and you want to dole out loyalty rewards like free timed subscriptions.

Let’s say that you also want to have tiered discounts depending on user activity on the site and referrals. Well, CCBill supports all this, but you’re not going to get a handy menu that lets you tick a box and be done with it. This shit has to be configured. It also has to be built into your web engine and depending on which engine you’re using; this could be super complicated.

CCBill’s code is pretty straightforward. They use JavaScript for all the work, as far as I can tell. But, copy-pasting snippets into your site’s code is fucking stupid, especially if you don’t have backend development experience. That’s why I think you really need to get yourself a proper developer who knows what he’s doing. You might take your entire fucking site down, or worse, you might set your shit up in a way that you end up charging the wrong amounts from the wrong people’s accounts. You could destroy your business overnight. Be responsible, get a coder.

Communicating with Customers

What good is a payment gateway if it doesn’t come with built-in e-mail automation? CCBill allows you to setup custom automated e-mails to inform your customers of their purchases during every part of the process. You can also set up remarketing campaigns using the data you gathered from unpaid carts and even tack on discounts to entice them to come back. I’ve seen this shit before and I’m pretty sure it works well. Someone fills their cart full of smut on your site, but changes their mind at the last second.

You wait a couple of days, then throw them a 10% discount e-mail for the cart they abandoned. It’s a nice approach to e-mail remarketing and I think it could really make a world of difference for your bottom line.

Great Support

Given how much information these people put on their site and how professionally it’s worded, I’d trust them to have the inside scoop on any issue you might run into while integrating with them. Hell, you can reach out to them at a later point too, if you’ve got a problem during the actual charging process mid-campaign. They boast a trustworthy support team and I believe them. I think that CCBill has done an amazing job propelling themselves to the top. Their offers are irresistible, especially since they seem to have covered all the bases for up and coming adult webmasters.

My advice to you is that you read all of the fine print. I know it’s a lot to sift through, but they cover every dead-end scenario and they indirectly help you to decide how you’re going to host your site and package your content. You have to consider these kinds of decisions in tandem, especially if some of your content is illegal in certain parts of the world, but perfectly fine in others.

It’s a fine balancing act and CCBill has done their best to be as transparent as they possibly can be. You get all the information on their public site. Go through it all, weigh the pros and cons and make your decision. You certainly can’t go wrong with CCBill, but you have to first make sure that they’re the right fit for you. And, if all else fails, contact them. Ask them to figure out if you are a right fit for them.