Testing is something that many marketers are happily ignorant about or completely ignore, but is absolutely vital, particularly in a product launch.
If you do not test your end to end sales process you are potentially setting yourself up for a major disaster on your launch date.
The idea behind testing is to ensure that everything is working perfectly including:
- Downloads
- Webpage
- Purchase buttons
- Autoresponder subscriptions
- Autoresponder sequences
- One time offers, upsells etc
And so on.
You want to test every possible permutation of the sales process so that you are totally sure it works.
What you need to do is get someone who isn’t a technical expert to test it for you. The reason being that you are familiar with the entire process and so will find it easy to navigate around it. If you get someone who isn’t familiar with it then they may well find problems that you skipped over because you know the system.
Just a single thing going wrong and swamp you with support calls and ruin a launch and potentially your reputation. You don’t want to be caught on your back foot during the launch. You need to be in charge or the process and know exactly what is happening and when.
Notify Paypal of the launch and explain what is happening and that they can expect a lot of money to come in to your account. It is not unknown for Paypal to shut an account down because they see a sudden influx of cash and assume some sort of fraud is going on.
Ideally, set up a secondary payment method just in case this happens. 2Checkout are very good. Make sure it is authorised and ready to go in case you need to switch it over. Ensure you know how to switch the payment method, in case you have to do it. If the worst happens, you want to be able to quickly switch over to the new payment processor.
Make sure you have plenty of bandwidth available on your server for the launch and notify your webhost of the event. If you are expecting a big launch you may want to move your site on to a dedicated server or a virtual private server (VPS) during the launch to ensure there are no problems. Ideally, ask your web host to have someone technical standing by to help you out in case of any problems.
Ideally, you want to test everything 3 times, once yourself and then twice by two other people to be absolutely certain everything works exactly as expected. Set the product price to $1 during the testing and / or refund the product price to the buyers.
You have to be 100% confident that your sales process works. There are lots of things that can go wrong with a product launch and you need to minimize the chances of anything going wrong. If something does go wrong it could potentially cost you a serious amount of money.