Visa Says Bye Bye to Cross Sales

[Peedy]

appears to only be 3rd party xsales. You can still do internal? Meaning two properties owned by the same corp? Surely nobody is shocked by this.

[RawAlex]

Originally Posted by Peedy

appears to only be 3rd party xsales. You can still do internal? Meaning two properties owned by the same corp? Surely nobody is shocked by this.

The most aggressive of the cross-sellers owns many of the programs that cross to each other, but has been very careful not to connect them. It has allowed them to open hundreds of different merchant and processing accounts, and to spread the "wealth" all over the place with little risk to their main brand's processing. If they pulled everything under one roof to continue cross selling, they wouldn't have the needed space to process it all under current accounts, and they couldn't take a risk on the high chargeback levels that could take down their main program.

The end result is pretty simple: Few if any will risk their own processing on sneaky, pre-checked, hidden, disguised, or completely non-disclosed cross sales. The value in buying up tired, worn down programs wasn't to get content or sites, but to get another long term existing corporate identity and another set of processing accounts to beat on until they fail. By the time they fail, the money has long since left for the mother ship, making the collapse of the little outside program meaningless.

I expect what you will see is that many old tired programs that were snapped up in the last 2 years will probably go dark within 90 days, almost certainly before September as they lose their merchant accounts and become black holes. Oh, they will keep the domains and redirect the traffic and not pay anyone for it. But that is a whole other story.