With the U.S. dollar continuing to freefall, webmasters are starting to look beyond American borders for billing options that will allow them to maximize revenue from consumers globally. Billing expert and CommerceGate CEO Bjorn Skarlen stepped up to clarify these Visa cross-border procedural regulations.
There is money to be made from a weak U.S. economy just as there is money to be made from a strong U.S. economy; the secret is that a webmaster's methods have to adapt to the changing market to be successful in monetizing potential revenue at any point along the macro-economic cycle. The advantage to the falling dollar is that consumers outside the United States have started to feel as if they are being offered quality membership content at bargain prices. Paysite owners can utilize a variety of tools to reap rewards from the current climate. Tours and join pages that process with geo-targeted regional payment structures are at the top of that list.
Using geo-targeted billing systems is not something complicated to set up. It all happens seamlessly in the background and results in more pricing flexibility as well as more revenue for site owners because they can custom tailor the price of their merchandise more effectively for each region instead of charging the same price to someone in Kansas as they charge someone in Germany.
From the consumer's point of view, geo-targeting means the join page and tour they see is dynamically generated with information specifically targeted to their region. You may have seen early examples of geo-targeting with simple things like fan-signs that were populated by the name of viewer's hometown. Now, that same technology has been expanded to include all aspects of website publication.
Giving your visitors the information you wish to display in their native language and offering them memberships priced in their local currency has been shown to dramatically increase conversion ratios and to significantly deter chargebacks as well. Put simply, geo-targeted tours allow paysite owners to charge their customers what they are willing to pay locally instead of trying to set one fixed price for all consumers no matter where in the world they are from.
Arranging your billing in this way does have some initial complications that need to be sorted out in advance to avoid further problems down the line. One of the key areas to address is the often misunderstood Visa cross-border rules.
Visa's regulations state that any company with both a U.S. corporate entity and an EU corporate entity which funnels traffic to a domestic URL has the option to have multiple processors in the different regions where the company is doing business. However, there are some EU processors that are now allowing U.S, corporations to work directly within their billing setup, and while that may seem like a good idea, it is specifically not allowed according to the long-standing Visa cross-border billing regulations.
Some webmasters are moving toward trying to handle their billing in-house. These webmasters are likely to overlook these kinds of important regulations, especially because their EU biller may be telling them that their internal processing scheme is acceptable. At the very least, any prudent webmaster should always keep in mind that Visa has rules that need to be followed even if your EU biller has a more open system than the kind Visa allows.
With a lot of money involved and some murky billing regulation obstacles in the way, the best course of action for webmasters considering a move to geo-targeting their sites is to start thinking about their billing within the United States and their billing outside the United States as two different paths. Just as you wouldn't create domestic billing practices based on guesswork, you shouldn't do that with your EU billing either. It's really important to have a solid working relationship with a domestic processor and with CommerceGate or another reputable EU processor.
Billing is a lot like the referee in a major sporting event: If we do our job perfectly nobody even notices we exist, but if your billing gets screwed -up, your whole site screeches to a halt and chaos reigns.
Reading this article is an important first step in understanding these crucial issues, but anyone reading this should consider it to be only a brief introduction. Visit CommerceGate.com or another reputable billing processor and speak with one of their processing agents about the specific needs of your company.
CommerceGate is one of the leading EU IPSP Billing Processors for adult online companies based in Barcelona since 2005. For more information, e-mail [email protected].
This article originally appeared in the September 2008 issue of AVN Online. To subscribe, visit AVNMediaNetwork.com/subscribe.
