30 Minute Trials A Good Idea?

[Cal]

Paycom has now given their webmasters the option of putting up 30 minute trials. I'm not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing; maybe good because the 30 minute rebill will increase chargebacks and weed out the little ripoff artists trying to get affiliates into their programs by offering higher payouts.

Personally I've heard the retention is only 40%, I think it was mentioned on this board. If so, what is the advantage? You can offer these free 30 minute trials, make $0 on your signup, and still maintain the same conversion ratio as a regular trial signup? I know the argument is that more people will sign up if it's free, but In this day and age I can't see that outweighing the risks for smaller merchants, who don't have the volume of sales to compensate for the inevitable chargebacks.

I have run free trial sites on a merchant account and I can safely say that it is a regular haven for frauders. Switching to a flat monthly did not hurt sales at all, but then again I don't run cookie-cutter paysites. Anyone else have thoughts on this? Some programs do better with free signups, no argument. But offering it to every webmaster who decides to use paycom? Luckily they have to answer directly to VISA now.

C.

[MarkTiarra]

My biggest concern here would be to watch the chargeback rate. IT's a touchy subject as is and if you push yourself up in the 2% range, you're going to have problems.

My lady handles the huge majority of the CS mails for MaxCash so I hear about all kinds of shit that people try to pull with refunds and crap on three day trials even. 30 min ones would be a "but I lost my connection... my computer crashed... etc..." nightmare.

[Dianna Vesta]

Mark the hell with that. I stopped giving trials and did a loyality discount. If someone is going to charge back they will and they'll go as far as they can.

I use to post in HUGE letters:

AFTER THE 3 DAY TRIAL YOU WILL BE REBILLED MONTHLY-

I can't tell you how many idiots never read that. I'd rather give 30 minutes free then deal with that bull shit again.

[Nickatilynx]

Cal,DV,Mark,

I switched to the 30min trials Epoch offers as a result of positive info posted here on Oprano.

It works very well for us.There is no doubt the credits have risen but I take that as a sign that Epoch is doing there job and crediting when validly requested.Very professional.

Our cb's are still under 1% but we have virtually 100% convert to the 1.95 and a greater percentage convert to 34.95/39.95 than previously.

But running the stats...if we had started without a decent size recurring database the results results may have been different......

Just my 2 cents....