Don’t ask for my credit card number for a free trial

Posted by James Beattie - under News 4 Comments

Offering a free, limited time trial for a software product or online service is not a new trend, however a recent development is vendors requesting credit card details before access to the trial is possible.

I recently decided to check out Audible, a service that supplies audio books for portable audio devices. They are a regular advertiser on my favourite podcast, Security Now,  so after hearing a recent offer on this podcast for a free Audio Book, I decided to give it a go.

The initial free trial page is friendly and attractive, and simply asks for your name, email address and country:

This is all fair enough, so I entered my details and then I was presented with this page:

As you will notice, there is a payment section here requiring my credit card number to continue with the free trial. You may also notice the small link just above the credit card payment form titled “Why do you need my credit card information for a free trial?”. Clicking on this link presents the following pitch:

Our free trial offer is valid to customers new to Audible. Entering your credit card ensures that your AudibleListener® membership service will continue uninterrupted. In addition, it helps prevent abuse of our special offers. Cancel your trial within the trial period and your card will not be charged.

I have a problem with providing my credit card details for the following reasons:

Internet Security

I never give out my credit card online without a very good reason. In this age of internet fraud and identity theft any provision of my credit card to an online provider is made with due dilligence. A provider has to earn my trust first.

I am not willing to provide my credit card to get access to a trial version of a service that I may or may not choose to continue after the trial.

If a vendor has confidence in their offerings, they should not need this reassurance upfront. I also don’t like vendors storing my credit card details at all I would prefer to manually enter them at the time of payment and not have any online systems keeping a record of them in some possibly vulnerable database.

I am forgetful

I may sign up for trial version now and then forget to cancel it, even though I have no intention of using the service. With some vendors, if you do not cancel it before the trial verison is over, you suddenly start getting charged for the service you are not using. I think this is the real reason these vendors want your credit card upfront - because it gives them the ability to start billing you the moment they can. (I don’t know whether Audible is one of these services, as I did not proceed with the trial verison specifically because of this matter).

I think this a fundamentally unethical approach to earning revenue and I would encourage vendors not to ask me for my credit card number at the start of a “free” trial. I would even go further and encourage vendors not to store customer credit card data at all - there are other approaches that do not risk your customers credit card data.

What is Rupert Murdoch up to?

Posted by Ken Davis - under News 2 Comments

Over the past week there has been a bit of buzz online about Rupert Murdoch’s plans for the future of News Limited’s websites. In a recent interview with Sky News, Rupert said he was thinking about removing his websites from Google and placing his news articles behind a paywall, available only to subscribers of his websites.
…Read more after the jump »

The Satisfaction of Leaving

Posted by Ken Davis - under Jimmyweb No Comments

Ok, so I might be drawing a long bow to say that this post has anything to do with web design and development, but bear with me.

I’ve been banking with the same regular, normal bank since I was a child. There’s never been any real  incentive to change banks, no matter how frustrating the bank behaves, because, well basically, you still end up using another bank. Its kind of like voting. It doesn’t matter who you vote for, you still end up with a politician! In this case, it doesn’t matter who you bank with, you still end up having to deal with a bank.

Well that’s all changed.

…Read more after the jump »

Beyond the web - Real world analytics

Posted by Ken Davis - under News No Comments

Anyone who has used Google Analytics knows just how awesome and useful the software can be.  Anonymously tracking users to your website, gathering data on site usage, discovering traffic trends, Google Analytics is a wonderful tool for any business on the web.

After doing some Analytics work for a website today, I started thinking about how brilliant it would be if businesses could use the same data in the real world. Some kind of geo-tracking analytics that could give real-time, real world feedback to businesses.

Could this be the future?

…Read more after the jump »

10 tips for businesses starting out with Twitter

Posted by Ken Davis - under Writing 3 Comments

There’s been a lot of buzz about Twitter recently in the media, so its natural to want to know what all the fuss is about, and learn more about how Twitter might benefit you, both personally and in business.

I thought it might be a good idea, to put together a quick beginners guide to Twitter for our clients, and a list of my top 10 tips for using Twitter in business, to help you understand the basics of Twitter, and how you can use Twitter to help your business.

So what is Twitter?

Twitter is a social communication network that asks the question: “What are you doing now?” Users can answer via the Twitter website, sms, mobile phone application or a desktop application. Twitter updates (commonly referred to as ‘tweets’) have to be under 140 characters in length.

Its natural to think that you couldn’t possibly say anything meaningful in 140 characters, but the quality of communication is actually quite surprising, once you become familiar with using Twitter. Unlike writing a blog, Twitter is a great place to tell the world what you’re thinking before you’ve had a chance to even think about it.
…Read more after the jump »

Agile Design - Quickly moving from Photoshop to CSS

Posted by Ken Davis - under Design 1 Comment

I recently read a post over at 37 signals about why the designers there skip Photoshop in the design process and I found myself agreeing with most of the conversation. There are some good reasons for designing this way, along with some good counterpoints.

The Photoshop mockup just isn’t a website.

A while back I used to always fully develop a design in Photoshop, with all the polish and finesse that could possibly fit into a flat two dimensional image and present the design to the client for approval.

This worked reasonably well when the only real interaction was the click of a hyperlink or perhaps a drop down menu. You could explain the functionality, describe the interaction and hope the client had the imagination to perceive the concept clearly enough to approve it.

…Read more after the jump »

Use a web-designer, not a print-designer to design your website

Posted by James Beattie - under News 2 Comments

Many traditional advertising agencies are, by neccessity, now moving into the web design and web development space. This makes perfect business sense considering the large amount of money which is being refunneled from traditional advertising methods into online advertising and marketing.

An unfortunate side-effect of this is that graphic designers with a background in print are now passing themselves off as web-designers without doing the requisite study/training/self-education to move to the new medium. The problem with many print designers is they do not understand the intricacies of working within web browsers. They are used to their design being exactly represented when it comes out of the printing press.

…Read more after the jump »

Symfony Tip: Admin Generator + sfGuardPlugin + SfGuard Profile

Posted by James Beattie - under News 1 Comment

If you get the error “Call to undefined method BasesfGuardUser::addsfGuardUserProfile” when using a custom sfGuardUser profile, you need to add the following method to the file /plugins/sfGuardPlugin/lib/model/sfGuardUser.php

  public function addsfGuardUserProfile()
  {
    if(!$profile = $this->getProfile())
    {
      $profile = new sfGuardUserProfile;
      $profile->setUserId($this->getId());
    }
    return $profile;
  }

I know it sucks to hack a core plugin file, but sometimes we must pragmatic!

Symfony Tip: Propel pager with group-by returns incorrect total

Posted by James Beattie - under Developer 2 Comments

A quick tip for those getting incorrect record totals (and thus broken paging) when using the propel pager in Symfony:

Add the following method to your pager object:

$pager->setPeerCountMethod('getGroupedCount');

Then create the following method in your peer class:

    public static function getGroupedCount($c)
    {
        $copy = clone $c;
        // this should be the intended grouping column
        $copy->addGroupByColumn(parent::ID);
        return parent::doCount($copy);
    }

Your pager will now work the way you want it to!

Managing your personal online reputation

Posted by James Beattie - under Writing 1 Comment

We recently recommended to a client that they set up a page on their website promoting themselves (and optimised for their name) so that people searching for them in Google would get this page as (hopefully) the first result.

The client expressed some concerns about putting themselves out on the web as a personal brand, and we thought some of the issues that were brought up were worth a mention here.

…Read more after the jump »