Recommendations for Processing Payments Online & Delivering eBooks

Written on March 19, 2008 – 5:37 pm | by Wordpreneur |

Tools Icon One of your fellow wordpreneurs Akemi Gaines, publisher of the Yes to Me site, recently asked me: “Do you recommend any ebook delivery company? I currently use PayLoadz because I saw some recommendations for them, but I’m not quite happy with their customer service.”

Thanks for asking, and I’m sure many readers are thankful as well since, without a doubt, year in year out this “How do I handle online payments and automated delivery of ebooks I sell” question in its various guises is the most frequently asked by ebook wordpreneurs.

Note that whatever we touch on here is applicable to any digital product, such as software, with the basic “online order processing” system being:

customer goes to your site or sales page
customer orders and pays online
customer downloads the “product” immediately after purchase

To you (the publisher), the desired system is an automated, “hands-free” solution. All you worry about is creating the product and sales material and depositing the proceeds from any sales. Cool!

Of course it’s a tad bit more involved than that, but you get the picture.

First, I have to admit that although I am aware of PayLoadz, I’ve never used it as a publisher, hence unfamiliar with the operation from that side of the fence. I have, however, purchased at least a couple of products sold through the service, and those went through without a hitch… from the buyer’s perspective anyway.

So I can’t really say PayLoadz yay or nay. What I know is that setting up an account and getting started is free, and that the service has a built-in affiliate program, letting others on its network promote your ebook and make commissions on referred sales. (Comment below or contact me if you have anything to share with the rest of us on your experiences with PayLoadz.)

Now let’s get to what I can recommend. There are two relatively easy, inexpensive, and most importantly tried-and-tested over time solutions for you to consider:

ClickBank — The service has been at this game for a long while and has pretty much got the operation down to a science. It does cost to get started (last I checked, it was a one-time $50 setup fee), but worth it, I think, not necessarily for the tech (which is solid), but for its built-in affiliate program which in effect makes everybody on its network of affiliates a potential source of ebook sales for you (anyone can sign up free to be a ClickBank affiliate).

Big whoop on the aff thing? Well yeah, when you consider ClickBank’s age and resulting extensive reach — hard to find someone in Internet Marketing (IM) circles who isn’t a ClickBank affiliate.

ClickBank handles all the money stuff — processing orders and receiving customer payments; paying affiliates; sending you your cut — and it’s very reliable and good at it.

That’s my recommendation for a 3rd party service solution for a “small” ebook publishing operation.

Now, what if you want to bring the whole operation in-house, for whatever reason? Maybe you don’t want to pay the fees ClickBank charges. Maybe you want to build your own network of affiliates you don’t want to share with your competitors. Maybe you’re just fussy. Whatever, I’ve got a recommendation for that too…

$7 Secrets Scripts and Paypal — You likely have a Paypal account. So do many other people (and even if they don’t, it’s not too hard to convince them to sign up since the service is free, it’s been around a while, and used extensively on online behemoths like eBay). But the service can’t be used for automated order processing and digital product delivery without extra software.

Enter $7 Secrets, the popular ebook that made the rounds last year. What many people don’t realize is that $7 Secrets comes bundled with a set of PHP scripts for your Web server that will let you set up an automated system with Paypal taking payments for you (with funds going directly into your Paypal account), and the scripts on your site handling your customers’ downloads… without your manual involvement (assuming it’s all been set up correctly, of course). All that for no more than the ebook’s $7 pricetag!

Even more interesting: The $7 Secrets scripts have an ingenious way of implementing an “affiliate program” that won’t even require you to get your hands dirty figuring out affiliate commissions due and cutting checks — you just decide on an affiliate percentage “commission.” The scripts send that percentage of transactions directly to the affiliate’s Paypal account. So, if you set an affiliate commission of 35%, and if one affiliate produced 100 orders for you, 35 of those orders were processed using the affiliate’s Paypal account (not yours, meaning the affiliate got all the payments made for those 35 orders).

I use this system for my GolfIncome: eBay ebook (check out the info for its affiliate program).

And just in case you were wondering, no, you don’t have to price your ebook $7 to use the scripts. You can set any price you want, and you can set affiliate commissions to anything you want too (or even take them out of the picture). Completely up to you.

And those, boys and girls, are my recommendations. For now anyway.

Before I let you loose, best know this: In both cases, I assume you are technically experienced enough (or confident and patient enough) to be able to set up either option properly. I don’t care how easy to set up and operate either claims to be, both will require you to read and follow fairly extensive instructions and make a bunch of little decisions on the usual “setup options” that let you control exactly how you want the tech to behave. Nature of the beast.

As usual, comments and questions welcome on these (or any other) service or solution. Good luck!