Can You Put A Price On Consumer Convenience Today?

We see that if consumer convenience is provided, people are willing to pay for it. This begs the question, how important is convenience to consumers?

It’s easy to deride subscription payment norms in the modern day because it does feel as though most companies are starting to put out their own premium service for extra features or members’ access.

An Example

We need only look to the failed initiative of CNN’s subscription service, which vastly overrated the interest people would have in news coverage and extra shows when so much was available. 

However, certain subscription methods, like those related to streaming video content, Amazon Prime, and even food delivery apps like Uber One are reporting great success.

As a business, just how much should you invest in this, to what extent should you market these changes. Or, should you just make sure this is an innovation you continually improve without the need for recompense or recognition?

In this post, we’ll discuss this through actional advice you can use to better round off your business. and include some examples to help you figure out its practical value for your own firm:

Payment Convenience To Increase Consumer Convenience

Payment convenience is a truly worthwhile feature to integrate. As paying hard-earned money for your service or product is one of the biggest hurdles a customer will have to get over, it’s good to make this as simple as possible for them.

Any friction here, like a transaction not complete, not accepting their preferred mainstream payment provider, or even a faulty cart can be an issue.

This is where servicese full gamut of payment provisions and transactional software for accepting online spending is given. This way, you can ensure that the platform you use is constantly maintained, highly intuitive and functional, and an utterly seamless part of the customer sales funnel.

This way, once a consumer makes their decision to pay, there is absolutely nothing standing in their way.

Customer Requests

Not all customer requests can be honored by the nature of how their service or product is manufactured.

Outside of choosing the color, storage capacity, and model of the iPhone you buy, it’s not as if you can ask Apple to place it in specific packaging, or to preload, it with certain software before it arrives at your door.

But to some degree, baking in user scalability is a fantastic idea too, especially if you offer services.

Let’s say you’re a managed IT service provider, instead of offering tiers of services that can be used by your clients. Why not separate them so a client can curate a package of their own choosing, with the right pricing for that?

This way they don’t have to dance around provisions they’ll never need, and you save time in adopting clients more readily, too.

It’s not hard to see how this could potentially give you a leg up over your competition, or how offering that kind of provision could put your competition in a stronger position for a heightened market share.

You can see how important consumer convenience to consumers really is.

Repeated Billing & Savings

It’s good to incentivize people to use your conveniences. So for example, your subscription model might offer a monthly payment structure. But perhaps, if you inspire someone to pay for a full year of your service, you’ll throw in two months free to make it worth that payment.

This is convenient for all involved. Not only does your customer not have to worry about monthly billing, but they can be certain to stick with your service and everything it’s offering for that entire year.

They gain a nice discount for doing so, which means they haven’t had to put themselves out for the trouble.

In the long run, an effort like this can be profoundly useful, and you’ll see that convenience is not always just granting a provision, but making their willingness to engage with your company as smooth, rewarding, and customer-focused as possible.

App Utilities For Added Consumer Convenience

Developing an app is a great use of your time to add consumer convenience. This is especially true if you deliver digital services or an online store.

It’s not easy to have full access to the coding possibilities when asking people to solely visit your website through a web browser, but you’ll find much more creative and engineering freedom in an app.

Here, you can showcase your entire storefront in a quick-to-load platform. This might also curate provisions like immediate customer support requests, the ability for a shopping cart, subscriptions that work with the app, or even integration with other apps and services.

For example, if you develop an app dedicated to weight loss in line with your products, you might also develop support functionality for the iPhone step tracker that helps someone count how many calories from walking they’ve burned that day.

This might not earn you any money of course, but it’s a nice provision that allows you to keep your customers around.

Accrued Points For Consumer Convenience

You may have noticed that loyalty schemes are quite popular in places like supermarkets or clothing retail stores. The more you buy with them, the more you’ll add points to your overall score.

In a year’s time, they may be able to buy something quite significant for free, redeeming their points for the provision, a reward for their continual patronage.

Integrating a loyalty system as part of your own firm could be worth integrating. But how might this help in terms of convenience?

Well, it’s not uncommon for some people to spend all year buying groceries from a particular brand, and then getting most of their festive shopping for free at the end of the year because of it.

Perhaps buying a turkey for Christmas time without having to worry about buying it. If that’s not convenient, it’s hard to see what would be, and thanks to your efforts someone has been rewarded and appreciated in the long run.

It’s impressive to see just how valuable consumer convenience can be, and how people appreciate it.

With this advice, you’ll be able to ascertain the right investment in convenience for you – costing it as is suitable.

Your Turn On How Important Is Convenience To Consumers

What kind of consumer convenience do you offer from your small business? How important is convenience to consumers in your eyes?  I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.