Renting the card

I had this one wrong for years, and the chart agreed with me the whole time.

Cash on delivery is expensive to run. Drivers carrying change, boxes refused at the door, money that takes a week to reconcile. So I did what the playbook says and put a small discount on prepayment, three per cent for paying by card, on the checkout page and again in the confirmation message.

Prepaid share went up. It kept going up for months, and I read it as the business earning something. Somebody who pays before the box arrives has decided to believe you, and here were more of them every month.

Then the discount came off, because three per cent of every prepaid order is a real line in the accounts and somebody eventually looks at it. The share fell back. Not instantly and not the whole way, but far enough that the story I had been telling about trust was no longer available to me.

What I had built was not trust. It was a monthly payment for a behaviour that trust produces at no cost. The people who moved for three per cent moved back for three per cent, which is the only honest thing to say about them.

The same arithmetic sits under most of the numbers a team is proud of. The review left for a voucher. The install bought with a first-order code. The subscription that needed a discount to start and cancels in the month the discount ends. All real, all reported, none of them owned.

You cannot buy trust. You can rent the behaviour trust would have produced, and the rent falls due again every month.