MBA2139 How to Charge for a Service on Your Website

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Hey. Welcome to the $100 MBA show delivered daily every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zed Home. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company. I started my co founder back in 2014 and in today's episode you will learn how to charge for a service on your website. I get asked this question a lot and it's for good reason. Products and services and software to help you charge for your product is easily available online. There's a lot of different platforms you can use, but when it comes to services like let's say you're doing one on one coaching, or you're a developer or a website designer, or even doing a live event where they're not actually getting a physical or digital product in exchange, what do you use for that? There are a lot of tools built for e commerce for online courses and digital products like ebooks. But what if you're selling a service? What do you do? How do you integrate this to your website so that you can say hey buy my service. Your customer can click a button, enter their credit card, pay you and then you can get started on the work. In today's episode, I'm going to walk you through the steps, what to do and for each circumstance how to make it a seamless process on your website and make sure you get paid easily by your customers. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Thy ticket lady, Jennifer of Coolidge. Well, many thanks good sir.

Here is my Discover card. They accept Discover at Renaissance Fairs?

Yeah, they do. Here. Discover is accepted at the places I love to shop. Get it with the times.

With the times. You're playing the loot.

Yeah, and it sounds pretty good, right? Discover is accepted at 99% of places.

That take credit cards nationwide.

Based on the February 2025 Nielsen report. When it comes to charging for your service, there are a few things you want to make sure happens. One, you want to make it a seamless experience for the customer. Once you get a yes from the customer, whether they read your sales page and they want to get started, or you just got off a sales call and you sent them a link so they can buy your service, you want to make sure it's friction free so they could pay you immediately so you can get started on the work. So that's, number one, you want to make sure that it's easy for them to check out to put their credit card information. Whether they're on a desktop or a mobile device. It's secure and you get paid easily so it goes to your bank account in a reasonable amount of time. Number two, you want to make sure the system automatically sends them a receipt. You don't want to know how to deal with that. You want to make sure that the system actually sends them an email with a receipt of what they just bought so they can use that for their own purposes, whether it's to claim out of their taxes or anything else. And number three, you want to make sure that it's integrated with an email provider, an email marketing provider, I should say the email market provider that you use to communicate with your customers, whether that's Mailchimp or ConvertKit. We prefer ConvertKit and it's one of our recommended tools on our tools page on our website over@100mba.net tools. But the point is, is that you want to make sure that their email address, their name gets moved to your email marketing service so that you can nurture them, you can communicate with them. You have a way to go back and forth with them easily and include them in your regular updates and newsletters. This also allows you to add them to any automations you might have, email automations or sequences. So those are the three main things you need to do. Remember, with a service, you don't actually need to deliver anything at the point of sale, meaning a downloadable or a physical product. You don't even need a shipping address, right? So here is what I recommend. How you set this up. There's a few tools you can use, but depending on your needs, here are my recommendations. You basically need something called a shopping cart or a checkout process, right? This is a page where people can put their billing information, put their credit card information. It integrates with your payment processor. Your payment processor might be Stripe, it might be PayPal, Braintree. Whatever you use to process payment and Then they check out seamlessly with all the features I just mentioned before. Now if you don't have a payment processor yet, like you're just getting started, you don't have a Stripe account, you don't have PayPal, you don't have something else, I highly recommend you consider signing up for Stripe. It's absolutely free to sign up. You only get charged when it's time for you to charge a credit card. And it's very, very competitive rate. It's about $0.30 per transaction and 2.9% of the transaction amount. But if for any reason you don't want to go with that, you can go with an all in one kind of solution. They're going to charge you a higher rate and I don't recommend because these percentages for transactions, they add up. Especially with services where you're charging a high ticket amount for a lot of services, whether it's 3,000, 5,000, $10,000 at a time, $10,000 is like $300 per transaction plus the 30 cents. So that's at 3%. Now imagine they say 5%. Now you're talking about $500 every single time. So do the math. But if you want to go with an all in one, you can go with something like Fresh is like an invoicing solution where you can send them a link to pay for the invoice. But this is not really productizing your services. This is like you having a call with somebody, you create an invoice for them and you send them that link. I like to mention this option just in case that's how your business works. But I don't recommend it. I actually prefer you to have a checkout process with a shopping cart experience that's secure and you integrate that shopping cart with a payment processor like Stripe because you'll save money in the long run. Now how do I have this shopping cart experience? This shopping cart page or checkout page? Well, the first thing I would recommend is check your current website or hosting provider. They might already have this built in. If you're using a tool like Simvaly or Squarespace, or maybe your WordPress site has WooCommerce already set up. Just speak to the person that maintains your website or your hosting provider. Ask them, do you have a shopping cart feature? I want to sell my services on my site. You might already have it on your website may part of your website builder. So make sure you ask before you start buying things you don't need. Now if you don't, if you have a simple website that doesn't have this feature. That's okay. There are solutions and here are your solutions for shopping carts. One, you can go with a solution that's a one time fee or you can go with a solution that's an ongoing fee. Now you might be saying, well, why would I go with the one time fee? Well, because you're going to put more money up front. And with that option, I recommend Thrive Cart. It's a service that a lot of coaches and services use as their checkout page, as their, what's called a shopping cart. And it works with any website basically. And it gives you a chance for you to integrate your payment processor and accept payments for your services. It's about $500 for the basic version, it's about $700 for the Pro version, but again it's a one time fee. It's lifetime access. You pay once and you can use as much as you want. They don't take a fee for any of the transactions. So that's a really good, sensible long term option. The other option is going with something called SamCart. SamCart is a monthly fee or annual and it comes with a lot more than just the cart. They started out with just shopping carts, but now they have landing pages and all bells and whistles and it might be too much, might be more than you need. But if you want to try before you buy kind of situation and you want to, you know, get started at the bare minimum in terms of price, then samcart is an option. Now both these tools will allow you to integrate your payment processor will allow you to send a receipt and stripe will do this for you as well, your payment processor and it will allow you to integrate it with your email marketing provider. So it ticks all the boxes. Now because you're selling a service and that you're not delivering something at the time of purchase, it's your job to communicate with the customer after they buy that, hey, they are a customer now. So yes, they get a receipt, but also send an automated email via your email marketing software saying, hey, welcome to the team, welcome to this program, this service. This is what's going to happen, right? Here are the next steps. I'm going to work on your project in this way. This is the progress that's going to happen in the next few weeks. Reply to this email if you have any questions. You know, make sure that they feel like, hey, they didn't make a mistake, that you didn't just run with their money. Make sure they don't have buyer's remorse and just welcome them as a new client. That essentially is what they're getting at the time of purchase. Now there is a third option when it comes to selling your services that's all in one and easy to use and that's using ConvertKit's option where you could sell services. Using ConvertKit, yeah, I know their email marketing software, but they also do commerce. You can sell your services using their tool. I know this sounds like a plug for ConvertKit and yes, they're one of our recommended tools, but it's an option you should explore and I'll tell you why. There's no upfront costs, there's no monthly cost. Every customer, even free customers, can use the E commerce tool to sell their services. They have a free plan and you can use this tool even on the free plan. They do charge 5% per transaction I believe. So it's a little bit more than what you would get in Stripe, but it's an all in one solution that will allow you to sell your services. They'll create the page for you, everything and there's no out of pocket expense. So if you want to just get started without spending any money or investing in a software, then this is another option for you.

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Now to wrap up today's episode, I did mention earlier, what if you're running an event like a meetup or maybe you're running a conference. Many people go down the route of using Eventbrite and Eventbrite's a great tool for this purpose and they have a whole ticketing service and everything. But they're expensive. They do have the option where you can pass on the fees that they would charge you to the customer, but that just marks up your prices and honestly it's a little confusing for the customer that is. Why are they paying these fees? Personally, I think it's okay if you're running a small event, small ticket price, or a free event even because it doesn't charge you anything. Eventbrite doesn't charge you anything if it's a free event. But if you're running, you know, an event that's $25 $50 a ticket, it's probably the least headaches out of all of it because you could do it all one shot in one place. But if you're running an annual event that you're going to charge, you know, 500, 1,000, 2,000, $10,000 a ticket, maybe a retreat. It's better for you to use the same options I shared with you today. You're going to save money in the long run. As long as your confirmation email says, hey, this is a confirmation email that you are now a customer that you bought a as long as your confirmation email says, hey, this is a ticket, just say, hey, you just bought entry to this event and you can always cross reference your guest list with your receipts. You don't need to overcomplicate things. And this is what I'm doing with oscon, our retreat for founders here in Australia. Anytime you need to do something in your business that's as critical as accepting payment, a checkout process for your customers. Think what is the simplest way to do this? Because if it's simple, it's going to be easy to understand. It's going to be friction free. Easy on me, easy on the customers. Thanks so much for listening to the hundred dollar NBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe so you don't miss an episode and you get access to over 2100 episodes in our archives when you subscribe. So hit subscribe or on your favorite podcast app. We're on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio. We're on a mole. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I'm a big believer in making your checkout process fast and easy. Only ask for the information you absolutely need. Make it one page. I'm not a big lover of the two step process checkout system. If there's information that you'd like to have later on, collect it later after they buy like with an intake form, a Google form, but get them checking out quickly. If somebody goes to the checkout page and sees they got a multi step process to get on the other side of this checkout process to buy to confirm their decision, they're going to put it off versus they go to a page. There's only a few fields they have to fill out. It's simple, it's easy. This encourages them to check out quickly. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in. Tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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