Document "authorised delivery" system: ideas please!

Z

zoulias

Weaksauce
Joined
Sep 20, 2005
Messages
97
Hi all,

I work for a company which I believe has an easily solveable problem. We are a consultancy and part of our job is to produce documents which may or may not be of interest to clients, deliver them and charge them.

Our model is to judge whether a client wants it, then send it and bill for it. This of course can lead to difficulty where the client decides it does not have the value we have charged for it, leading to our consultants being hesitant to disseminate the documents in the first place.

It would seem that all we need is the ability to send clients an email, explaining a document, with a link/option that would allow them to download the document, and in doing so, register this and bill accordingly. Are there such solutions out there? Would one be difficult to develop?
 
Is this type of business model even legal? Even your last solution you mentioned sounds crazy, you want to bill someone based on a simple hyperclick link inside an email?

If your documents have any worth and your company is legit, then at least you can do your clients a solid and present them with an online store and let them order what they wish to pay for.
 
Easy to develop and charge the client for the download. Its a great idea to have consultants researching and providing information to clients about documents they may want to purchase instead of making them wade through documents online and do the research themselves. Prolly could be developed fairly quickly using .Net Nuke as the document repository which the consultants can manage the online content for sale in. Give me a PM with your phone and we can talk.
 
Wait a minute; you're sending unsolicited documents to people and then billing them for it?

Wow. :rolleyes:

Now what Falcon is saying makes more sense. Are your clients requesting information and your consultants are doing the research the client could do themselves and then summarizing the findings? That makes more sense. But why is there any confusion in the first place that the person will need to pay for the information?

I know the post wasn't meant to be about this, but I'm honestly intrigued with this one.
 
Sorry for the late reply.

To clarify, as a consultancy we will have clear terms of business and we are talking about large corporate relationships - there is no question of "unsolicited" or "scamming" here. Its more of a relationship management piece. Large projects will be specially scoped but small updates which will be of relevance but perhaps/perhaps not of interest are issued based on a judgement call; the client can always object to being billed for something they feel is unneccesary.
We need a mechanism which is very cheap to administer and which fits in with our existing billing process (so no shopping carts, just something which generates a client list of accpetances/document) - but which also managers the client authentication process via (manually sent) emails or potentially through a portal/microsite linked by email.

Preferably this would have to be effortless to clients This - no asking them to sign up for accounts etc.

Being a global company it is unlikely that I can work with an individual external developer on this (although I will ask if I can get authorisation). I was hoping for pointers to existing off the shelf packages or pointers to the work required to build a business case for my boss.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top