Making it easy to pay

I heard about Voice Pay a while back on NPR's All Things Considered. It took a recent note by David Worlock of Outsell to remind me that these things are highly relevant to Publishers like us.

There are ever more inventive ways to make it easy for us to part with our money. My experience is that making things easy leads to more usage. It seems reasonable to expect that making it easy for customers to pay might lead to higher revenues.

Here are some other examples.

I have an EZPass so I can whizz ticketless through the turnpike toll booths. It automatically debits my credit card in $35 increments when my balance falls below a threshold. I have a Starbucks card that does same thing for my coffee. It's so automatic I forget what each transaction costs. I just get used to the occasional debit from my account.

My use of txt messaging has increased over time (Twittter!) and as it has I have changed my cell phone bill plan from a purely transactional plan (pay per txt) to buying a block of txts (drawdown) to unlimited txting (a subscription). A seamless transition from my point of view, low cost/high return for the cell phone operator since it was all done online with no human2human interaction and I’m using and spending more.

The bottom line: make it easy for me to part with my money and there's a good chance I will.