I was recently asked by a friend how she can sell a copy of her e-book online as a PDF. If you have a similar question, and would like to sell digital goods, such as videos, photos, games, software, etc. online, read this blog to find solutions on how to do so.
Solutions for Selling Digital Goods Online
1. PayPal for Digital Goods – If you’ve ever purchased anything from an e-commerce site, such as ebay, you’ve likely had to use PayPal to pay for the item you bought. PayPal for Digital Goods works in the same way, but instead of getting an item via mail, your buyers would be able to download your digital file right from your website. All you need to do would be to add the PayPal button right on your website, and individuals would be able to pay you for your item.
PayPal has a few advantages:
* Visitors pay right on your site and do not have to go to another site to pay
* Visitors have the option to make a one-time payment or purchase a subscription, if you offer one
* Excellent fraud protection
* Opportunity to sell to clients all over the world
To get started, you need to create a PayPal business account and choose either Express Checkout or Adaptive Payments products for your website. “Express Checkout allows you to sell your digital downloads to consumers with flexible payment plans, while Adaptive Payments gives you all of the benefits… {and lets you} set up various payment scenarios within your application, such as chained or parallel payments. For example, if a music producer wants to sell a playlist of songs by various musicians online, its developer can enable payment distribution to the entire set of musicians upon point of purchase,” according to PayPal.
2. Easy Digital Downloads – Easy Digital Downloads works with PayPal to allow you to sell e-books and other digital downloads on WordPress. The plugin developer claims that this is “the world’s easiest way to sell digital downloads through WordPress for free.” Within minutes, you can set up a default configuration to sell your items on your WordPress site. For example, if you are selling music, you have the option to sell it per song, or the entire album. If you’d like, you can customize this plugin for your specific needs; they are developer friendly, and make it easy to make changes to the code. They have 190 extensions that allow you to set up your site in any way you want, from different payment gateways to uploading to different gallery options to display your digital downloads. Furthermore, Easy Digital Downloads provides ways for you to analyze your selling and earnings data, and even to export that information to Excel or Google Docs.
3. Shopify – Shopify has teamed up with Fetch Softworks to allow you to create an online store to sell your digital goods. On your site, you can also sell tangible things, like actual books and CDs, along with the items that are available for download. The two services let you to host files on their servers, and they also work with PayPal to accept payments. Shopify provides many ways to easily set up a site, with different looks to choose from. And for beginners who have questions, they have a 24-7 Support Guru who help.
Shopify offers a free 14-day trial to anyone who is interested. They charge $14.95 a month. (Insider tip: I actually had a friend call Shopify and ask for a reduction in the monthly fee, and Shopify waived it completely.)
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