If PayPal knows you have used PayPal this is what your checkout screen looks like:

PayPal knows you have an account or have used their service before.  They don’t even give you the option to pay with a credit card.  They will make way more money if you pay with PayPal.

This is what PayPal looks like if you don’t have a PayPal cookie on your computer:

Notice how they offer you to enter in a credit card this time.  They know you aren’t familiar with PayPal   and logging into PayPal is a major drag.  This way they can grab the sale as soon as possible.  (Although the next step after entering your billing information they will ask you to open a PayPal account).

I got some advice from my good friend George Mosher the other day.  It should have been obvious to me but it wasn’t.  He said “Your best customers are the ones you have already sold to.”  You see this a lot in all sorts of businesses.  For example GoDaddy sends me coupons every 3-6 months to buy another domain.

Ikea sends catalogs.  Yahoo sends postcards reminding you to use their advertising program.  All 3 of these companies know that it is easier to convince an existing customer than find and convince a new customer.

Another cool thing that GoDaddy does is they constantly up sell you.  Here are the things they have tried to up sell me:
– 2 years of hosting (instead of month to month), if I say no to 2 years they say “how about 1 year”, if I say no to 1 year they say “how about 6 month”
– Purchase 10 years of domain ownership all at once
– SSL certificates

The lesson I learned from George was this: Don’t ever give up on customers you have already sold to.  Email/Mail/Call them every 3-6 months with some sort of offerring or a friendly hello.

• Offer Phone Support
• Design their store for them
• Offer in person setup