Over the past three weeks we've discussed the first few steps required for bringing an adult website into the world. We've named our baby and found a hosting company to mother it. Now we get to the nitty-gritty of actually making money with our offspring.

E-NABLING E-COMMERCE

The goal of any adult website is generating revenue and in order to do that, your website is going to need to process credit card transactions. There are two ways to do this. One is to create your own merchant account through a bank and then write your own authorization and password scripts. The other choice is to employ a 3rd party credit card processing company to handle those details for you.

Option One has one distinct advantage - you don't have to pay the processing company a commission. Now let's discuss the disadvantages. Writing credit card authorization and password scripts are difficult, time consuming, and mine-laden processes. Additionally, most banks refuse to offer merchant accounts to adult businesses (for some reason, many of them consider adult sites immoral. Hmm, go figure). Add those two disadvantages together, and you're left with Option Number Two.

Option Two is to employ a 3rd party credit card processing company, which handles the credit card transactions behind the scenes. Their authorization software checks the validity of the card number and protects against charge backs. Additionally, these companies have the expertise to install the CGI scripts necessary to password protect certain directories on your site (membership directories) and make the credit card process relatively seamless to your visitors.

In return for these services, they take a small piece of every transaction. Of course, merchant accounts take a percentage of every transaction, too, so in that regard, it really is "6 and one-half dozen," although if you use a 3rd party, you're less likely to wind up with egg on your face.

There are many 3rd party credit card processing companies to choose from, although the field narrows considerably when it comes to adult sites. Like merchant accounts, many 3rd party companies do not honor business relationships with "pornography."

Among the sites remaining, two stand out heads and tails above the others in terms of popularity: CCBILL, and IBILL.

I initially chose CCBILL, at www.ccbill.com, to handle my site at XXXBodyParts.com. I signed up on-line and provided the necessary information and waited…. and waited… and waited. After several days, I contacted them via email and asked what the hold-up was. Only after personally inquiring was I informed that my membership section was not sufficient enough for them to create the necessary password protection. Apparently, they felt I needed something tangible to "protect."

Well, the way in which they chose to blow me off (and not in a good way) left a sour taste in my mouth, but I did learn a valuable lesson. I was going to need to buff up my membership section BEFORE password protecting it. While I felt I had uploaded a sufficient amount of content, I had not yet gone to the trouble of designing an index or menu page for the pictures. Nor had I bothered to separate the pictures into categories. Apparently I needed to do that before contacting the credit card people again.

Truth be told, I did not invest MUCH time with it. I threw together an index.html page within my member's directory and loaded it with descriptive hyperlinks directed toward the content. I planned on investing much more time designing a better member's directory in the future, but at the time I simply wanted enough to satiate the credit card people and get the e-commerce operational.

Even so, creating the rough member's index was time consuming. Be prepared to spend a fair amount of time performing tactical operations like uploading images, image optimization, thumb nailing, and indexing. I'll discuss more of those details in later chapters but the point is this: it is time-consuming to run an adult site if you're the only one doing it. And since I wasn't making ANY money yet, I still had a full time job during the day. This "hobby" of mine was quickly beginning to occupy every second of my free time, and stealing away from my sleeping time, to boot!

Nevertheless, I persevered and created a member's section that would hold up to the credit card company's scrutiny. I contacted CCBILL again and found myself waiting…. Again.

The beautiful thing about living in a capitalistic society is that if one company pisses you off, you can go to another one. I surfed on over to IBILL at www.ibill.com, and registered with them. I got a little farther in the process and was given detailed instructions about installing the necessary scripts into the cgi-bin directory of my site.

Scripts are computer programs necessary for protecting designated directories on your site, maintaining the password and username lists, and allowing your site to communicate with the credit card site in relationship to users, transaction, and cancellations. Most scripts of this nature are written in PERL, which is a CGI script. CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface.

But I digress. The point is, I received the necessary scripts and followed the instructions as best I could. It didn't work. I tried several different ways to accomplish the task, all without success. I was becoming frustrated and nearly gave up on the whole thing. Was this really worth it? The frustration? The lack of sleep? The calluses on my palms?

Finally, I contacted IBILL's technical support staff and informed them that I was simply too oblivious to figure out the script process on my own. An email response informed me that a tech support guru would upload the necessary files and that in order to do so, they required my ftp server and access information. I gladly provided it.

I waited again, but this time, while I was waiting, I took the opportunity to begin filling my member's section with content. I had some exclusive content, sure, but that wasn't nearly enough. I was going to have to get some more.

Next week, I'll tell you the first steps I took to get some free content for my site, and whether my credit card processing through IBILL was ever completely set up.

Article written by Richard Follock - Freelance writer and webmaster for XXXBodyParts.com, the ultimate collection of sex on the Internet.