

The Data Behind Purchasing Behavior at UserVoice – Pricing for Conversion - thibaut_barrere
http://500.co/2013/07/18/the-data-behind-purchasing-behavior-at-uservoice-pricing-for-conversion-part-i/

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dangrossman
The surprising bit here is that dropping the requirement for a credit card had
no effect on conversions or trial signups. I've only ever read the opposite,
and my own testing at Improvely matched what I've read: the trial signup rate
more than doubled when a credit card wasn't required.

At the same time, the extra people signing up were not good leads. These new
users rarely completed the steps to start using their account, those that did
submitted more support requests, and the conversion rate to paying customers
at the end of the trial was more than halved.

I ended up putting the credit card requirement back in.

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chatmasta
I too am surprised by this. Another benefit of requiring a credit card is that
you prevent abuse of the trial system. Obviously this applies more to some
businesses than others. For instance, we are setting up a VPN business right
now and considering a free trial option. In that case, it seems like it would
be necessary to require a credit card so that users could not keep signing up
for the free trial with different email addresses.

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dangrossman
You're probably going to have to go a step further; something like Sift
Science or MaxMind MinFraud along with automated SMS/voice verification of a
unique phone number per trial. There isn't a carder in the world that wouldn't
love to use a VPN service that offers free trials. They want the VPN to use as
a proxy when testing stolen credit card numbers on other ecommerce sites...
and they have _plenty_ of cards to use to sign up for free trials with you
first.

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chatmasta
This is definitely true and something I've experienced running a proxy service
with 500+ clients. Fraud percentages are WAY too high right now. We're solving
it by simply checking the billing address vs. IP geolocation. Hopefully that
helps.

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jdavid
Glad to see other companies sharing their experiences with iterating quickly
on pricing. Marketing really isn't that different than code.

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Brushfire
All the images are becoming rate limited by google.

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rrwhite
Contacted them about fixing the images. In the meantime here's a PDF version
with them:

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/28/UnSexy-
PricingforConv...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/28/UnSexy-
PricingforConversion-Part1.pdf)

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mp99e99
This is really useful, thanks for posting!

