AW_Learner - 2:25 am on Jun 14, 2004 (gmt 0)

I don't know what this has to do with underpromising. You don't have to underpromise in order to overdeliver. I would promise as much as I could feel 100% confident with being able to deliver. So just not overpromising anything that I'm not sure about being able to deliver. A good option I think is what most businesses do which is to give a wider range. Like if you are promising a time period like Michael Anything talked about you can say that they will receive the tickets in 7-14 days before the flight. Giving a range of the earliest to longest so they don't just see the longest possible time. Right now I'm offering a service to people and the time it will take depends all on what else is going on in business and the number of orders which will increase in the future. So I promise that they will receive there proof within a week. Even though right now just starting out it will most likely be only 1 day before they receive them. I'm sure they will be surprised and happy when they get them so quickly when they had different expectations.

Another thing to think about is that overdelivering is not neccesarily all about your own promises or even what you deliver only AFTER a sale. It is also about people's pre-expecations of what they expect to get from sites and services. This is based on there past experiences with other sites. Like what brizad talked about his experience with all the sites he saw giving the same limited information and totally useless gave him that expectation of what he would find by going to sites from Google searches on it. Now if he came accross a site that was different and offered actual quality reviews and an organized directory and quick comparison, articles and other quality content on the different choices and merchants that site would in effect be Overdelivering on the average expectation from other sites and get his attention. I think you should overdeliver as much as you can upfront so people see the difference in what you are offering and what others are offering. Even if part of that is in promises of what they will get only after they complete your desired action. As long as you promtly follow through afterwards.

I don't think it has anything to do with Branding either. It's all about service and usefullness. Which is all people want. They don't give a **** about your brand or what you want to call yourself. If you want them to remember that and for them to keep coming back to you you will have to make that even more solid and easy to remember, good logo, talk more about yourself and company, provide more reasons for trust and reasons to come back. So in other words a lot more content and positioned as an "expert" in your area.

But for general service overdelivery even for review/comparison aff. sites you don't need to worry about your brand. Esp. if your site is very niche that once the person is able to find what they want from your site and get it from the aff. merchant they have no reason to come back because they already found what they want from you.

I do think it is a useful service. I've been looking for a merchant account and most of the sites just list a bunch of different ones with links to them. So you have to go to each one and read through a huge site after site trying to compare them. But then I found one site that has a bunch of articles and brakes everything down by type and needs with full reviews, rates of each, benefits and drawbacks etc. Everything I needed to compare the different choices on that site instead of all the individual sites. That was the only one where I was able to find quickly what I was looking for all day. And I really don't think that accounts for only .01% of internet surfers.

I think the basic idea is to give something of value first if you can.