I've been playing with the idea of adding a new custom payment option.

- Call Me
Customer service will contact you via telephone for your credit card details.

Does anyone currently do this or something similar? I was thinking it could bring some additional sales from customers that still don't feel safe providing credit card information via the internet. However, it could also spark a good volume of regular orders becoming "Call Me" orders that then get cancelled when we call or if we are unable to reach them due to an incorrect digit in the phone number.

That's my little pro vs. con... any other comments?

Aaaah, that's the way our site is actually going to be set up. We do all billing internally, but that is because we're B2B (ok, somebody can shoot me for being cliche). A large portion of our clients use purchase orders, company credit cards, and other forms of payment that have special circumstances not covered by a normal merchant account.

I see a couple of thoughts, so I will think them here.

Why do you have an internet store in the first place? So it can sell for you. Now, if you have the staff to handle a call influx that may be ok, but I know people who would click on that if they couldn't figure out how to use the order form, kind of like a tech support for ordering.

I guess if it's an order, that is one you didn't lose. You could always try it and see how many hits you get.

Well, I will list our experience.
When we listed our phone number visibly for everyone our phone calls sky rocketed. Sometimes its ringing off the hook non stop all day, which yes can be good if they turn into orders (which 90% do), but can you handle a large amount of phone calls? And some of these people will call on off hours, we have had calls as early as 5:30a.m. and as late as 10:00p.m.
Weigh your options, and think about this, those people who are afraid to use their card on the internet are usually not shopping on the internet, so they are few and far between and I doubt very much that you are really losing many if any orders.
But, again its your choice.

Thanks for the feedback Strapworks. I most likely won't be going this route anyways. I am unable to handle a large number of telephone inquiries/phone orders at this time. I do, however, post our number under the "Contact Us" section of our site which generally hits voicemail when people call and we are unavailable. I plan to remove all telephone numbers as of Thanksgiving and then place it back on the site in early January. Unfortunately, I believe it is required to best serve our customers... it would be no help if we got hundreds of calls and couldn't return them all in a timely fashion.

Strapworks, you mentioned using the phone number there. I think Robert is more mentioning a "Call me" button -- different thing. I guess (now that you have decided not to do it) that you could do a week test and see how many people use it. Having a "Call me" button instead of a "CAll 1-800-blahbla" gives you the timeframe to call back. Not the other way around.

But, like I said, we probably get 2 orders a day. Not 2000. One can only hope.....

Even though I don't think I'll actually use this option I will atleast still test it out. Of course this won't be until Jan '04. I know I can't handle a large volume for the holiday season, which is coming oh so quick! I'll let you guys know if anyone uses it when I do a test implementation early next year.