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Mastercard and the Need for Speed Revisited
(Article Contributed By Marie, of Sex Story Text - Posted on January 18th, 2010)
Last week seems to have been a very interesting one for some mainstream merchants who are beginning to feel the icy touch of Mastercard. It seems that Mastercard is reaching out to freeze their accounts and prevent them from making online sales to people who want to pay with their Mastercard.
It seems that over there in mainstream a favorite marketing technique of some is to advertise their product as being free and all a purchaser has to do is pay for the shipping and now Mastercard has decided that an offer like that is probably bogus.
Mastercard is also reported to be freezing accounts where there's some sort of rebilling that's not made clear to the buyer at the time they signup for the first time. Mastercard also has a problem with a cross-sale that's billed by someone other than the first merchant. Of course all the mainstream billing providers such as PowerPay are doing exactly as Mastercard is directing ... they're freezing accounts and asking questions later.
Trial offers are also coming under scrutiny and Mastercard is freezing the accounts of merchants who offer trial offers without clearly spelling out ... in an easy to read font size ... what happens at the expiration of the trial period.
But wait ... there's more.
It seems that some merchants are discovering that Mastercard is not really comfortable billing for merchants who offer signups through several different billing providers.
Evidently Mastercard is seeing that as an attempt to manipulate chargeback rates and there are some reports that when Mastercard discovers a merchant is offering billing through different providers Mastercard closes the merchant's account completely.
You may think that some of what I've already mentioned sounds rather familiar. Adult online merchants have been through much of that already but there are a couple of points in there that we haven't had to deal with before here in adult.
The multiple billing option is one of them and by giving potential members the chance to try their cards through different billing providers we've often been able to save a sale that might otherwise have been lost. Now it seems that option is going to be taken away from us ... once a card is scrubbed there's no second chance for us to make a sale.
As this story has been developing it now seems that Mastercard is not making these moves alone. One email that I've seen from a payment processor seems to indicate that Visa is also getting in on the act and starting to freeze accounts as well.
And why are Visa and Mastercard taking this action against online merchants? The credit card companies are telling people that they have to take these steps to prevent damage to card companies' brands.
I expect this story will develop even further this week and you can read more about it over at MermbershipSiteOwner.com.
The need for speed revisited
A couple of Fridays ago I talked about the possibility that Google may be going to start including the time it takes for a website to load as one of the factors Google considers when it compares a website to it's ranking algorithm.
When Google's mouthpieces began talking about the speed factor they advised everyone that if you wanted to know what Google thought of a website's loading speed you should head over to Google's Webmaster Tools where you would discover a report on the loading speed of individual sites.
Over the weekend Steve and I and another friend have been looking at loading speeds and we've been comparing the speed that Google reports for a site with the loading speed that a site such as WebSiteOptimization.com reports for the same sites and what we've found really does make us wonder.
One of our sites – a fairly basic site running on Joomla - loads like a dog according to Google ... it takes 8.1 seconds to load. That's a speed that puts it in the very low speed range according to Google. However, the WSO site reports that it takes 83.27 seconds to load on a 56k modem or 30.91 seconds on an ADSL connection.
Then we go to another one of our sites on the same server that's loaded with graphics and includes a few plug-ins to add some bells and whistles to the look of the site. According to Google that site takes 3.4 seconds to load and while it's not the fastest site around it does load quite quickly according to Google.
But according to the WSO site people on a 56k modem are going to have to wait for 191.53 seconds for the second site to load and 69.76 seconds for it to load on an ADSL connection.
It makes you wonder how Google actually measures the loading speed and whether the numbers it's providing are really the numbers that it's going to use to assess the loading speed.
But wait ... there's more here too.
It seems that relatively low-traffic sites aren't going to have their loading speed assessed all that often. Google says that the last time they checked the loading speed for the first site was FOUR months ago. The second site ... a site that sees a lot more traffic ... was assessed about four days ago.
So what does all that tell us about how Google intends to use loading speed as a ranking factor? Frankly it's left us scratching our heads and we can't see anything good in this for webmasters at all.
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