Yesterday I received a call from Matt, he’s the marketing director with Trialpay. Coincidentally I had just come across Trialpay about 5 days earlier when I went to purchase Linkman, a software for bookmarking websites that I use.

TrialPay works by offering customers an alternative to paying for your product directly. Instead, customers can register for one of many different offers that Trialpay has and then get your software product for free. Trialpay works with many large companies (Ebay, Gap, McAfee) and offers include various credit cards, music downloads, movie rentals, etc. When the customer signs up for an offer, let’s say they decide to join BlockBuster movie rental service, you get paid an amount from BlockBuster, and in turn the customer gets to download your product.

It’s actually pretty ingenious if you think about it. It’s like letting your customer pay for your product by buying something else through an affiliate link that pays you a commission. It’s a win-win, you get paid, and the customer gets more bang for their buck.

Trialpay has a case study on their site with the company Lavasoft (makers of Ad-Aware). Using TrialPay they made an additional 5000 sales a month!

I’m not going to go in-depth about all the ins and outs of TrialPay, but the amount you make as a vendor varies depending on the offer, and you can offer two options to your customers; Trialpay and your own merchant, and you can still do affiliate tracking if you want.

Matt did mention that this service works best for products that are under or around $50, and you need to have a digital product, software is ideal, and any kind of trialware is perfect for this service.

I’m currently working on a software program and will definitely be testing this one out.