I’ve written about decreasing the “friction” of customers signing up for your products and services. My company still does a lot of transactions at live events (demos and trade shows). I found its much better to close deals at the event and not rely on them signing up when they get home.
To do this we still have to rely on paper order forms.
This is due to mostly crowd control issues. If a single presenter is doing a Cloud Streams demonstration to 40 people in a room there is no easy way for those attendees to sign up for the service asynchronously other than a paper order form.
I see more and more REALTORS coming to events with their digital devices, but filling out an online form by taping on a screen (whether an tablet or iPhone) is still a cumbersome process.
Yesterday Apple announced a brand new service called Apple Pay. They are also releasing an API for developers. With this service you can order online product with the Touch ID button on your iPhone. No forms to fill out, and a receipt is emailed you automatically.
Imagine the scenario at a presentation where after your demo you direct an attendee to a website address and have them click a choice of Monthly or Yearly Plan and then use Touch ID to sign up. That’s it. Boom.
I get goosebumps thinking about it.
Me too Greg – I watched the demo from Apple and my head started to explode about all of the opportunities for Apple Pay – they’re going to take over eCommerce just like have the music distribution business – you gotta give them credit – they’re a pretty amazing company – even without Steve Jobs!
OMG Apple is so awesome!
Of course, you could’ve been doing this with PayPal, Amazon Payments and Google Wallet for years but thank god for Apple!
@Robert
PayPal – Not easy for subscription services.
Google Wallet – Not a high adoption rate. Hard to set up.
I haven’t checked out Amazon Payments.
PayPal not easy for subscriptions?
I had a Vendor Alley Premium subscription from 2010 in my PayPal subscriptions, along with 26 others going back 7 years. Seemed easy at the time. 🙂
Six years with Amazon payments and Google Wallet NFC has been working great for years, too. Easy to set up: https://developers.google.com/wallet/instant-buy/web/quickstart-java
Welcome to the future, iPeople.
You realize Robert we are talking about real estate agents. They can handle putting their finger on a button, setting up a Google Wallet or Pay Pal, not so much.
Hey Greg, what do you use as a Gateway for online transactions and what are your costs per transaction?
Thx
MB
We use Braintree. I believe they recently got acquired by PayPal. off the top of my head I’m not sure of the cost per transaction .