Softgood Sales
Shopper's Guide to Shopping Cart Programs

This article contains older information. Go here for newer information on shopping carts and transactions.

You want to sell primarily digital products such as e-books, whitepapers, or software. You need a system that will handle sales and downloads.

You can sell digital products through just about any shopping cart systems. But delivering the digital product is the trick. A few systems attach the product to an e-mail message, but this doesn't work for large file sizes.

Typically, you upload your digital product to the server using an upload feature in the shopping cart program. When a purchase is made, the shopping cart software creates a temporary URL from which the digital product can be downloaded. This is usually limited to a specific number of days or a specific number of downloads to prevent someone from giving the URL to their friends -- or posting it on a forum.

An alternate way of delivering digital products is to create a password-protected area on your site. When an order comes through you manually e-mail the purchaser the URL of the digital product, plus the username and password. People like to be able to download things instantly, but you can use this system to start, until you find something else.

Be aware, that if you use PayPal, or other systems in which the order button URL contains the download page, hackers can find the download page and go there without paying. With PayPal, don't consider the sale complete until the customer has paid. You don't want to give them access to the digital goods and then have them just stare at the PayPal payment screen without paying.

As I mentioned, many, many shopping carts allow delivery of digital goods, including (I believe):

Of the many good options above, let me highlight just three:

1ShoppingCart* (www.1shoppingcart.com) is a great system if you have just a few products to sell. It includes in a single package all the tools you'll need: digital download capability, newsletter listserver, autoresponders, shopping cart, and ad tracking. $69/month for the professional version. You'll need a merchant account and payment gateway (or 2CheckOut), but it's a popular system for small businesses.

DigiBuy (www.digibuy.com) allows you to sell and deliver digital products without an additional website. They charge $29.99 set-up fee and 13.9% processing fee. It's a bit pricey, but works well. It's how I got started selling e-books.

PayLoadz (www.payloadz.com) requires you to have a website to tell about your product, but handles the digital delivery. It uses PayPal as the order processing system, but unlike most that have a PayPal option, it is programmed with PayPal's Instant Payment Notification (IPN) feature so it doesn't release the product for delivery until payment is made. Costs vary from $15 up to $500+ per month, depending upon how many sales are made and file store capacity is required. It's an inexpensive way to get started.