Ha. Funny that this showed up here. But, after all, it was a hack-ish experiment...
So far, 24 invitations have been purchased. Which is amazing, considering that I just put the form up there as an experiment (and a joke) to test a new client-side javascript payments thingy.
Turns out, apparently, that people are willing to pay for things!
I'm not sure if I'm in the minority or not (probably) but my philosophy behind paying for one of the invites isn't so much that I felt like I was getting an "honest to goodness" $10 worth of product or direct benefit out of it.
I paid the money because I really like your work, I loved the visual style you had going and how smooth it seemed to be, and I figured if I could help in someway to keep you being able to be doing what you're doing and making more awesome things, then it's worth it: a more tangible "like" button or a concrete confirmation that you're doing something right. It's the same reason why I'm a subscriber to Marco's fantastic Instapaper.
if you want to test willingness to pay you should try to recreate real conditions as much as possible to get usable test results. You would probably get a much better response if:
1) the page had SSL
2) you show what cards you accept (i.e. logos)
3) you require the buyer's name (sounds suspicious to not require it)
4) you show a paypal button as an alternative option*
It sounds like you're just doing an MVC for payments to see if people would pay. If you're pleased with the MVC conversion rate now, I bet you'd be ecstatic if you implemented the above. I wouldn't be surprised to see a 5~10% uptick in conversion.
*anecdotally speaking, I would have totally clicked through if you had a paypal button.
dcurtis > yeah I figured the ajax post operation would be over HTTPS, but still - a user would want to see the little padlock sign on the browser regardless :)
the illusion of security is just as important as actual security!
do you think #1, #2 and #3 would really make a difference? I would have thought most users (including me) when it comes to payment are simply thinking "blah blah blah take my money"
You might want to provide a non-javascript page/text for those hitting the home page. I went to it and it's pretty much a blank page. I'm not willing to enable javascript for a site I don't know a single thing about.
Will, you haven't accomplished much in life other than speak your first sentence, hit puberty and apparently make comments on Hacker News. I'm hopeful now that I see you have the rest of your life planned out for you though. About that heart attack, there is plenty of time for us to find a cure for that. You might want to add that to your timeline.
So far, 24 invitations have been purchased. Which is amazing, considering that I just put the form up there as an experiment (and a joke) to test a new client-side javascript payments thingy.
Turns out, apparently, that people are willing to pay for things!