Here’s how you do it:
1. Subscribe to any system, even the most expensive system(s) on C2.
2 .Use the system until C2 charges your card.
3. Cancel subscription to the system.
4. Simply ask for a refund.
Voila. You get all those signals before your card is charged and you never have to pay the developer anything. Genius! Thank you C2 for making it not worth my time to develop systems and put them on your website. And thank you to all the cheapskates who do this.
Micah:
You and our customer service team (Alen and Melissa and myself) have exchanged several emails about this, and we’ve tried to be helpful and to patiently explain this.
You write your forum post as if (1) you have discovered an amazing deficiency in C2, and (2) there is something terribly unfair about the fact that you can’t extract money from customers who don’t like your service.
A lot of system vendors make a lot of money on C2. How do they do it? Well, let’s see: they create good systems and they focus on trading profits for their customers. They are not anxious to bill customers who don’t want to be billed. In your case, you have a couple of systems which attracted a few people (and just a few) for a limited time. These people decided to unsubscribe rather than be charged.
You seem to feel taken advantage of by this. But how can you expect anything else? I’ve given an (admittedly cursory) look at your systems, and it seems like no one has made any money trading them. How did you delight and please your customer?
The dirty secret about the way credit card transactions work on the Internet (which is no secret, truth be told) is this: if you bill someone and they don’t actually want to be billed, they’ll simply call their bank, and they’ll get their money back from you anyway. Plus you will receive the joy of being dinged by the bank with a “chargeback fee.” C2 passes those chargeback fees along to you, the system vendor. Are you sure you want C2 to charge people who don’t want to be charged for your system? (You’ll experience this chargeback joy whether you use C2 or not; go ahead and set up your own credit card merchant account and you’ll quickly learn to avoid the chargeback.)
Keep in mind one other thing. The fact that C2 acts like an honest party in mitigating customer unhappiness and issuing refunds to unhappy subscribers is actually a net benefit to you. It helps customers feel comfortable subscribing to good systems which they might otherwise feel uncertain about if the system were not part of C2. Customers know they can trust C2 to make them happy, and so they’re willing to try out new systems and vendors whom they are not deeply familiar with. When your system results start to attract new users, you’ll like this.
My suggestion is to step back and take a deep breath. You can’t just charge people who don’t like your service. That’s bad business, and it’s not sustainable. I’ve been running C2 for almost 8 years. You know how many “bad faith” subscribers we have had, who have tried to game the system and chronically subscribe and unsubscribe without paying? I can count maybe one or two in the last eight years I’ve been doing this. Out of tens of thousands of users and millions of dollars of subscription revenue. That’s a pretty tiny number.
The reality is that no C2 subscriber is interested in ripping off system vendors in order to save a couple hundred dollars here or there. Real traders, with actual trading accounts at stake, don’t have time for that nonsense. Too much is on the line.
So my suggestion is to just step back, and focus on your system. Make a good system where traders can profit, and you’ll do fine.
I want to keep you as a happy and satisfied C2 vendor. I understand you wanted to receive some subscription revenue, but the way to do that is to just focus on your system performance, and let the rest take care of itself.
Matthew
Oh, and I notice one other thing. You started the system as a completely free system ($0 per month!) and that’s when your two subscribers signed up.
Thus they were never required to provide a credit card (typically we do run a credit card check on customers, even for systems with free trials that eventually require payment).
Later you changed it to a paid system, after they subscribed to your free system, but when the users were asked to provide a credit card, they declined.
Matthew
Mathew, you wrote "A lot of system vendors make a lot of money on C2"
What do you consider "a lot", both for system vendors and money?
Great response Matthew… As a subscriber to multiple systems, I find that it sometimes takes me a little bit of time to understand how a system really works and to determine if it meets my goals, works well with my online broker, and matches my overall trading style. I appreciate it when a provider gives me a few days or a week to evaluate their system. I think it’s in the best interest of a legitimate provider, who plans to be around for a while, to be totally transparent about their system and let prospective subscribers take it for a short test drive. If the system works well and continues to be profitable, who wouldn’t be happy and willing to pay the monthly fee?
I also agree! This is capitalism at it’s finest.
Someone thinks they found a system that works; they subscribe. If they’re right, they profit and the system developer profits. If they’re wrong, they lose money, get unsubscribed to, and the system developer needs to (at the very least) go back to the drawing board.
Most even OK systems have a few subscribers - see the number of people who got autotraded fills and you can get a rough idea. Some of the systems I’m subscribed to have 40-60 people autotrading in them; multiply that by $100-$200 a month and you have a substantial monthly sum.
If a system is generating 5% a month on a 20k account, (1k a month) I could care less about a trying to ‘scalp’ $50 out of the subscription fee.
My own personal perspective: I’m grateful that these system developers offer their systems up for me to trade. Some of these systems are gold - and I think the system developers are undercharging for their services.
There’s a saying I heard: In a room full of saints, all a pickpocket sees are their pockets. (Makes you wonder what a proctologist sees. 
)
