Sorry for the crazy subject but yesterday I had a chat with some foreign students in Hangzhou, China. Most of them had heard about skritter but did not try it out due to the simple fact that even a free account requires you to sign up with a credit card. I know this have been brought up before but you really should think about this strategy. Especially non US potential customers are very reluctant to sign up for anything free if you need to use your card. Many do not even have a card. I know for sure that I would not have signed up if it had required my card back then and I am now one of your most loyal customers:-). I am rather sure that you miss a large part of the market by having it this way. Other ideas that did pop up from those individuals are possibilities to buy packages. Let's say a semester package with a discount. Me my self would love to have an life time package to buy. I like to buy large packages instead of monthly small payments. Think I have a three year now with Cpod. Word of mouth is a very good way to bring in new customers and most of the people I talk to are very eager to use it but those small things stops them sometimes to actually start using this. Just hoping for more fun customers to Skritter:-)

Same for me, I wouldn't have signed up if I had to give my credit card number...I know you could just write an email, but that's not what everyone would do...do something about it ;-) at least "Write us an email if you don't have a credit card" or something...

They had packages in the beginning (with discount), but they changed it...you can still buy 6 months I think with paypal but without discount...

Who is that skritter critter wearing a hat? I don't want a turkey...what is he doing here? Where is his friend, the red one? ;-)

students are lazy
my 2c

Might be that students are lazy but the fact is still a lot of people simply do not sign up for any service, even if it is free if it requires you to enter your credit card details. Just look at Chinesepods adds, now saying "Sign up for a free trial, no credit card required". Sometimes we just have to follow how the general public like to do their business.

I agree, giving out credit card info is scary $#*!. In fact I never give it out if I have an alternative For example, I use prepaid iTunes cards not credit cards for buying apps. An alternative might be to create a trial ware version of Skritter that needs to be installed and expires after a period of time. User testimony is always good. If potential Skritter users saw an active community and were assured by them it's not a scam, I'm sure they would be more likely to sign up.

I agree...I wouldn't sign up for a free trial if a credit card was required...in this case it would be my loss as well as skritter's, but there are just too many stories about credit card fraud and better to err on the side of saftey...

Agreed!
If nick hadn't given me some sort of code to register without a credit card it wouldn't even have been possible for me to become a customer, since I don't own a credit card (most people in Europe don't; good way to avoid a market :S).

Skritter is awesome and so is the company/team behind it, very dedicated and I believe trustworthy, so it's a pity that this might be holding Skritter back.

I also saw that you can sign up for Cpod without a credit card, so why does Skritter need one?

Yep, I second that, I've had people who got curious seeing me use Skritter and were interested to try it out too, and when I warned them that they'd have to enter their credit card info for the trial, they completely lost interest in checking it out.

@nick, to follow up on the thread, http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=55231117. In addition to credit cards being harder to obtain overseas (ie in Europe), they also usually come with a fee, I only know one bank in France where they'll issue one with no annual fee, while in the states pretty much any bank has an option for a free credit card... In France, I believe there's a process similar to what @marchey described, where for each transaction you have to use some cardreader for extra protection, and I think there's also "one time" or short term credit card number issued. I think those are related to the Visa electron, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Electron, "available across most of the world, with the exception of Canada, Australia, Ireland and the United States."

Besides I don't know if things have changed, but I saw
a TV report once about cases of credit card fraud (in France), and how there's a gap in the law to take in account those situations, so the victim was pretty much f#!*&ed. I personnally want to avoid getting a credit card because of the sucky customer service around it and whenever you have to deal with paperwork it takes forever and ever... so better being safe than sorry.

Indeed.

I've tried to obtain a credit card at my bank here in Europe twice before, but after registering and the bank assuring me that everything would be in order, they plainly forgot about it and henceforth just deny ever taking my forms or copying my passport. Also, most banks here will want to have some proof of stable income, and since students don't usually qualify, they simply can't get credit cards.

what would you guys suggest, then, for the Skritter guys to do if they stop asking for credit card info? How could they prevent people from signing up for Free Trials over an over again?

I think email should be good enough. I mean, realistically, if people want to study seriously with Skritter they will have to do it with a subscription, there's no way to sign up for different trials accounts and expect to do some substantial learning that way, I'm talking from personal experience ;)

I don't know what the time limit is for the free trial but it could be made more restrictive, like one week, or have the trial restricted by number of characters one is able to study.

it would be nice if perhaps the scratchpad had a way to easily import a bulk list of words from your own document, and theres no subcription needed for the scratchpad right? that way someone could use skritter without tracking progress, or characters, no SRS- but then they will obviously end up getting a subscription.

You should be aware that the credit card mechanism creates a deadweight loss: It prevents your service from being provided to customers whose marginal benefit from consuming it exceeds its marginal cost. This obviously is a pareto inefficiency and needs to be rectified.

The reasoning behind this deadweight loss can be divided into two asymmetric information problems:

Firstly, some customers do not have enough information about your corporate practices to reveal the credit card details (particularly true for non-US customers).

Secondly, customers who do not subscribe may not have sufficient information to properly evaluate the marginal benefit from consuming your service. Hence, they are unable to find out that their marginal benefit exceeds marginal costs and make the pareto inefficient decision not to subscribe.


My payments to you would have been part of this deadweight loss if you had implemented this mechanism earlier, as I certainly would not have signed up due to the outlined asymmetric information issues.


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哎哟，我又来了，我每次用英文写东西就变成这个样子，不好意思啊。

For customers in china at least a unionpay internet banking payment should be provided. I have asked a friend to do the skritter for me. I don´t like this feeling and maybe it could become as well a reason to stop subscription in the near future.

Thanks for all the feedback, guys. We'll be looking at ways to make the PayPal / Google Checkout alternatives more visible. I've read that you can hook UnionPay up through PayPal, now, although I couldn't find any other obvious way to accept it (other than that most UnionPay credit (not debit) cards supposedly are affiliated with card brands we can already accept?).

There are two problems being discussed here. The first is that our primary subscription method is via credit/debit cards, which are not good for many overseas customers. It is unfortunate, because we're looking at a horrific splintering of ways people would like to pay. After credit/debit cards, PayPal, and Google Checkout, the fragmentation is too much. How can we support Alipay and direct debit and the other things listed here?: http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=55231117
But I think that if we can better support PayPal and GC, then it'll help somewhat, as tons of services can link into PayPal.

The other problem is that we ask for the payment details before the free trial, which makes many potential customers uncomfortable. It is unfortunate. The benefits outweigh the costs here, though. It is more convenient. Prospective customers think of Skritter as a valuable service instead of a free thing. They use it more. They are vastly more likely to keep using it and to pay. They know they want help learning Chinese/Japanese, they make a little commitment to giving it a try, and that commitment helps them achieve their goals.

It's like buying a membership to a new gym. It would seem like it would make sense to just get a few day passes at first, to make sure you like it, before being the yearly membership. But to help encourage yourself to go to the gym, especially at first when it's hardest to get the habit going, it may make more sense to get the yearly pass. Then, once it's bought, you don't have any excuses not to go--it's a sunk cost, so you feel like you'd better make use of it, which helps you get more value out of it. It just works better for us and for the larger number of people who become Skritter users. It doesn't work as well for those that would have become users but were scared off, but I don't see a way to satisfy everyone here.

It's not at all about preventing people from creating multiple free trials. You can do that already if you want--one credit card can make as many accounts as you like. If you are that price-sensitive that you'd keep making new accounts just to use Skritter but can't pay, send us an email asking about it and we'll just give you a bunch of free time. Everyone should be able to learn.

Hey Nick

I totally get what you're saying about the first point. I can't imagine it's a lot of fun trying to get all those different interests to fit.

About the second point I don't I quite think I agree. You are saying that people will value Skritter more if they have to pay for it. Although I can imagine a bunch of people where that is true (cognitive dissonance), I think there were many people that mentioned a point that isn't accounted for in that explanation. You say the people know they want help and thus are willing to pay.
Although this is true, it's probably only true after they have tried skritter. Many people would be more than willing to pay for skritter once they know how great skritter is. The thing is, although they know they want help and are willing to pay for it, credit card information is a tricky issue and first requires a certain amount of trust. If they never get to try it, they will never know. For many it will have been one of those services you aren't quite sure about how good it is but you did potentially avoid a fraud. That's why they need a trial...no strings attached.

On a side note, that line of thought about the year membership with the gym makes sense. I was, however, also surprised when during my time at university they brought up exactly that scenario. People would go more to the gym, once they had made such a financial commitment. Studies have shown that those sunk costs don't affect you in the long term (I now can't open the study because of some server issue, but it's called "paying not to go to the gym"). It's probably the same mechanism that makes people put on too much weight and then discontinue diets (you know it's unhealthy...but you do it anyway) and with other unhealthy behaviours such as smoking and watching too much TV. Self control is a tricky thing ;)

In the long term, how the initial signup process went with Skritter probably doesn't matter, true. We do monthly subscriptions for the most part, though, with no real free version, so this effect is only coming into play in the short term.

The combination of these effects does mean that more people use Skritter, even despite scaring off some people who don't trust us enough to sign up and give it a shot. We can compare retention rates and it really does work better this way. More people are being nudged to see the value in Skritter than are being scared off. It's unexpected and fascinating!

So since we haven't thought up a way to give a no-strings-attached trial to people who don't just straightaway trust us, while still providing these efficient incentives and nudges to the others, we'll keep doing it like this.

What is keeping me from signing up for Skritter is uncertainty about what happens if I stop or suspend my subscription. Do my words/lists disappear into thin air? so that if I restart I don't have them anymore? Can I somehow download the lists I've made so I can practice offline (not on Skritter) and not waste the investment I've made in creating my own lists? I can't find answers to these questions anywhere on the site.

Dawei: if your subscription ends, you can still practice on Skritter fine, you just can't add any new words.

And yep, you can also export your word list.

(That is, you can export a list of the characters/words you practise with in Skritter, as well as the characters/words for any lists you or anyone else have created).

Byzanti, thanks for the quick answer, that's just fine. I wait now for my Wacom pen tablet to arrive, then I'll set up an account and get to work.