First of all, I would like to completely commend you for your absolutely wonderful web application. I can’t explain how much time you have saved me and my company. I was able to shift two of my Creative Engineers (AKA designers) over from just processing paperwork and payments to doing what they are actually paid to do.

We’re a small, but charming web design firm based in Indianapolis, Indiana and have searched the internet far and wide for an option to accept payment over the internet. We resorted to PayPal Invoicing (which is horrid, believe you me!) and quickly started our own “cart” system, called Cocoa Pay. The reason it was called Cocoa was because it was sort of built in C (ridiculous, eh?).

Long story short, I found Olive today when I was browsing the internet and immediately fell in love. I posted a praise comment on Get Satisfaction about it, but honestly, words can’t even describe how amazed we are. We’re testing it right now to see if we need to bring it online full time, but you’re allowing us to offer something new to our customers just by using Olive.

For our new customers who ask for a dSMART Account (our Olive brand), we’re taking development costs down from $375 an hour to $100 an hour because it saves us so much time and money.

Anyway, I’m thankful for your web app and I hope that you develop a lot more in the future. (P.S.: We’re having an executive meeting today about Olive to upgrade to the highest level, so we may be on your doorstep sooner than you think! — Oh and we’re promoting it on our website for you. I’ve told all of my freelance friends… hopefully it’ll get you some more users!)

Andy Markle-Desjardins, a loyal fan of Olive

It’s all about that first run experience, and leading them through that process, putting the emphasis on how it will improve their business.

When you first sign in to Olive there is a great opening video, but then quite a lot of steps and detail to follow and understand. Perhaps remove that and focus on the first actual step they can take to get started. Their next action. I would suggest that they don’t need to yet worry about credit values, changing the colours and so on. That can come afterwards. Hold their hand through those first steps one by one, and always emphasise how it will benefit them.

I’d also suggest making it easy to contact you – and from people’s enquiries you then know where they’re getting stuck. Fit it for the person who enquires, then go back to the app and see how you can solve that for everyone else too.

You could also run something like Clicktale (http://www.clicktale.com/) to get more of a sense of how people are interacting with the app.

I hope some of this is helpful, best of luck with Olive!

I couldn’t find the original page but I think 37Signals once revealed what proportion of their users were free and which ones were paying. The number of free users was a massive percentage, I seem to remember their free->paid conversion rate being less than 1%. It would make sense that the proportion of users who sign up “just to see” would be a large proportion of those free users, meaning that sadly the majority of your sign ups will go no-where and add nothing. That’s just the way it is, better to focus on the 1% you can help.

The key thing is to make sure you convert the people who do stick at it into sales. I watched a video seminar by David Heinemeier Hansson recently where he mentioned that a sign-up-to-sales ratio of 5% or more is really good.

We’ve been hitting 20% but as you mention in your article, getting people onto the site in first place is the tricky bit.

Sounds like you’re doing a great job though. Good luck.

We’re a video for eBay site and a fair few people sign up but don’t even upload a video. We’ve found though that our ration of people who sign in and do nothing and people who sign in and upload a video but don’t put it in to eBay are pretty solid. No change month after month no matter what we do.

I think their is just a fair baseline of this activity. Monitor it and track it, but don’t stress about it.