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You should make it possible to sign up without credit card. It's a big barrier to cross, as the potential customer not only has to leave his comfortable chair o

by MortenK 14y ago

You should make it possible to sign up without credit card. It's a big barrier to cross, as the potential customer not only has to leave his comfortable chair or sofa to find his cc details, but also has to remember to unsubscribe if the service is uninteresting. I personally pass on trying out any service that has this requirement (unless it looks extremely interesting right off the bat, which is quite seldom).

hopeless 14y ago
Look at it the other way: requiring a credit card up-front gets you less unqualified tyre-kickers so the people who do sign up are probably far more motivated by the pain you're solving, and so are much more likely to become a paying customer. Ideally, after reading your sales site your potential customers should be begging you to take their credit card details ^ It's a choice between a higher throughput into the funnel, or a higher conversion rate. Neither is necessarily wrong. ^ My one problem with the upfront credit card system is the <$1 test transaction which is usually applied and then instantly refunded. This makes the anti-fraud systems at my bank go into meltdown and puts a block on my credit card until they can confirm the transaction with me.
- smalter 14y ago
  That's an interesting point, and it makes me wonder if our decline rate is higher than average because of it. Yours and the OP's points were well-made. I think it's ultimately empirical which works best for your product. We haven't quite gotten around to testing that, so for the time being, we're sticking with upfront cc because it's simpler.
- MortenK 14y ago
  In the realm of web-apps though, unqualified tyre-kickers i.e. people who just try the demo, have an almost non-existing cost (a bit of traffic and a few system transactions). So I can't see why you would sacrifice more potential customers (higher funnel throughput) for an artificially higher conversion rate. I mean the conversion rate is just a metric. A conversion rate of 5% of 1000 is better than 10% of 400. The goal must surely be, at least as long as the cost of serving a tyre-kicker is almost nothing, to get as many to try as possible.

by MortenK 14y ago

hopeless 14y ago

Look at it the other way: requiring a credit card up-front gets you less unqualified tyre-kickers so the people who do sign up are probably far more motivated by the pain you're solving, and so are much more likely to become a paying customer. Ideally, after reading your sales site your potential customers should be begging you to take their credit card details ^ It's a choice between a higher throughput into the funnel, or a higher conversion rate. Neither is necessarily wrong. ^ My one problem with the upfront credit card system is the <$1 test transaction which is usually applied and then instantly refunded. This makes the anti-fraud systems at my bank go into meltdown and puts a block on my credit card until they can confirm the transaction with me.

smalter 14y ago
That's an interesting point, and it makes me wonder if our decline rate is higher than average because of it. Yours and the OP's points were well-made. I think it's ultimately empirical which works best for your product. We haven't quite gotten around to testing that, so for the time being, we're sticking with upfront cc because it's simpler.
MortenK 14y ago
In the realm of web-apps though, unqualified tyre-kickers i.e. people who just try the demo, have an almost non-existing cost (a bit of traffic and a few system transactions). So I can't see why you would sacrifice more potential customers (higher funnel throughput) for an artificially higher conversion rate. I mean the conversion rate is just a metric. A conversion rate of 5% of 1000 is better than 10% of 400. The goal must surely be, at least as long as the cost of serving a tyre-kicker is almost nothing, to get as many to try as possible.