Single Sale vs. Membership: The Risks

 

Example number one. Starting with the single sale site. You go to bed one night, a bunch of customers buy your product while you’re sleeping, but the download link goes down, so they contact you via e-mail, or call you and wake you up in the middle of the night to get a fix in. Simple, you wake up, you discover the problem, and fix the link and all is well.

Customers download, you apologize and explain, and everyone is happy. You have your single sale money, the customers has the product.

Now let’s look at this example from a membership point of view. Remember, compared to single sale sites, often the services presented by a membership site are vital to the running of a business. The tools are often re-occurring and live, and often consist of software that even just a few hours of down time can be hurtful to a business, whether it’s an investment tracker, or ad tracking, or auto-responders, hosting or even an info course following a schedule.

Can you see already how much more devastating losing control of a membership site is just for a few hours. Even if you pull off a quick fix a few hours after the problem has arisen, you may have disrupted the members business, their investing, their websites, their tracking, or even taken up the time that they put aside specifically to follow your course, something they now can’t do because their two hours a day of free time in between kids and work is now gone.

Whatever your product, with a membership site comes much more responsibility, because the product isn’t sell and forget. It’s constant, and you have to be ready for anything at any time, and to fix it quickly to prevent disruption to the users. If you disrupt the users, what are they going to do? Cancel their membership.

Reliability is the key for sure, but as you’ll find out if you set one up, not matter how well you plan, things can go pear shaped and devastate numbers quickly if you’re not careful severely affecting your income.

So you see, on the outside, it looks very much like single sale and membership aren’t dissimilar, but when it comes down to it, their inner workings are really very different. Stay with me though, I don’t want to put you off either one until you have the full story, and I don’t want anyone opting for the easy option if it’s going to make them less profit than the more challenging road.

There’s a lot more to discuss as of yet.

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