Serious question: charging ahead

[baycouples]

I have a question for those who have membership based sites and in addition to monthly recurring fees give their customers an option to pay 3, 6 and 12 months in advance:

Are you concerned about the following?:

- If your site goes belly up - you personally will be responsible for returning money to those customers who have paid many months ahead?

- Re-bill customers are more loyal customers and don't need to be "bought" again when their one time fee membership expires

- You can get more money out of a customer by having him on a rebill

- If you sell your business all the multiple month memberships that are still active are "liability" and decrease the price of your business.

Thank you for your opinion!

[KidCock]

Originally posted by baycouples
I have a question for those who have membership based sites and in addition to monthly recurring fees give their customers an option to pay 3, 6 and 12 months in advance:

Are you concerned about the following?:

- If your site goes belly up - you personally will be responsible for returning money to those customers who have paid many months ahead?

- Re-bill customers are more loyal customers and don't need to be "bought" again when their one time fee membership expires

- You can get more money out of a customer by having him on a rebill

- If you sell your business all the multiple month memberships that are still active are "liability" and decrease the price of your business.

Thank you for your opinion!

For your second point, it can work in your favor as well. Someone who purchases a 3-month pass for example, earns you more than someone who purchases a 1-month and chooses to cancel.

Another advantage is for affiliates who get %, they earn more right away (lots of affiliates like to earn more now, not rely on rebills - even if it makes them more money - from what I've seen).

Most sites do offer them, but focus on marketing/advertising their one-month membership or trials.

[baycouples]

Yeah, that's a number that I have not been able to figure out - the number of people who would go for one time fee and never go for a rebill.

[ZoiNk]

First off, I don't run paysites, so take my info with that in mind.

If the site goes belly up, people typically don't give refunds. They hope the surfers just give up, and a few will get refunds or chargebacks. Your rolling reserve is setup to cover that. Some will chargeback, and some won't. Most people's opinions are, they don't care anymore if that happen, b/c if they are broke, they don't need to be in the good books with Visa/Mastercard/that particular billing company. They won't be looking to get more billing relationships, so they can burn the bridges.

Rebill customers are loyal. If you look at most of the major sites offering 3 month or 6 month trials, they convert to monthly memberships after the 3 or 6 months, OR they rebill again at 3 or 6 months. If you aren't rebilling, I hope they are keeping a database of those ppl, so they can mail them a discounted monthly rate to those people. Remember, it is in No way at all spam, ever, if they are a past customer of yours. Mail them your offers, and you can make $$$ mailing them other ppls sites. Make money off of them, anyway you can reasonably.

Yes, you can get a lot of money out of a customer having them rebill... That is why something like Epoch's CancelPlus(tm) is such a nice thing. For example, they are rebilling at $49.95/3 months every 3 months. They decide to cancel. You hit them with an option on the signup page. Do you want to continue your membership for $9.95/month or would you like to really cancel. Discounted rebills on ppl trying to cancel greatly increases rebills, and the longer term members don't use as much as the new members, so the discount is well deserved.

If you do sell your business, your multiple month memberships are a liability, yes, but hopefully you have 20x more monthly rebills going on at the same time, so it is a small liability. Plus if you have those 3 months rebilling, they turn into a nice potential future asset.

ZoiNk

[KidCock]

Zoink,

One comment I have from experience about the CancelPlus type offers of discounted rebills, or even loyalty discounts for that matter:

You can lose more. Some people fine out, whether from other members or even by accident, and then they ofcourse cancel/rebill for cheaper. These are people who without the option, would have rebilled at full price.

Depending on your site, ofcourse, you have to see if doing something like that comes out as a + or - for you...from my site though it came out a -. Since removing it rebills stayed around the same number, but at full price =)

[TimeStamp]

[DatingGold]

I'm not telling

[Mr. Marks]

Why do you want to know?

[baycouples]

Why do I want to know? That's the weirdest question I've hard on this board...

[chAos]

Originally posted by baycouples
Why do I want to know? That's the weirdest question I've hard on this board...

I have heard worse... LOL

the 3-6-12 is good for your overall bottom line and believe it or not they do reccur sometimes or rejoin if you have a good product ..

#1 If you are going into this business with that sort of mentallity then you might not want to start a website... the way that it works for the billing companies is technically they are the members of your 3rd party biller unless you are running your own merchant account in either case you will get a shitload of chargebacks and you will prolly never get paid from the biller.

#2 a large majority after looking at many stats tells me that many of the rebill members are people that have forgotten to cancel and do not pay alot of attention to their credit card statements. i might be wrong but i think it also depends on what type of site that you have as well.

#3 if you sell your business you sell it at a value of 6month revenue if it is something that you are truly considering you should have someone that is legally versed in assesing the value of your company and do it correctly.