One thing I’ve learned at CDNify is that you should always take on board feedback, just the other week we had a customer asking why they should use HTTPS and what the benefits are, so I wrote a quick blog post.
I imagine you’re wondering what this has to do with a “CDN that accepts PayPal”? Well, it’s all about listening to what your audience wants, and yes I know this may seem obvious, but a lot of new businesses out there aren’t doing this.
Feedback: The Surprising Tales from User Enquires
A few weeks back I was having a discussion with one of the devs about different payment methods, the conversation boiled down to this: “What we have works, so why change it?“. To me that just didn’t seem good enough, it’s the equivalent of being on dialup when you could be on fiberoptic broadband, so why were we limiting ourselves? The answer was simple, we weren’t engaging with our users to see what they wanted.
Diving in head first, we got in touch with our audience and asked for feedback. It was quite surprising the amount of requests we got for some things, but the main thing that stood out the most was PayPal support. A lot of users said that the only thing that pushed them away was the limited payment options.
So we got to work and in no time at all we had implemented PayPal. To our amazement the first thing we noticed was the increase in traffic (which shocked us), more enquires (our support team will love that!), and more signups (queue the rain dance)!
More Signups, More Fun!
I know what you’re thinking, “who the heck are these guys showing off their fancy signups!?“, well honestly we’re not one for tooting our own horn, we just didn’t expect a huge return straight away, especially for such a minor (what we thought) update. I mean, the amount of return we got easily justifies the time we spent developing the integration, so it goes to show talking to your user base actually works, even for simple things like implementing PayPal support.
Advantages of PayPal
Ok, now let’s get our hands dirty with the meat of the article: Advantages of PayPal (user), or, Why You Should Implement PayPal (business).
1. Cost
Probably the best reason by far is that PayPal is free. There aren’t any processing fees, membership fees, or even service charges. Users and businesses alike get an enormous bang for their buck.
2. Control
It can sometimes be a pain when cancelling a service as it requires you to go through an issuing provider like a bank, but with PayPal you have control over your subscriptions in one location.
3. Security
Businesses accepting credit cards require you to fill in this info on their site, which can seem like a security risk if you’re unfamiliar with their brand. With PayPal you only need to input your card details once, then everything goes through them. You never need to disclose your card details and they remain private from prying eyes.
4. Mobile
I think this is the most underrated aspect of PayPal. Yes you can pay via desktop, but what happens if you’re away and you get notified about an upcoming bill? Managing your subscriptions from either an iPhone, Android, or (god forbid) Windows phone, you can ensure you’re always on top of any loose payments.
Lessons Learned
As obvious is this may seem, I would say the most important takeaway from this experience was listening to our audience. It meant we got to learn features that we were missing, their demand, and know where to head next in terms of functionality.
One thing that I’ve learned personally is that being open about not knowing actually helps, it’s the quickest way to learn and adopt things that people want.
So prepare to have your minds blown and check out PayPal support in action.
Feel free to let us know what you’d like to see next in the comments below.