We have a very easy to use digital sales system on Limited Pressing. You create a product in your store and if you want to attach a digital download to that product, you upload a file and then purchase credits (either in batches of 125, 400 or 1000). Whenever someone orders that product from you, they get to download the file.

Back when we rolled out our new support system, we thought it was a great opportunity to collect and review the most common questions we received. After a few weeks, we figured we could create help documents based on the questions we’d been asked. As it turns out, one of the biggest questions was whether or not digital credits could be used across multiple products. If you purchased 1000 credits on one product, could you use those credits on all of your products? To everyone’s disappointment, the answer is no.

We have a valid reason for doing things this way: it costs us money to store your files. We can’t let you buy 1000 credits and upload 1000 albums. We’d go broke, Limited Pressing would shut down and you’d be stuck selling your digital goods from somewhere else that’s way more expensive. Neither of us wants that.

My co-founder (and brother), Nick, suggested we make a single change to combat this issue: stop using the word “credit” and instead use the word “download”. The problem is that when people hear the word “credit” they think of a bank. They think of a big stockpile that they can grab from whenever they need it. We decided to make the change to our marketing pages, in our product editor where you purchase the “downloads” and when we speak to customers about setting up digital downloads. Incredibly, this simple change to how we talk about and describe our digital system, resulted in us never receiving another question about whether “downloads” could be used across multiple products.

Sometimes you need to change the way you do things in your application to make it more clear to your users what’s going on and other times you just need to change the conversation.