Payment processor that allows free trials for my clients

[jclever]

Hello everybody,

I want to offer a free trial. I want to take the credit card info but not process until free trial expires. After the trial payment needs to be processed automatically.

I am using clickbank.com, 2co.com which both don't offer a free trial. PayPal does but it looks more like a subscribtion payment. I want to offer people a clear form where they wil see that they are registering for a free trial and they wil not be billes until the trial is over and they can cancel at any time.

I would prefer not having to open a merchant account and add complicated programs to my site. I am happy with the third party processing I am using except I can't offer a trial. Maybe there is a company out there that will allow me to?

Best regards,

Jens

[pp_rb]

In PayPal, you can create a Subscription payment that only bills the customer once. When creating the subscription button, where it asks "Continue to bill the subscriber for this amount on a recurring basis?", select "No", and the customer will only be billed once after the trial period is over.

If you are concerned that your customers may be confused by the term "Subscription" if it appears on the PayPal website, the best way to avoid confusion is to give the customer an explanation while they are on your website. Let them know the terms, the length of the trial period, and reassure them that it is a one-time payment.

[jclever]

thanks for the answer...all the time I make PayPal more visible on my site or make it the only Payment choice my sales go down so PayPal is not an option for me it seems. I like PayPal but only as an alternative to other Payment processors...

[Staffa]

I don't know what product you are giving a free trial for but from a customer's point of view I would be very weary to give my card details to someone on the promise not to bill me until the trial is over. If I decide the product's not for me I would then have to go through the whole process of cancelling the trial, etc, etc.....

Can you not give a free trial, and assuming it's software, disable your product when the trial ends?

[jclever]

it is an ebook package.

[bostonte]

Your best bet is to spend some time browsing the PayPal Merchant site and do everything you can to make it easier for your customers. They allow a lot of things (if you know how to set it up) that make it much more seemless for the customer -- they don't even have to have a PayPal account at first anymore (automatically create one as they pay you).

Anyone else out there that would offer this as a "packaged solution" is even more shady than PayPal (iBill, etc.). iBill is very expensive, prone to fraud problems with customers (i.e. even if John Doe calls his credit card company first, you still can't get the charge to go through), and has a bad reputation (they cater to adult sites).

I personally use a standard merchant account and have in-house software that I had coded which automatically keeps track of trials and bills when necessary.