So many great things on the web cost less than a single cup of Starbucks. Yet, I myself am so hesitant to pay for them.
On my landing pages I design at work, I'm increasingly trying to communicate this via comparisons("less than a morning Starbucks trip"). Another one is showing a dollar bill to communicate that for less than a dollar a day, they will get _____.
For a service that we were charging $10, we had 3% conversion rate.
Then I showed an actual picture of a $10 bill to show how inexpensive this is and we doubled conversion to 6%.
I increased the price to $30 and showed a one dollar bill, an equal sign, and what they would get for a dollar a day. The conversion rate is 3%. Overall, we make $30 more per 100 uniques to that page than at $10 price(we make $60 at 10, $90 at 30).
It seems promising though not totally conclusive in terms of increasing conversion rates. The point is, spending a dollar on the web to me seems much more difficult than spending a buck on a Crunch bar. The efforts of my landing page experiments are to align online spend perception with retail.
(numbers rounded to nearest % for purpose of this post)
Also, with food, even if it is terrible you can still eat it. It's a no/little risk investment.
I see you've never been to Friendly's.
I've had it UP TO HERE with services that allow me to subscribe with one click and then make me go through a half-day long ordeal of phone calls to outsourced customer service people (who earn bonuses based on convincing you not to leave the service) in order to cancel.
Making it obvious that I can leave at any time just as easily as I joined is a huge greasing agent for getting me to actually put down money to try your service. It is a shame so few sites/services do this and most go with the short-sighted trap-em-in model which hurts the industry as a whole (since it makes people like me far less likely to use any non-essential services just to avoid the potential of a cancellation PITA).
Let me know and can click 'cancel' anytime, no strings, no hassle and you'll probably get me on impulse purchase. Don't : Good luck getting my money.
It was fun to that the same companies who made cancel-ling impossible would call me up to tell me that billing had failed.
I sent all of the calls to voicemail and I sent a letter to the collector (via certified mail with delivery receipt) that said "RE: account number XYZ; this bill is erroneous, do not contact me again." I haven't heard from them since.
My health insurance denied my coverage for a Dr's appointment ("pre existing condition") a month or two after the appointment. I had moved by then, and apparently the mail didn't get forwarded or something. The dr's eventually turned me over to some California collection agency who then wrote letters to the same address, with the same result. They did leave an incoherent, mumbling voicemail once, which sounded like a telemarketer (hence I ignored it).
To my eternal horror, my credit score dropped from 762 to 630 in June. Over 130 points, over an $80 bill. This means I went from "higher score than 86% of Americans" to "higher than 24%".
It has utterly destroyed me. I have no credit anymore. I've been too scared to even apply for another credit card (I only have one), even though "you're supposed to every N years", for fear it would drop my score even further. I have a wife, and our credit prospects went from "could not be better" to "completely, utterly screwed. Good luck if your car dies. Also, good luck getting any kind of AT&T service, Internet service, etc etc when you move again."
They showed no remorse at my situation. The lady assigned to my case even directly hung up on me when I expressed annoyance about her not attempting to contact me more... Thoroughly... Before she decided to ruin my family's financial life. I immediately called back, which rang and rang until reaching her voicemail. I contacted her manager, who said that the lady assigned to me was the final authority on my case, and had not acted inappropriately by hanging up. Nor did they care that the mail hadn't reached me. The worst part was, I had the money the whole time. I would have paid.
Don't take bill collectors lightly. They'll break your family's financial knees over $80, as they did mine. (Edit, clarification: they will report your bill as "seriously past due 90 days / account in bad standing" or some such, which will destroy your score at all 3 of the credit bureaus; hence, the whole system will break your family's financial legs.)
(I'm not sure who the "they" is, hopefully not the credit bureau :(
It seems unlikely that the credit bureaus would listen to me over Cal Coast Credit (the collectors).
[codename47 site:fatwallet.com]
Also check out these: http://www.bargaineering.com/articles/how-to-fight-debt-coll... (note that this site is now owned by Quinstreet so caveat emptor) and http://www.creditboards.com
Since you're dealing with a small valid debt -- the first thing to try is the Right Thing. Call the Dr's Office -- not the collections agency -- offer to pay if they will take the bill back from the collections agency. Whether they can do that depends on their arrangement, but for a small Dr's office they probably can. After that, you may need to contact the credit bureau's again, but it should go much better.
If that doesn't work, then you need a VALID complaint for the bureau's. Any discrepancy between the truth and what's on your report is worth trying. If the date is wrong, or the name of the company, anything. Keep trying.
This last part is my opinion, but I don't think you should EVER pay to the collections agency. They will not remove things from your report because you paid. If you ask, then they know they have you over a barrel, and will try to get more money out of you. Pay the original company.
EDIT: Another great weapon is local state law. Collection agencies have to abide by the law of their state, and the law of your state. I'm in Texas -- our laws are very strict on collectors. Your agency is in California -- I believe their laws are strict too.
I haven't paid the collectors.. I've been so disgusted with the situation and their behavior.
Again, thank you so much for your time.
If my car dies, I won't be able to get anywhere, because I can't get a loan for a new one.
When we move to a new apartment, they won't allow us to have Internet service. I am not exaggerating in the slightest. AT&T U-Verse already denied me once in the past, before I got my score to 760 --- they refused me service. Completely. No alternatives. It didn't matter to them whether I had $10, $1,000, or $10,000 in the bank. The computer told them "unknown risk", and so they would not do business with me. There were no alternative internet providers. I would have been completely screwed, but my wife (who was my fiancée at the time, thankfully; credit score of one person will reflect on both of you after marriage) was approved.
We will not be able to get a house, if we choose to. We might not even be able to live in a specific area we want --- apartment complexes check your credit before allowing you to live there.
All over $80, due to the messed up health insurance system. Blergh.
I sincerely hope you're able to get things sorted. Thanks for the explanation
In the Netherlands we have the "Burea of Credit Registration" which registers most debts, storing:
- amount
- start date
- expected end date
- actual end date
- type of credit
- miscellaneous notes
Note that this only tracks loans to individuals with a duration longer than 3 months and over a certain minimum amount.
The basic idea is that everyone who has not failed to repay a loan is considered creditworthy, actual loans are based on the above info, income (plus certainty of employment) and collateral.
The idea being that Nigerians usually have vowels on both ends of their family names.
Other places, like in Denmark for instance you are by default considered a trust-worthy customer and only if you start not paying your bills does it affect your ability to get a loan etc.
Depending on your situation it may be less expensive than what you would pay for a high-rate auto or home loan, etc.
I don't work for or know anyone that specializes in this but had a friend get 4 different claims removed over the course of a year this way.
Collector offered to pay and clean up the records.
After going through some doubts (what if collector lie about clean up?) we did pay and within weeks credit score returned back.
Tivo, on the other hand, will make you cry before they let you cancel their service. Can't do it online, and it's a minimum of 20 minute phone call. I've had to do it twice over the years and it makes me really reluctant to turn on Tivo ever again.
But, all I hear about this model from my customers is complaints. It's a pain in the ass for them to pay every month, or they hate paypal, can't they just give me a credit card, etc...
It's possible that most people feel the way you do and those people just sign up and don't say anything... but I dono.
I wouldn't think that a comparison like that would work.
For one thing there are many people who feel they are pissing away money on Starbucks, or feel some guilt (I myself spend about $4.00 per day and sometimes twice that. That's at least $1500 per year. I don't want to be reminded of that, especially when business is off.)
(So you are making a comparison to a potential sore spot. You want a positive association. Comparing to Starbucks but without mentioning price might be an example but that wouldn't make sense for your product, right?)
Now, to sell it's product, Starbucks (or any premium brand) doesn't make comparisons to what other things costs. They make you feel special in some way by the product or by the experience or create some value that justifies the price.
Making comparisons is good though if you are saving people money.
Have you tried raising the price and offering an unconditional money back guarantee?
"Cancel at any time and owe nothing".
That seems to work with many things I've seen that cause people to be fence sitters as long as the price is high enough.
Seo book does that (p1 for seo and search engine optimization)
It's the same thing where if you add up all the things you are supposed to do each day that only take 5 - 10 minutes, you end up with like three hours worth of stuff. Flossing, meditating, abs, showering, etc.
The reason that digital goods _seem_ more expensive is because the result we get _is_ less valuable to us as human beings. It's hard to pay money for things that leave you exactly as you were before - sitting in a chair, looking at a screen.
If that was true, you'd get paid to smoke and eat fast food, since they have a negative impact.
Or you may have less headaches from your finances.
We've literally turned pricing around: even $1.99 seem like too much for an iphone game... when you realize that too many $1.99s will turn into $20 or more dollars.
But I agree, money for services online feels very different from money for product, whether a good deal or not.
You know what doesn't have trouble selling online? Sex. Anything from escorts to live cam shows to porn. Why? Because that's another direct, physiological pleasure we've had for billions of years.
Now tell me, what kind of web services compete with eating and fucking in terms of what people really want?
My $.02, but I think it's why it's easier to buy a big mac than Rdio.
Netflix perhaps should consider transitioning from a consumer-facing service to a white-label technology provider, developing things like the recommendation engine, rental and streaming platform, etc. and licensing to media companies as the basis for their several services. Unfortunately, I think the unified collection in services like Netflix is going to go away as media companies' greed drives them to try to take their own slice of the pie, probably resulting in fewer subscribers all the way around and potentially a resurgence of brick-and-mortar video rental, where, it appears, media companies still are not interested.
All that said, $300 was grossly overpriced for a company whose entire existence depends on the benevolence of a handful of major media producers.
Netflix can only offer a relative few movies without the approval of content holders, mostly only those that are older than my grandparents. They don't even have the option of reverting to classics from the 40s, 50s, 60s or 70s.
The hope is that the dramatic demise of Netflix will raise awareness and visibility of these issues, promoting IP reform.
The problem is that the content holders don't realize who their friends and enemies are. They worry about the web, but when a solution to a lot of their issues arises, they want to charge them right out of business.
my 2 cents...
Compulsory licensing already exists for music. Something similar could be done for movies. It may not fit in an $8/mo streaming plan, but the change would allow anyone to set up a streaming site as long as they pay the compulsory licensing fees.
I'm generally all for government regulation as needed but this seems absurd. Why would any film company produce movies anymore? People (un)happily pay a lot more for the content today in other mediums. We're going to force the film industry to charge them a lot less to prop up Netflix and other streaming video services? Again I have to go back to the simple fact that Netflix has always been selling a fantasy and their troubles today are totally self inflicted. They convinced people they could spend an insanely small amount of money to get a huge amount of value/content. Netflix is almost a ponzi scheme.
If this were true, those studios would go out of business and more cooperative studios would rise up to replace them within a few years.
> $300/share is certainly not something to shirk
The important metric is market capitalization (share price multiplied by number of issued shares). Netflix's market cap is an optimistic $5 billion. Apple is $377 billion, equal to 75 Netflixes.
Hmmm... because it's so easy to do that well? Their arrogance would be amusing if it wasn't so brazenly stupid.
How is it that Jobs and Apple could do iTunes successfully, but Netflix's neck is under Hollywood's boot?
What is going to really hit Netflix hard is the entire Starz library disappearing from Instant.
This is true, but the content providers are also between a rock and a hard place, but don't seem to realize it. A generation of kids are growing up knowing how to get content for free, but the low cost, convenience, and value add of netflix is worth it if you aren't poor.
I still find it much more convenient to head over to TPB (or another tracker of my choice), find a torrent of whatever I want to watch, download (and share) it, and then be able to play it with my favorite media player - as many times as I want.
I don't see what value a streaming service is supposed to add over a local copy. It's a waste of bandwidth as soon as you watch something more than once, and the quality will never reach that of a local copy.
By the way, I'm not exactly poor. Asserting that their financial standing has anything to do with the reason people pirate is a confusion of correlation and causation.
The interesting thing for Netflix as they raise prices will be finding out where people's threshold is for paying for the convenience and licitness of Netflix versus downloading a torrent instead.
That depends on your watching habits. I maintain a backlog of things to watch which I regularly refill. That also prevents me from wasting time on impulsive decisions - I plan ahead on what to watch. Besides, you can also use direct downloads to get the same advantages (almost instant playback) than streams.
>And if you have "unlimited" bandwidth, then the additional streams don't really matter.
I talking more about the big picture. The extended usage of streaming is, or at least will become, a burden on the infrastructure. It's unneeded traffic. It's the same as the push towards cloud storage - insanity, and not only from a security and privacy point of view.
(In addition there's all the petty stuff you have to deal with when it comes to the content industry. From branding requirements, to arbitrary limits in video resolution, to who can encode what how and where etc. There are too many lawyers, too many spoilt brats and not enough people who actually care about the product)