When you think of website development and selling products online, most people envision getting a big box delivered by the postman to their front door. Physical products are not the only ones sold by online businesses. These days, digital products are a hot commodity in the eCommerce market.

Selling physical products requires a lot of preparation on your website, and serious online business management. You will need to create graphics to show what they look like, set up appropriate landing pages, engage in comprehensive marketing and establish a working shopping cart, so that the customer’s demands are met. When it comes to selling digital products, however, a different approach is taken.

Digital products can be received in one of two ways: in the mail or downloaded directly to the customer’s computer. The download solution is often preferred by online organisations, as delivery is rather easy and no real inventory needs to be stored, other than the initial files.

However, how can you ensure that the customer receives the products in a secure fashion, and that you don’t get “scammed” in the process?

Here are some considerations on this issue:

Payment Methods

The issue of e-payments is still an issue with digital products. Customers pay at the time of purchase just like for any other product. In order to accept and process payments via credit card, you have to have:

• Internet Merchant Account
• Merchant Bank Account
• A Payment Gateway Account

A payment receipt still needs to be generated for your records and also for the customer, in case something should go wrong with the download process. Credit card purchases of digital products are still subject to charge backs from the credit card company.

A “person-to-person” payment solution, also known as third party P2P is common for digital situations. PayPal functions in this way. To create an account, a customer or business owner just needs an email address to associate with the account and a bank account for verification. On your website, payments are transacted by entering an email address. This will send the customer to their PayPal account, where they will be prompted for their login details. At this point they will be asked if they want to make the transaction, or not. When this is all over, they go back to the product website during the confirmation process.

You can opt to store your digital products in a special directory online which is protected by a password system. This is to keep unauthorised individuals from accessing it. In simple terms, you would just give the customer the login and password details after they have paid, together with the appropriate link to the product they’re interested in. Ask your customers not to share the link with anyone else. However, if you’re willing to invest a bit more time, and perhaps hire a professional online business management firm to handle this process on your behalf, you can have a timer set up on the download link as well, for added security.

If you don’t want to bother yourself with all this organisational headache, get a complete digital download solution, where for a monthly fee you have everything you need to do business, digitally. Head to ClickBank at www.clickbank.com or PayLoadz at www.payloadz.com, for more information.

Digital products are all the rage, currently. Setting up a digital product eCommerce business means low overhead and more profit. The ultimate system should allow people to access your product easily and quickly, so that they can get their money to you, fast!

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 25th, 2010 at 6:49 am and is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.