I paid for a subscription to a website yesterday sending the money over by PayPal.
I got what looked like the usual email confirmation through. I expected to be able to follow a link in the email and get to the members content immediately.
Alas, there was an email in my inbox, but it wasn’t what I was expecting……apparently my application was being reviewed by their administrators and it might take up to 12 hours to complete the process. 12 hours. Really? 12? Wow, that’s the online equivalent of an Ice Age!
I waited about an hour ”to be nice”. To pass the time, I did some research and google showed me other people had had the same problem). I was annoyed because I really wanted to use the site and I felt bad for the site owner. But I was going to look somewhere else if I couldn’t do something urgent there for 12 hours, so I went to get a refund (only my second online refund in 7 years…)
I really can’t think of another subscription site that took so long to join. ancestry.co.uk…instant, monthlycontent.com…instant. The list goes on.
There’s two important lessons here:
- Once users have paid, they just don’t expect to wait for access to information that’s digital. Period. Instant gratification really is king.
- Pick the right sales process for your digital sales – compared with clickbank or amember delivery, Plimus is just too slow (- sorry guys!)
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