This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
What is the best way to offer a payment plan? If you have a product or a service that costs a good amount of money, or perhaps even one that doesn't, these days you can see payment plans for everything. But what if you have an online course, let's say, and it costs at least a couple hundred dollars, maybe something that could give people pause in purchasing. Is there an easy way you can offer a payment plan? We all know that what payment plans are. But how
do you set it up in a way that minimizes your risk? So let's talk about the best strategies to balance accessibility and profitability. We're going to hear from somebody who's preparing to launch his first course. And it's just going through all the different settings, I think, in his, you know, payment processor, and trying to decide what's the best thing to do. I'm going to give you a really easy answer. Like this is super practical. And hopefully it's going to help
for your first or your next product as well. Thank you, listeners. I'm so glad you're out there. The detailed question from Raj and my answer coming right up. Hey there, this is Raj from Seattle.
I'm getting ready to launch an online course. And I've noticed that many creators offer payment plans to make it easier for people to enroll. I think it's a great idea. But I'm nervous about people defaulting on payments or canceling midway. How can I set up payment plans in a way that makes my course more accessible, but still protects my income? Are there any specific tools
or strategies you recommend to minimize the risks? When it comes to increasing conversion on your website and getting more customers, payment plans are a great way to go. Payment plans can make a several percentage boost just by offering the plan. Basically like if you do nothing different, you don't change anything else on your website. But at the checkout process, there's a payment plan for pretty much anything that is sold, especially anything that is a high ticket item, having a payment plan option is going to help. It's going to allow some people to purchase who
might not purchase otherwise. So here's the cool thing. A lot of payment processors make this really simple. Now, like back in the day, I used to set up like I had to manually manage a payment plan process that we did for one of my events. We had a spreadsheet, we had to physically go in and charge people. I think it was like a three payment kind of option. And then stuff would go
wrong. You know, there would be this risk that Raj is talking about, like the first payment would work, then the second payment would fail. So then what do you do? There's maintenance in terms of the communication with customers and such. These days, that would be the wrong way to do it because processors like Stripe just make it simple to build it in. So as you're setting up your Stripe account,
or if you're using another payment processor, there is often an option that's like, hey, just enable this. And there are other companies behind these services that actually manage the risk for that whole process. And PayPal does this as well. I think Shopify has this as an option because the whole industry understands how impactful this can be. So that is the easy way to do it. If you're trying to do it on your own in some other fashion, for whatever reason,
because you have to, for example, payments from some customers or some customers in some countries may not automatically work with the Stripe option or whatever. One thing you could do is encourage customers to pay in full by offering a small discount. So if your course costs $600 with a payment plan, you could offer a full payment option at $550. That rewards customers for paying up front, but still enables the payment plan for those who need it. Again, whenever possible, you want to let other companies do this for you so you don't have to mess with it. Ecommerce has
really evolved a lot to make things so much simpler than they used to be. So I would say, definitely use the payment plan unless you have an objection and try to set it up in a way that doesn't require extra work from you. Good luck to Raj and everybody out there. We've got lots of e-commerce folks joining us this year, people selling products of all kinds, people using third party shipping, drop shipping, some people doing the shipping themselves, using tools like Ship Station. I'd love to know what you're selling, what's going well, what's a challenge. sidehustleschool.com/questions.
New episodes every day, seven days a week, always free. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.
