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Cards Against Humanity: Results of "pay what you want"

cardsagainsthumanity.com

111–120 of 168 posts

Re: Cards Against Humanity: Results of "pay what you want"

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're doing something you really love, money is just a side effect.

Loving what you do never bought groceries. So the actual answer has to be 'I have enough money from other sources to live on'.

The money spent on essentials may also be essential, but things can both be essential and the side effects of processes which have some other primary intent.

Re: Cards Against Humanity: Results of "pay what you want"

#112
post #8

I wonder what the effect would be if you'd simply state the production cost per unit on the ordering page, while still allowing people to pay zero $.

They did, several times (breaking it down in to the $1 for production and $2 for processing/shipping like on that page). They also suggested $5 as a fair price, and pointed out that it cost them $3 to make the set one last time on a nag screen if you tried to pay $0 (fun fact: the site wouldn't let you donate anything greater than 0 but under fifty cents, since they would lose money on credit card fees).

Beats me why someone would not pay anything except for those people who really really really have no money at all. Like... none. Everybody else... shame on you!

Re: Cards Against Humanity: Results of "pay what you want"

#113
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I considered having it show various different values at random to do testing on the payments received when users are presented with them, but honestly there just wasn't enough data to pull that off and make it worthwhile. I think my total sales were <40 (downloads were in the tens of thousands, IIRC).

I would be interested to see data from the Humble Bundles on pay-what-you-want pricing. They seem to have done things over the past few sales that have resulted in higher averages.

The biggest thing is that many of the products are not unlockable unless you pay over the average, so the average is always trending slightly up more than other pay-what-you-want models. High incentive to fork over a few more dollars.

Re: Cards Against Humanity: Results of "pay what you want"

#114
post #15

I ordered this pack and paid the default $5 by mistake (with a bit of laziness), and would bet quite a few others had the same experience. When ordering, you had to enter your amount before adding it to the cart, with $5 as the default. There wasn't an option to change it later that I could find. By the time I realized it couldn't be changed, I was through most of the ordering process and didn't feel like starting ov…

Developer for the site here. We definitely talked about this in the post mortem. Do you have any specific changes that you would have made to make the process more clear?

Separate shipping and billing addresses. My fiancee ordered a pack for $5, put in her credit card number, and put the address of the person she was buying it for in the shipping address slot. Then she realized there had been no place to put the billing address.

Long story short, the credit card charge went through, the package did not get shipped, and she's in the middle of resolving the situation via email with somebody at CaH, hoping her giftee gets their gift.

Re: Cards Against Humanity: Results of "pay what you want"

#116

It seems like one takeaway is that a significant portion of people will just pay the default as stated, even if given a choice. I think people just have a hard time deciding what something is actually worth, so they'll take whatever advice is given. So, when pricing your products, if you're wondering if you should charge more, the default answer should be "Yes"

There is actually a well-documented psychological phenomenon known as "anchoring," which is to say, people will be subconsciously influenced by the number they first see.

Car dealerships do this all the time with the MSRP numbers they put on their vehicles (which are, typically speaking, wildly inflated from their cost basis). Seasoned negotiators do this, as well -- anchoring either high or low, depending on their objectives.

I would be willing to bet that an A/B test of a higher suggested price and a lower suggested price would yield better returns from the higher suggested price.

Anchoring is especially effective in cases where people have no real sense of the intrinsic value of something. For instance, if I offered someone a bar of palladium, they'd generally have no freaking clue what they should pay. I could tell them $2000, or I could tell them $200,000. The $200,000 offer might not actually get any takers at $200,000. But it would generate a much higher negotiated price than the $2000 offer would, because people would mentally start at $200,000, and then try to work down from it.

Re: Cards Against Humanity: Results of "pay what you want"

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loving what you do never bought groceries. So the actual answer has to be 'I have enough money from other sources to live on'.

The money spent on essentials may also be essential, but things can both be essential and the side effects of processes which have some other primary intent.

Doing something for free doesn't get you any cash as a side effect.

Re: Cards Against Humanity: Results of "pay what you want"

#119
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, a couple months back I released a WebGL Enabler for iOS with a pay-what-you-want model: http://demoseen.com/webglenabler/ I keep meaning to write a blog post about the results, but ~99.5% of people paid $0. Of the people who paid, probably around 50% paid the $1.99 I had as default, but what's really interesting to me is the way people priced it if they changed the value. I got a number of payments for amounts li…

I can imagine more people might have paid if you made the default $3.99. $1.99 is practically zero, so people may consider it less of a difference.

Even if it increased the number of people paying the original listed price ($3.99) in this case to slightly >70% they would still gain less money than $5 and it would not have seemed as clean. In either case, I find it more interesting that so many people would pay money when they are not required.

Apparently even people "against humanity" still have a sense of justice.

Re: Cards Against Humanity: Results of "pay what you want"

#120
post #81
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, a couple months back I released a WebGL Enabler for iOS with a pay-what-you-want model: http://demoseen.com/webglenabler/ I keep meaning to write a blog post about the results, but ~99.5% of people paid $0. Of the people who paid, probably around 50% paid the $1.99 I had as default, but what's really interesting to me is the way people priced it if they changed the value. I got a number of payments for amounts li…

aren't a lot of people who have jail-broken iOs devices, already by definition people who want paid apps for free? I'm an Android guy myself so I might be wrong here (and your app is an example of non pirate usage for jail-breaking), but I often hear young relatives talking about jail-breaking their iPhones to save those $1-2 on apps, which to be honest, is pretty shitty behavior IMHO (yeah, I lecture them, they look…

>aren't a lot of people who have jail-broken iOs devices, already by definition people who want paid apps for free?

Careful not to fall into the trap of conflating jailbreaking with piracy. There are many, many good reasons to JB not even counting apps that end in -ous. Google voice and SMS extensions, f.lux, theming support, wifi tethering, and a great deal more low level customization than Apple gives you.

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