Web Industry Blog

How much would you like to pay?

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Example of offering a valuable spreadsheet behind a wall that says “How much would you like to pay?” I can continue on and pay 0 when I give over my email address, which I did. But if I did want to offer a tip of appreciation, Jesse Cannon sure made it easy for me to for over a buck or two. He’s using a third party system called ko-fi, and it makes a shopping cart that makes it easy for the user to give money to the website owner. The first part is an actual cart. The second party is a checkout system, even if I give 0. The upper payment intake system is using stripe, while the buttons below are obviously paypal.

Next is the follow up email, which encourages you to confirm your order (really confirm your email address) to get the content. Let’s take a closer look here. So really this looks like an automated email to simply confirm that the email is valid (you know, we’ve seen it before, all the time) but the lingo around this email leads you into thinking instead about the account (first sentence, you weren’t logged in…) “Confirm your purchase (it was free) and YOU WILL ALSO BE ABLE TO ENGAGE…’ so I’m clicking a button used to identify my email is valid but now we’re also lumping on the fact that I now have a user account (even if I didn’t want one?) and also I’m on the mailing list, as you might expect when you give someone your email address. I don’t know, this just feels a bit invasive to me, but the spreadsheet was so good that I’m gladly clicking here, whatever, I can always unsubscribe later.

And when I clicked it I got access to the asset (download link):

I documented this here as an example of how easy it could be to give money to a website owner. But this has a different face on it, where the user is being offered something for free, something they could potentially find valuable, and we simply asked if they would give us money for it. Simply Ask.

Simply Ask.

Musformation // Jesse Cannon