Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
Just looking for advice/experience/preferences on how to bill regularly for web hosting. My dilemma is...
If a customer purchases a domain name (on a yearly rate) say on the 1st of May then later procedes to buy web hosting on the 1st of June later, how should I bill them?
Both would be billed for one year at the time of starting the new services - fine - but what about next year? Would you bill them for the first domain name registration on the 1st of May for a few pounds and then bill them again, a few weeks later for a more considerable amount?
Other ideas I've had are to bill everything within a 4 week window all at the same time (but the actual services would be renewed from the 1st of May/June as appropriate).
Edit: what about billing for only partial years when they start a new service to synchronise the billing date?
The only trouble with seperate billing is the fees involved - our current payment processor uses fixed fees and so smaller payments work out rather expensive for us (on a .co.uk domain for instance, 17% of the cost would be the processing fee).
Any experience on how other people solve this or how you would prefer to be billed would be appreciated.
Thanks. :)
A few options:
1. Give the domain name registration away for free and add it to the hosting cost.
2. Bill monthly instead of yearly for hosting (bill for the domain at the same time), that will add to your merchant services costs, but it will most likely also increase sales.
3. If they buy a 12 month hosting contract, offer a discount, a "free" domain registration.
Domain registrations are so cheap the last thing you want to do is charge for them separately. That just becomes an accounting hassle that ends up costing more than any profit that may have been made.
I do #1 of the above. My merchant services provider gives a better discount rate if you don't bill for hosting services more than 3 months in advance......therefore it makes sense to throw in one domain name registration and bill monthly or quarterly.
We already give away free domains with all but the cheapest package. I think the monthly billing is a good idea though and I'll definitely investigate it.
Thanks once again.
