I'm not sure if if you are making a distinction here between surfers in general and site members. But I consider giving people what they want to be good customer service and not pandering.

Our members often make requests for repeat shoots with specific models, certain types of shoots or models, etc. We try to be as accomodating as realistically possible, because these people are our customers and they are paying, they are not getting it for free. And our rebill rate for the past month has averaged out to be 75.86% so it seems to be a sound strategy and is certainly paying off.

As for the new technologies and ways of delivering, that seems to be following the same philosophy to me. Like Luke said, there are lots of people that dont have credit cards but we dont write them off as being potential customers. When I go out to restaurants and stores, the generally offer lots of payment options, like cash, check, credit card, EPS, etc. If we limit ourselves to only taking money from people with credit cards, that seems to be defeating the whole purpose of getting them to pay for goods and services.

Same with delivery methods. The more ways we make it possible for for surfers to receive our goods and services, the more likely they are to spend money with us. Again, when I do my shopping, I am give a plethora of options to get the stuff to my home. UPS, Fedex, regular post, etc.

And I agree with Ken that it is a good idea to create and serve our stuff with the customer in mind. I know there are some webmasters out there that consider surfers to be an annoyance that they have to put up with. I dont subscribe to that theory. I'll admit that sometimes they make demands that are over the top and and just not reasonable.

I had one surfer last week that sent 5 emails regarding one movie on our AEBN feeds that was not working. We explained that was content we purchased for them and tried to get it fixed, but for some reason they didnt get it done. I explained there were 100's of other movies in the feeds to see, and over 3000 video clips on our site, so if he wanted to cancel over one missing movie, there was nothing I could do about it.

For me, the "larger picture" is finding more customers and getting them converted to rebilling customers. And I dont think giving them what they want and how they want is hurting the industry. There are so many quick buck artists out there that have really done damage to the industry by playing the little bait and switch game and all the other dirty tricks some webmasters think they have to play to make money.

In my book, this is called Customer Service. And it seems to be working, at least for us......