When affiliate program JasonAndAlex.com announced it was leaving behind NATS, their back-end software, and switching to a competitor, the impending storm exposed a rather major flaw in NATS’s integration with payment processor ElectraCash that let a substantial number of re-bills go unreported.
After a case of “he said, she said” that played out on adult webmaster board GFY, screen caps of JasonAndAlex.com’s re-bills through ElectraCash as reported by NATS were posted followed by the same information directly from ElectraCash. The former showed five re-bills; the latter showed 275.
“I don’t believe that Too Much Media or their staff is intentionally trying to do anything to deceive others,” JSA Media, the parent company of JasonAndAlex.com, CFO Alex Kalogianis told AVNOnline.com. “I didn’t want to get to this point, but it has.”
The company switched to the rival MPA3 software on March 23, after having issues with NATS’s functionality with ElectraCash for the previous six months, Kalogianis said.
No similar shaving issues involving other processors have been reported with NATS, which has been heavily promoted as the no-shave software by parent company Too Much Media. However, their partnership with ElectraCash, whom NATS listed as a supported biller on their website some time ago, apparently failed on the implementation level.
“We had implementation issues on our side first, which made us find issues on the other side,” Too Much Media co-founder Fabian Thylmann told AVNOnline.com. “We then worked closely together with ElectraCash to fix all issues once and for all, to make both sides better than they were before.”
The systems are now fully intergrated with each other, according to Thylmann, but the process was more involved than anyone expected.
“They made some demands on us that we had to change a few things, and we did take a little longer than expected to do that,” an ElectraCash spokesperson told AVNOnline.com. “It seemed as if they weren’t as integrated as they made webmasters believe. It seems like they presold the product before it was ready.”
After first reporting their issue to NATS on November 24, 2004, JSA was forced to switch to a different check processor on November 28, 2004 when NATS discovered the situation was more complex than they originally thought.
“We have learned a lot over the past seven months that there are many questions to ask when implementing the billers,” Thylmann said. “Documentations are often not as complete as you would wish; they all have their little special things that exist, which you need to often learn the hard way. Because of the many billers we have integrated into NATS, we know what to ask to make sure nothing will cause problems and everything is accounted for.”
To date, NATS has integrated more than 16 billers, including gateways, with six others currently being implemented.
Still, the issues that have arisen for JSA will continue to fester. The company is still paying individual affiliates that NATS failed to recognize because of the imcomplete ElectraCash integration.
“It wasn’t a one-day task and it’s actually ongoing until all those re-bills stop,” Kalogianis said. “It’s something we’re going to have to continue to do from when we started to notice it.
“NATS might be working great for other programs, and that’s good. In this case, with JSA Media Group, it ended up not being the solution for us.”
When reached by phone, Oystein Wright, the owner of Mansion Productions and creator of MPA3, opted not to comment on the situation.
