Lars Brehmer wrote:
I think the KRM process of buying and unlocking with a click without
navigating a store, shopping carts, checkouts etc. would be the
perfect way to go, at least for me with this particular project, and
worth every penny of the fees thay charge for using this service.
It certainly seems convenient, but unless you have an uncommonly strong
brand association and trust level with your audience you may want to
also maintain a shopping cart on the web.
While no financial transaction is entirely hack-proof, customers are
used to buying on the web, and as long as they see the "locked" icon in
their browser they feel reasonably assured that their sensitive credit
card data is secure.
When building a custom purchasing solution into your software, you not
only have the technical challenge of implementing it but also take on
the risk that your conversion rate may be lower because customers have
no idea what your software is doing under the hood.
This perceived risk issue is exacerbated by an ever-growing number of
malware programs floating around, contributing to an erosion of trust
throughout the environment.
The degree to which this trust factor will affect conversion will of
course depend on a great many factors, and for some audiences the
convenience might just outweigh the perceived risk.
Just the same, you may want to play it safe and offer an option to buy
on the web.
I haven't seen specific studies of conversion rates for software sold on
the web vs. with a built-in shopping system, and if anyone has one I'd
be very interested in reading it.
But as a general rule, when it comes to generic business questions
common throughout the industry, I tend to follow trends established by
the most successful companies, not reinventing those wheels and instead
devoting any resources I might spend on innovation to crafting the
differentiators in our products.
Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, and pretty much every other major player I can
think of sells software through their web site, and do not include a
payment system in the software itself.
An exception to this is iTunes, but that package has a very different
business model based around frequent low-cost purchases of individual
songs and albums, rather than a one-time purchase for the software
itself. That said, it should also be noted that Apple has an unusually
strong brand recognition and trust factor which raises consumer
confidence to levels most of us can't hope to match.
If, like iTunes, you sell a wide range of low-cost content, making a
built-in shopping system may prove worth the expense.
But in reviewing this option with clients, we decided that the cost of
adding this feature provided a low ROI in even the best case, since it's
a feature that if used at all will be used only once. So instead we put
that development expense toward features that are used in the daily
workflow, the things that make our product worth buying.
Tip: provide a PayPal option for your customers. Mine kept asking for
me PayPal for years before I finally got around the spending the five
minutes it takes to set it up, and boy did I feel dumb for not doing so
sooner - conversion rates bumped noticeably.
Using PayPal has two attractions:
- It's ultra-convenient to make a payment; just enter your address and
password and you're done.
- Because it's in a separate account from one's normal banking and
credit cards, it doesn't feel like spending real money; it feels like
play money, making impulse buys much more frequent.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
Revolution training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com
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