Introduction

If you skim through any products or services on a website, you’ll probably notice some familiar phrases like ‘risk free trial’ ‘double your money back’, ‘order now and decide later’, or ‘money back guarantee’. This has become a frequent tool and feature in most business to secure the confidence of visitors and prospects. It is as a form of free trial and helps to reinforce mindset, believability and credibility of the product. The money-back-guarantee feature has become a standard idea of trustworthiness for many.

Types of trial

Considering in the context of web hosting, there are generally two types of ‘trial’ that are given to the prospect – X –days guarantee and X-days for trial (usually for 30 days and 7 days standard) Most visitors do feel more convinced to see either of these to appear in a product that they’re in, because the product conveys confidence. But when talking about web hosting, the two trials might be different in expectation.

The ‘7 days trial’ for web hosting usually uses a test server to host a site. This also means different performance compare to the actual server that will be used to host your site after seven days of trial. After the trial period, all files on the test server will be transfer to a different server environment where other factors of server capacity and speed may not be what you are experiencing from a trial server.

Thus the performance of your website may differ greatly. An experience from a trial server may not be a realistic expectation after the trial period. On the other hand, the money back guarantee gives a more realistic expectation from the actual experience of trial. It also does not require the transfer of files after the end of a trial period. You can apply other products and services similarly in web hosting.

Conclusion

If you’re considering to use a trial for your products to boost the confidence of your visitors, you might want to think about the conditions for the procedure if they choose not to proceed with buying or request for their money back. Lets take the money guarantee back for example. The procedure to get their money back will also determine if the customer will trust this feature or not. The procedure should not be too long. But more importantly, it should look genuine.