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How Packaging Your Product Can Affect Your Sales (& Refunds)

By Tim Gross - Internet Business Blog | April 29, 2008

A few years ago I was at a business seminar and one of the presenters (who sold an expensive home-study course) was bragging about how he stuffed all of his product’s components into an intricately packaged pseudo-box which basically exploded when the recipient opened it.

The reason? -To make it harder for customers to return the product for a refund, because the box self-destructed making it harder to repackage, and it was easy to lose individual pieces of the product (which would then make you ineligible for a refund).

Compare that with…

John Reese is getting ready to release a new version of his Traffic Secrets home-study course, and he put out what he’s calling a “spy photo” of the product box.

Just the box. -Because one of his selling points is that it’s a large, good-looking case that will hold everything in the package for the customer’s convenience (based on customer feedback he got from selling his original version).

It’s interesting that going to opposite extremes can both serve a marketing purpose when it comes to selling products:

  1. Create purposefully crummy packaging to make it hard for the customer to return the product by causing him extra trouble
  2. Create an extra-functional storage case and turn it into an actual selling feature

One hurts the customer, the other helps the customer, and in theory they could both make you more money… at least in initial sales.

…But when it comes to building lifetime value of a customer and building success in the long run, I’m putting my money on the better case.

I’d rather create more value than play a game of “gotcha”. :-)

-Tim

PS - I just removed all 6+ hours of free video over on InternetMarketingCourse.com, I figured, hey, enough is enough, right?

Gotcha! I’m just kidding, they’re still there… see, that gotcha game is no fun at all, heh.

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One Response to “How Packaging Your Product Can Affect Your Sales (& Refunds)”

  1. Alex Argrow Says:
    April 30th, 2008 at 7:56 am

    “one of his selling points is that it’s a large, good-looking case” :O)

    Very interesting stuff Tim.
    Will be glad to visit you more.

    Alex.

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