Product Creation - Check Yo Self Fool

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In most marketers minds, when it comes to processing that "shipping and handling fee" you're probably only thinking about credit cards.

Add to that, every course I've ever read on the subject has said, "Don't bother with checks or money orders" credit card only.

That just goes right back to me thinking that the guys who write these things have never had a successful product in their lives, and if they have, too bad their so stupid because they easily could have added 18% to their net profits.

I will absolutely take checks for trial orders and I'll give you my personal reasons why:

1. It saves the sale if the customer has a trust issue with putting their credit card number into a website or over the phone, and also for those people (yes they exist) that don't have a card they can use right now, or at all, but have a checking account and still want the product.

2. It's not as if UPS is going to back up and unload 16,000 envelopes full of checks onto your driveway. The processing isn't going to be that time consuming. Of course personally I wouldn't have an issue with 16,000 checks being dumped on my driveway.

3. I've actually found that a strong percentage of initial check orders have been longer term customers than those who originally put the trial on a card. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

4. You lose nothing. 9 times out of 10 the person wouldn't have bought any other way because they didn't trust you. Worst case, you break even on shipping them a bottle of pills or whatever the product may be, BEST CASE, you add a new customer to the funnel who will now trust you and be willing to enter the credit card for the next order.

By the way, remember when I said that in most cases the shipping and handling fee will cover all expenses from the product to the order taking, to the shipping putting you at a break even right off the bat?

Well a check saves you the credit card fees which can be 2% to 8%, and also ensures no funny business with charge backs on the shipping payment.

Now in a perfect world, I'd want checks all the time, no processing fees from the merchant bank, and no charge backs, but of course most customers won't remember or even care to send you a check every month which will kill your profits on the auto ship.

What I like to do is offer it as an option just to get the customer in the door. It lets them know we can't go and start running up charges on their account, and while it's not global by any means, the trial industry has exploded over the last few years and a lot of negativity around credit card fraud has gone mainstream.

Many of the people we accept a check from initially will roll over the next month and let us have a credit card for their new order which then puts them into the auto ship program.

If we give them a follow up call and they don't want any more, nothing is lost, if they do want more but will only pay with a check, big fucking deal, what are you going to say no to $40 to $60 in profit by shipping them a full price product that costs you a few bucks to make?

Now the last thing I want to do is take a check from most people, all I'm trying to do is save sales that would otherwise be lost.

My customer service reps are trained to do everything they can to steer people away from a check (much longer processing time, won't be able to start getting the benefits of the product for a few weeks etc) but if they are about to lose the sale, they will offer that as an option just in case the customers real concern was security, which by the way, in many cases it is.

On the web ordering system I don't even offer check as an option because I don't want to put ideas into people's heads. If however they abandon the order page my save a sale chat pops up offering them reduced shipping and other payment options such as mail in check if they don't want to use a credit card.

I've tested this over and over and I've had as many as 18% of customers who were "saved" by the save a sale, actually use a check or money order which let me know that the shipping price of course was never the issue, no one gives a shit about $5 to try something they are interested in. What they were concerned about was trust.

Save a sale chats offering a discount on shipping do work, they certainly at least work better than the alternative which is the customer leaving forever, but what a lot of these guys don't get is that offering $1 shipping instead of $4.95 wasn't the issue 95% of the time, the customer just didn't believe what they were being told, whether it was that the product actually works, or that you weren't some scammer who was going to go on a spending spree with their MasterCard or billing them forever for new bottles until they had to cancel the card.

So listen to your friend Rob and become one with the check again, it's not just for the elderly anymore.

Speaking of the elderly, I have products that cater specifically to them, and more than half our orders are mail in check, nothing beats a crisp valid check, once it clears, that money is all yours.