A few months ago, I decided to offer multi-month payment plans for a few of my products. The program seemed to be a success as a few sales came on in the plans. But since then, a few customers have, without a word to me, canceled the remaining payments.

In PayPal's system, the customer is free to cancel recurring payments at any time, so the system is probably better suited to handle subscriptions than deferred payment plans. If the payments were for subscriptions, I could simply cancel their account when they canceled their payments. As it is, my options are limited.

I suppose some people may mistakenly think that the recurring payments are for a subscription, and simply think they're unsubscribing. I could contact the customers to see if that's what they thought, and try to get the rest of the payments out of them, but I think the sale page was pretty clear, so it hardly seems worth the trouble.

Here's what I've done instead:

1) I've removed anyone who cancels before paying in full from the mailing list for updates and bug fixes.

2) I've adjusted my payment plans so that more of the total is paid up front in the first payment.

Other options include:

3) Space out the delivery of bonus products so that they won't receive all of the bonuses unless they let the payments run their course (I got this idea from a caller into Russell Brunson's* affiliate manager Brent Coppieters' affiliate training call yesterday -- clever!)

4) Send a few strategically timed emails to new customers to remind them that the upcoming payment is part of the payment plan.

5) Build a better relationship with the customer so that they won't feel as inclined to rip me off cancel their payments.