Making sure it works

PayPerPost have just launched a new additional to their blogger tools called PPP Direct. It’s a great new feature that lets bloggers capitalise on their blog audience to try and attract direct payment for posts. It involves putting a badge up on your blog (like the one I have on the right) where a visitor can click and ask the blogger to write up about anything they would like. So, when I saw that a fellow blogger would do a review for $1, I thought I’d test it out just to see how it works from a publisher’s perspective. What I got was this:

Basically, I keyed in the minimum offer amount needed for the blog post ($1.00) and got an error message telling me I hadn’t specified an offer amount. I tried again, putting “1” instead of “1.00” (maybe the decimal point was throwing it off), but still no luck. And if I had been a real customer, that would have been the end of it. System doesn’t work, not interested!

As a customer, I’m not interested in finding out why something doesn’t work. The error could have been something trivial, and I probably could bypass it by turning Javascript off, but the bottom line is, customers won’t spend time helping you solve a problem. It either works or it doesn’t. I understand that this release has gone through a number of test iterations and quality checks, which is commendable, however, my experience was a negative one and negative experiences have a more lasting impression than positive ones. It’s all about perception at the end of day!

Has anyone else out there tried PPP Direct? Have you had any luck with it?