Comments on: The Trouble With Offline Payments for Subscription Products http://www.clvrbrdg.com/corporate/the-trouble-with-offline-payments-for-subscription-products/ Fri, 03 Jun 2016 18:27:10 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5 By: Elan Sherbill http://www.clvrbrdg.com/corporate/the-trouble-with-offline-payments-for-subscription-products/#comment-154 Thu, 11 Oct 2012 22:05:41 +0000 http://blog.cleverbridge.com/?p=7946#comment-154 In reply to Doug Caviness.

Doug, Craig – I’ve also noticed the large amount of SaaS/subscription companies that don’t offer alternative payment options beyond credit card and PayPal.

Aside from that concern, I’ve also noticed SaaS companies that don’t even allow visitors into an online shopping cart without an initial conversation with a sales rep.

My assumption is that these companies are protecting themselves from “problem buyers” who for one reason or another are unsuited for their solution.

It’s worth noting that in a different blog post, Building Keystones showed research from Forrester that indicated 21% of customers from large enterprises prefer to buy directly from a B2B cart over the 18% that prefer to buy directly from a sales rep:

http://blog.cleverbridge.com/2011/07/saas-strategy-webinar-forrester/

My personal philosophy is, “Get out of the way and let people buy your product.”

]]> By: Doug Caviness http://www.clvrbrdg.com/corporate/the-trouble-with-offline-payments-for-subscription-products/#comment-153 Thu, 11 Oct 2012 16:17:23 +0000 http://blog.cleverbridge.com/?p=7946#comment-153 Craig, you raise a really important point here about the inherent conflict between monthly billing and offline payment methods, and I like your suggestion about providing offline payment customers incentives to buy longer subscription periods — quarterly or annual. This also coincides with many conversations I’ve had with online subscription service companies who report that their lifetime customer value increases for customers that opt for annual over monthly billing, even after accounting for the pricing discounts associated with the longer term.

Additionally, I’ve done research on hundreds of SaaS and other online subscription service providers and find that most are “missing the boat” by generally not offering payment methods beyond credit card and perhaps PayPal, and thereby not capturing incremental sales from customers that either don’t use credit cards or prefer using offline payment methods.

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