My company is now in its stage of major expansion. We receive and send payments daily regarding the whole business, and sorting out our hosting clients with monthly payments would be a nightmare to resolve!

So..we have discussed, and discussed, and come to the decision that a quarterly payment for hosting, and the choice of a yearly payment would be suited, rather than any monthly payments.


What I would like to see is any feedback...or just suggestions you may have...do you agree? or do you REALLY disagree because customers should have the right to pay monthly..?


Anyway, I await your replies. :D

Best Regards,
Leigh Hewitt.

Well the customers that you allready have if they are satisfied with your company will probably change to 1/4 billings without leaving, but new customers...hm perhaps they'll get scared if they have to pay for 3 months upfront.


You could set a setupfee which is 0$ if you pay 1/4, so they can choose.

I also require a minimum of a quarterly payment, as I have had problems with customers in the past, and it becomes too much of an annoyance/effort to deal with the opening of an account for only one month. A payment of three months is really not that huge a time frame, and when you consider that there are several (many) hosts out there that require payments for an entire year at a go and still have plenty of customers, you see that quarterly charges don't look that bad. Regardless of the time period the customer orders for, I do not charge a setup fee, as I think that makes the plans more attractive.

Okay great. Looks like I will provide the quaterly payment...and also a choice for yearly payment.

Thanks,
Leigh Hewitt
Chewnet Web Services

While personally I have a problem paying more than a month for a service I have not yet used with a vendor with whom I have no experience, I seem not to represent a large segment of the population. It seems that many have been quite successful only offering quarterly and annual payments on their lower end accounts. As such, I find maybe a middle road is to offer monthly, quarterly, and annual, but make sure it is financially very beneficial to the customer to choose a longer term. For instance:

On a lower end account.

Monthly $5.95
Quarterly 3 x $4.95=$14.85
Annual 12 x $3.95-$47.40

or

Monthly $20 Setup and $4.95/month
Quarterly $0 Setup and $4.95/month
Annual-Get two months free-$0 Setup and $49.50/yr.

I found that only offering quartlerly billing was stopping some potential customers who had been burnt in the past from signing up.. So I just set it up to do recurring billing once a month instead of going through the whole mailing/emailing invoices thing and it saves us a ton of time.. I am sure you allready thought of this but the way I look at it if out of my next 20 customers 1 does not sign up because we do not offer monthly billing then we are still taking a loss