I just finished cleaning out my email inbox full of one product launch after another.

It seems marketers have went Product Launch Mad!

Now, don’t get me wrong – I love seeing and participating in some of the Product Launches.  And it’s really cool to see a launch pull together like a work of art.

I’ve seen some launches that turned into dismal failures while others are planned out and executed almost perfectly without a hitch.

Anyway, this post is to raise a question on the effectiveness of using payment plans during a launch.

For that matter, just using payment plans in general.

I know as a marketer that lowering the level of resistance and making it easier in the form of price, sales will increase.

There’s no doubt about it.

However, exactly what type of client are you getting when offering a payment plan?

Here’s why I’ve pondered this question for the last month…

I recently participated in a product launch in a completely different niche (totally unrelated to marketing).

Anyway, I sold a grand total of a little over $28K.

Not bad – but not so fast…

The price point was around $2K with upsells.  Anyway, I receive the initial check along with the breakdown of my sales.

Out of 11 sales, 6 orders were using the payment plan.  So, I had roughly $13K in orders that were paid in full and approximately $15K in orders from future payments.

Now, I don’t mind waiting on the future payments, but after a couple of months I began to question if I’d even see any of this money…

Two months rock on and I receive my 2nd payment which was only a fraction of what I thought it should be based on the number of sales, so I put a call in and discovered that 5 out of 6 buyers on the eay pay schedule had refunded!

Not one person refunded that paid in full up front.

So… I decided to do a little research of my own.

I pulled my orders for my own products, pulled the refund request and began analyzing where most problem customers come from and realized that much of my headaches came from those that bought during a sale or with easy pay options where I divided up the investment.

I had always thought it, but after running some numbers I knew it..

And the good ‘ole 80/20 rule was dead on.

So.. before you jump the gun on offering a payment plan – you gotta ask yourself – “Is it really worth it?”

I’d love to hear your comments below…