Whether you’re looking to sell ebooks, music, or software, there are two ways to make money from selling digital products online – the easy way, and the hard way. The hard way entails spending thousands on set up costs for your ecommerce website with long set up times and legwork. The easy way simply involves finding ‘point and click’ service providers who specialise in payment processing and digital fulfilment, signing up, adding your products, and promoting them! Here’s a few handy sites which can help you sell your digital downloads and products online.
1. Paypal
One of the first things you need when selling anything online – digital or otherwise – is a merchant account. There are many providers on the market such as Worldpay, Realex, and 2Checkout, but the fastest and easiest way to start accepting payments online is via Paypal. There is no set up fee to create an account with Paypal, but there are fees incurred on a sale-by-sale basis, usually an incremental percentage of the sale value itself. Paypal also provide access to an API, so many ecommerce applications such as E-Junkie and Shopify (below) integrate with Paypal to provide instant payment notifications – perfect for making digital products accessible immediately after payment.
2. E-Junkie
E-Junkie is one of the best digital product fulfilment solutions on the web today, not just for the price (from a mere $5 USD a month for 10 products with no transaction fees) – the feature list is comprehensive and above and beyond what many small merchants will need. Registration is free, and E-Junkie give you a 1 week free trial to check out the service and see for yourself how easy it is to use. Oh, and it integrates with Paypal’s IPN notifications service meaning you can hook up your Paypal and E-Junkie accounts in a few clicks. Seriously cool.
Shopify is one of the easiest ways to get a fully featured shopping cart style website up and running in a few minutes. They provide you with a fantastically easy to use interface, and a massive range of out-of-the-box templates which you can use to get your shop up and running quickly. Search engine optimisation is built in, so no need to pay for an ‘expert’ to help you get the most from your pages.
Like Paypal, Shopify has an API which developers can utilise to build handy addons to extend the Shopify service. One of these addons is Fetch. ‘Seamless digital delivery’ is the mantra of Fetch, and they deliver just that. Their plans start from $10 USD per month for up to 15 items – so slightly more than E-Junkie – but you get the added value of being able to attach your digital products to a fully search engine friendly Shopify website, complete with Paypal integration so you can process payments. If you have big ambitions and want to future proof your digital sales, try this combination out for size.
4. Indiestore
I first found out about Indiestore in 2007 when it was launching, and I even got a great tour of their offices in East London (thank you Tejas) when they were busily working on newer versions of the product. Indiestore is a division of 7Digital.com – one of the biggest music download providers on the internet – and allows bands and musicians to sell their music online, and distribute it through the 7Digital network. The service also allows musicians to use social tools such as Bebo to promote their work via music player ‘widgets’ which can be embedded into social networks or on basically any website or blog. Indiestore have starter packages starting from free (with you earning 70% of the value of your sales), to a pro version (£35 / $50 USD per year) which allows you keep 80% of the revenue, and also makes your download sales chart eligible.
5. Clickbank
Clickbank has been around for as long as I can remember, and there are thousands of E-Books out there which can tell you how to make gazillions from Clickbank. The best way to make money from Clickbank is to create your own digital products and sell them yourself, whilst leveraging the 100,000+ affiliates Clickbank have registered with them. If you’re looking for a ‘one handy invoice’ solutions, Clickbank issue weekly payments but have fairly strict guidelines you must adhere to before being allowed to sell products on the network. Clickbank also has an international, multi-currency checkout which is handy for localisation. In terms of pricing, there is a $49.95 USD once off activiation charge when you upload your first product, and a $2.50 charge per cheque they issue to you.
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Hi Hugh,
Can’t see an email form anywhere on your site so I thought I’d leave a comment and hope you pick up my details.
I’m working to promote the site money4gold.ie (they buy consumer gold) and I’m lookng for Irish affiliates on a cost per lead basis (also doing cost per acquisition). I’m already speaking to Pigsback and have paid search covered but wondered if you know any webmasters with Irish traffic that might be interested in carrying banners or doing emails?
Payouts are high, 10 euros CPL and 30 euros CPA. May be able to go a little higher for quality/volume.
Many thanks for your help!
Jason Andrews
LeadCreations