How to Sell E-books using PayPal

We've probably all seen web sites featuring paid content requiring the use of a credit card. Generally such a web site provides a brief paragraph or two advertising their product, perhaps displaying a table of contents and finally a form making the information available for download.

The true advantage of any digital product, such as an online e-book, is the instant gratification factor. Customers don't want to wait for product delivery. Instant payment notification or IPN (a paypal term) makes it possible to safely and securely deliver an e-book immediately after purchase.

If you are an author of such an e-book, you might be interested in providing this service on your website. While it may seem complex or perhaps something only larger companies can do, any small business or freelance writer can easily make their e-book available as a download for their website visitors.

The nice thing about using a well known company such as paypal is the trust factor. Your visitors are far more inclined to trust paypal than they might another unfamiliar payment processor.

Paypal is known for its high standards in the area of security, using them as a sort of "trust broker" allows you to capitalize on their reputation.

The first step is determining whether or not you will be doing this yourself or using one of the many commission based online services.

Commission based resellers offer some advantages, most notable is slightly less complexity. You simply create an account with them and upload your files, they take on the role of another broker. The main selling point of such a broker is "ease of use".

Another, less expensive approach is to do this yourself. This is not very difficult, anyone, even smaller home based businesses and freelance writers can easily do this using inexpensive off the shelf paypal software. Should you find yourself in over your head, you can always hire an expert to perform the software installation.

There are two advantages of installing your own system.

The obvious advantage is that you won't have to pay a commission to another 3rd party, the transaction is strictly between yourself, paypal and your visitor.

Another, less obvious yet crucial advantage is that you will have complete control over the design and layout of your ad copy.

The importance of maintaining this control cannot be over-stated. No one buys anything without first being told about the product. You simply must provide some advertising copy describing your e-book or it will not sell. Keeping the paypal download software on your own website enables you to have complete control over the process.

When you decide to do this, you will need to find some paypal software for your website. This generally takes the form of a CGI or PHP script, the one I use is called PayVeX (an open source package). If you are already familiar with mysql database settings, you're well ahead of the game. If not, you should ask your hosting provider about them.

When locating paypal software, it is essential that the package ship complete with source code in an unencrypted form.

While you might not be interested in the technical details of software design, you may some day find yourself in a position where the paypal script will need to be modified. It is impossible to hire someone to do this if the software doesn't include full, unencrypted source code. It is therefore essential that you have access to it, even if you never intend to make modifications yourself.

After you have selected the software, you might decide to install it yourself or hire an expert to do it. If you should decide to install it yourself, you would follow any included instructions (generally running some type of setup procedure). You may be surprised at how easy this is to do.

Should you decide to hire an expert, you will need to give them your hosting provider login credentials. It is important to change your password before asking them to login.

Changing your hosting password before and after hiring the services of an expert is important, not only will you be preventing that person from logging in again, you will also be protecting yourself in the event your credentials were compromised during the password exchange. (ideally, you would use something like PGP to exchange this information)

Installing and operating a paid download tool on your own is easy, best of all, you are completely free to tweak or adjust your website to enhance its selling impact.

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