The sales page, checkout and delivery
Two things stand between interest and money. The first gets all the attention and the second quietly costs more sales.
Two things stand between interest and money: a page that explains what this is, and a checkout that does not lose people. The first gets all the attention and the second quietly costs more sales.
The page
A sales page for a digital product has one job: make a stranger confident enough to pay for something they cannot hold or try. Confidence comes from specificity, not from enthusiasm.
- Say what it is and who it is for, in the first screen. Not a story, not a question, not a promise with no noun in it.
- Show it. Screenshots, a sample page, a short walkthrough, the table of contents. Buyers of invisible things need to see something.
- Say what the outcome is, concretely enough to be falsifiable. "A finished pricing sheet for your own services" beats "confidence in your pricing".
- Answer the objections in order. Is this for me, will it work for my situation, how long will it take, what if it does not help.
- Price, plainly, with what is included. Hiding the price for a product with no sales process reads as a trap.
- One action. Every extra button costs you buyers.
The first screen, written out
Most pages fail in the first two hundred pixels, so it is worth being concrete about what belongs there. Four elements, no more.
- A line that names the thing and the buyer: a pricing sheet for freelancers who keep quoting too low.
- A line that names the outcome: finish it in an evening and send it to your next client.
- Something visible: the actual template, a page of it, a photograph of the finished sheet.
- The price and one button. Not three buttons, not a form, not a video that has to be watched first.
What does not belong there: your story, a question aimed at the reader, the words imagine if, a countdown, or any sentence a competitor could put on their own page unchanged.
Objections, in their order
Objections arrive in a reliable sequence, and answering them out of order reads as evasion. The sequence and what answers each.
- Is this for me. Answered by naming the buyer narrowly, and by naming who it is not for. Saying this is not for agencies or anyone charging day rates makes the rest believable.
- Will it work for my situation. Answered by a worked example in their situation, not by a reassurance.
- How long will it take. Answered with a number: an evening, two hours, a week of twenty minutes. Vagueness here is read as a lot.
- What if it does not help. Answered by the refund line, stated where they can see it while deciding, in plain words rather than policy language.
Checkout
This is where decided buyers disappear, and the causes are boring and fixable.
- Too many steps. Every field is a chance to reconsider. Email and payment is enough for a file.
- No account should be required to buy a document. Forcing a password on someone who wants a PDF loses sales for nothing.
- Surprise at the last screen. Tax appearing at the end reads as a trick even when it is not. Say what will be charged before the card comes out.
- A payment method they do not use. Check what your buyers actually pay with, particularly outside your own country.
- A page that does not work on a phone. Most of the traffic, frequently the worst checkout.
Delivery
Delivery should be instant and should not depend on you being awake. Automatic, on payment, with the file or the access arriving immediately and a receipt that says what they bought.
- Send access even if the email bounces into spam: show it on the confirmation screen as well.
- Make the link re-sendable without a conversation. Lost access is the most common support request there is.
- Say in the receipt how to get help, so the first problem does not become a refund request.
- Test it by buying your own product, with a real card, on a phone, before you tell anybody it exists.
That last line is a procedure, not a gesture. Buy it on a phone, on mobile data rather than your own network, with a card that is not the one connected to the account. Then check the receipt arrives, the file opens on the phone, the confirmation screen shows the access as well as the email, and the help address in the receipt is one you actually read. Most failures are in that list and all of them are invisible from the editor.
Work to do
- Rewrite your first screen as the four elements above and delete whatever is left over.
- Put the four objections in order on the page, with the refund line visible at the point of payment.
- Buy your own product end to end, on a phone, and write down every point where you hesitated.
- Count the fields in your checkout and remove every one you do not need to deliver the thing.