Hi Jim,

Thanks for the comment. Anytime that you can have a one-on-one relationship with the vendor, it certainly will help in terms of loyalty, word of mouth and ultimately sales. As organizations scale up in size, this can become a challenge, especially when thinking internationally. B2B orders are definitely a different breed than B2C and we’ll investigate this in a future post.

What would you do if you did get a barter offer? Has it happened yet? I know that this is done fairly frequently in the service sector.

craig.

We have always tried to make it easy for customers to send offline payments, purchase orders. While it would ideally be outsourced to a vendor — these orders seem destined to be fulfilled by the vendor directly — in this way, customers will likely get better personalized service, more generous terms when risk is considered and better follow-up for payment.

We have received everything from Money transfers to personal checks to money orders — have yet to receive an offer of chickens for software!

You’re right B2B is a completely different beast. I usually tag offline sales to B2B and expect all consumers to pay online by credit card. We try not to accept any offline payments from end-users.

The client event in San Francisco was very educational and fun.

Hi Lyle,

Thanks for the post and don’t worry, we don’t mind some ruffled feathers!

I think that you make a good point that the target of the offline orders noted in this post are targeted towards B2C and B2B is a much different beast. For B2B, many more orders than B2C offline do get paid because those B2B customers generally need the product and the money isn’t their own. Hence, the barriers from indicating interest (submitting order) to completing purchase are much lower with B2B.

Nonetheless, you bring up a great idea for a future blog post. Thanks for interacting!

craig.

I agree that that all consumer sales should be processed immediately via a secure e-commerce provider that can deliver instant customer gratification and delivery…

However, anytime you get into any B2B or commercial sales; the wants and needs of the customer and consumer are completely different. We need to focus on the customer – who is not necessarily the consumer of the product. This is usually the purchasing agent or IT director. As we know it, they have complex purchasing processes that can not be circumvented. In most cases these clients needs vendor quotations, sole-source letters etc. along with payment terms.

I disagree that all offline payment orders are never paid or customers experience remorse or memory losses about the order… I think that this maybe true for individual consumer sales; but definatly is not the case for commercial and educational sales – which amount to 80% of our business. We have never had a delinquent purchaser through our offline payment methods.

BTW. I don`t mean to ruffle any feathers on my first post. I think that this is a great blog!