The first half of October has been a pretty good time for Secure Delivery. There have been more free account signups than we can count, our first free-to-paid conversions, and quite a few paid sign ups. We even had a couple signups for more than the base plan, which just tickles me pink.

Traffic and Promotion

Our traffic has dropped a bit from September, but thats ok. In September I tried a bunch of random traffic producing methods- everything from “buying traffic” to social bookmarking and forum posts. While we did get a big surge in traffic from what I suspect was pop-under traffic and surf consoles, there was not a corresponding big surge in sign-ups.

This confirmed my suspicions, but hey- I wanted to try it out anyway. At least now when I say buying visitors is a crock of @&*$ I have the experience to back up my claims instead of hearsay and conjecture.

Throughout September Secure Delivery got a number of reviews, both paid and free, from other bloggers. They continue to bring quality traffic to Secure Delivery and I suspect they will continue to in the future. In addition to the blog reviews, Secure Delivery was picked as on of the prizes for the Problogger Birthday Giveaway. This resulted in several posts on Problogger. While this didn’t bring a whole heck of a lot of traffic (there were always many other product links beside ours) I know for a fact that quite a few people who did come through created an account.

Add to that the random distribution of prizes meant that only 3 of the 5 people who won lifetime subscriptions actually sold digital downloads and could use the account and the cost of promotion on that one went way down. I’ll have to think of something to do with the other two lifetime prize subscriptions if they are not eventually claimed…

Fraud!

We had our first fraud claim on PayPal this weekend. Evidently someone signed up for a paid plan, decided they didn’t want to use the service, and decided to file a fraud claim against us in PayPal to get their $10 back.

You know, we hate it that someone wanted to cancel their subscription. That really sucks, and we’d love to know why. What really chaps our ass about this particular cancellation is that they could have just dropped us a support ticket saying that Secure Delivery was not for them and we would have happily canceled their subscription and given them a full refund.

Interestingly enough, the fraud reason was “Unauthorized use of PayPal account” even though they used their business domain email, set up a product being sold on that domain, and even added our buy button before canceling. Lies and deceit I tell you- when all they would have had to do is ask, and not even nicely at that.

Features Features Features….

Both my business partner and I are working on new features and trying to get ready for a publish.

A publish is a big thing to us- it pretty much copies our dev environment to the live site and lets all the new features we are working on behind the scenes out to the public. Being how our service directs people’s money and products to the right parties, we spend a long, long time testing new features in our dev environment before we publish to live, so we get pretty excited when we get to stop testing, throw the big switch, and actually launch new features and see how subscribers use them.

What will probably be in this upcoming publish includes a new payment processor (2CheckOut), a new method of putting your products “On Sale” and setting up “Introductory Offers”, and a few other tweaks and updates. Of course, all this is subject to change and development complications might move features further down the time line, yada yada yada.

Sorry for neglecting the blog, this whole running a business online thing is a lot of work. Thanks to all three of my readers- I’ll try to keep you updated as time permits :)