Originally Posted by pompousjohn

I am not sure what all the various reasons are, but you can find a lot of people who will confirm for you that $5 seems to be the minimum for reasonable conversions.

I have spent way more time than is probably healthy obsessing over prepaid cards, and I find it's not the card being prepaid or not that makes the difference, it's the credit rating and income level of the customer. There's just a lot of irresponsible or unlucky people out there that seem to be on their last couple bucks of credit card or bank balance for whatever reason.

I recently did an experiment with 1.95 trials. It was the second one I've tried. The first time around I lost a lot of money, conversions were deplorable (under 20%) but that was a few years ago with a different affiliate team and this time it was a custom program that we put together with an affiliate who had good enough volume and a solid track record who specifically wanted the lowest $ trial offer we could do. For this affiliate we were competing with another program who has a $0 trial with a 29.95 cross sale in fine print. I don't do crosses of any kind, not that I am too ethical for that or anything, I just feel that keeping the card associations happy is complicated enough without playing games like that.

Anyway at 1.95 conversions hovered around 25% for 3 months, this is at a volume of ~100 joins/wk. 3 months is long enough to see that it wasn't going to work, obviously, I was pretty sure after 1 month but needed to convince my 100 joins/wk affiliate I was giving it every chance.

I raised the trial price to 4.95 and conversions rocketed to 55%, though we did see a 20-25% drop in overall volume, it seems pretty clear that the sales we didn't get were the ones that were never going to convert anyway. So that little increase in trial price turned an unprofitable 100 sales a week affiliate into a profitable 75 sales a week affiliate.

I also heard they are still promoting the competing $0 offer but are getting a lot of complaints from that program regarding poor conversions.

So to make a long story short, (even though it's a little late for that now) I don't know the exact reasons but I can make some well educated guesses, however it remains clear to me at least that $5 trials are the lowest amount that is viable for PPS programs without shady x-sells.