Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

• Sponsors
• Billing Options
• Content Providers
• Web Hosting
• Traffic Counters
• Website Designers
• Resource Sites

When do people visit your site and are you scaring them off with your pricing?
Well I guess that was the weekend. I seem to recall some years ago that experts were forecasting that in the modern age of computers people would have far more leisure time. Boy how wrong people can be!

But then, on the other hand, maybe we do have more leisure time … but only while we're at work.

Last week the results of a survey conducted in the United States were released and it revealed something that many of us here in adult already knew. The survey found that the business hours for online shopping was during office hours. For some years now many adult sponsors had found that sign-ups were always higher during office hours and now mainstream has finally realized that too.

And it's not something that is restricted to the United States either. Over in the United Kingdom mainstream e-commerce sites have long known that most sales happen between 9am and 5pm. Some of the really savvy guys over there only run their Adwords campaigns during those hours while others drop their bids outside of those hours.

Of course, the Internet is all about taking your message or your business to the world so it's always going to be 9am to 5pm somewhere in the world. However, if you're a small business whose market is almost entirely within your own country then concentrating on those core hours within your own country can prove to be a very sound move.

Knowing the hours when most of your customers are going to be hitting your website can be important too. It should certainly influence the times during which you do server upgrades or major site maintenance.

In the real world few bricks and mortar stores do major renovations during peak shopping times. They're hardly likely to shut down the store while new features are added during the hours when most customers will want to come in and buy something and we need to have the same approach

Even if you're not into e-commerce but are more involved in marketing it can be important to think of the times when most people are going to be hitting your sites. Just like the e-commerce people, you don't want your sites to be unavailable when most people are trying to find them.

Price Confusion
How many times have you gone to a site and not been quite sure what the bottom line is going to be till you are ready to check out?

I'm not talking about being uncertain of the price because you're not sure how many items you want to buy; I'm talking about being uncertain of the price because each item has too many options to choose from.

It seems that people are easily confused when it comes to pricing and when they become confused they tend to leave the site without making a purchase. Another recent survey has found that when a consumer wants to buy a product they are more comfortable about completing the purchase if they see one all inclusive price for the product.

When people are confronted with a price for a basic widget, an additional about for a deluxe widget and then yet another price for the super-deluxe widget they become uneasy and confused and they don't make the purchase.

Even if your product only has one price but then there's more added on for postage and packing people tend to move away and not make the purchase.

The survey found that people were prepared to pay a slightly higher price for an item if that one price included everything. When they had options or the purchase price was showing with postage and packing as an extra more people bought the same product at the higher all inclusive price than bought at the lower non-inclusive price.

There's a lesson there for us here in adult and it basically is that the KISS principle needs to be applied. We need to keep it simple stupid when it comes to pricing options for the products we sell and the more pricing options we give people the less chance there is of making a sale.

For those of us who are into affiliate marketing there are some who suggest that we shouldn't be including a price point in our sites at all. Instead we should leave that up to the sponsors.

On the other hand there are many who suggest that we should be including a price point before we send the surfers off to the sponsor. Those who favor that option suggest that if we include a price point then those who do visit our sponsors are more likely to actually make a purchase.

If that's the way you are thinking then it's obvious that we need to keep that price point simple. Instead of telling them about all the options for trial members, 30 day memberships and 90 day memberships perhaps we need to give them just one figure so that we don't confuse them and scare them off.

So there are some interesting and challenging things to think about this Monday. Marketing is a fascinating occupation and there is so much more to it than just throwing up galleries and free sites and hoping people will buy.