Should I give trial access to my site

[Ron T. Storm]

Hello,

I run a British site with British girls (bar one Russian lady).

I charge $12.95 sign up and $4.95 trial for a 2 day membership.

Recently I have noticed people signing up and canceling before the full membership kicks in.

I use CCBill and have now noticed a pattern of people signing up for the trial, downloading as much as possible and then canceling sometimes saying 'Unsatisfied with Content'. They then sign up for again for trial a few weeks later again and download what they have missed.

I am getting the feeling I am being taken for a bit of a ride here.

Should I dump or increase the trial membership costs. If anyone has an idea about how to treat this delicate financial situation please let me know,

Matt

[Hugh Jampton]

Well, the first idea would be to restrict the amount that can be downloaded by trial members and the second would be to restrict punters - perhaps identified by credit card details - to a single bite at the trial membership cherry.

Not sure if either of these ideas are technically feasible though... I'm not an IT nerd

[Ron T. Storm]

Hi Hugh,

Sounds like two good ideas. I will have words with CCBill about this,

Many thanks,

Matt.

[Toyboy001]

Two great ideas from Hugh Jampton.

I've seen a couple of sites who give only the latest video to the trial members and if you want the previous videos you have to be a full member.

[Ron T. Storm]

Hello Toyboyoo1,

Thank you for your advise.

I just spoke to CCBill, They said they can only give access to refunding/canceling a membership. I really would like to know technically how to do what you and Hugh suggest. Any ideas out there considering I use CCBill and don't want to change right now would be greatly appreciated,

Matt

[ecucamman]

How about setting up a seperate 'trial' site, which only gave access to some of your content, and perhaps thumbnails or low res video clips of the rest. You could then allow access to the full site after the trial period if the customer signs up

[Ron T. Storm]

What is weird is why this was moved to promotions forum. I don't mention my site or even my email address. I am only asking a question not promoting my site. I didn't even include my site address.

Sending it to O/T is fair but why to promotions?

Seems a bit daft but the powers that be who control this forum must have a good reason.

[vila]

Ivor Tiddler has it spot on when he puts the members' view of the situation.

Speaking as a punter I've found that with every site I've joined I'm only interested in a small percentage of what's on offer and that not a great deal of fresh material is put up each month. Not only does this make the individual site not worth the money (even if it is only $12.95), but to get a decent amount of new stuff each month means joining a fair number of different sites, which gets a tad expensive. Hence people take advantage of trial and short-term memberships to make occasional 'dips' to find out if there's anything new to interest them.

But what's the problem? If you don't have any kind of trial arrangement people don't know what's on offer and won't join. If you restrict the access so they can't get a second bite you might lose them after their first visit. If you leave it as is you at least get a small income from their occasional visits. Better than nothing at all, surely?

[vila]

Might have something to do with your site address being available from your profile and the fact that it's mentioned in other posts (not necessarily yours).

Got me confused too - it disappeared from the main forum while I was trying to reply!