DEWDigest

For our own online store the discount ebook store we tried many different shopping cart software packages to get the balance of ease of use for our customers and hands off operation for us. Sadly choosing the right shopping cart software to sell digital products wasn’t as easy as we’d thought.

When it comes to choosing shopping cart software to run your online store there are a myriad of possible solutions.
All of the software we tried had good integration with most of the payment processors like Paypal, 2Checkout and Worldpay alongside many others. All of the carts would also save the buyers information for sending out offers after the first sale so follow up is an option. In fact the options were similar on most of the shopping cart software we tried.

 Running an online store with physical products can be handled by all the software we tried without too many problems, as you will be shipping out goods manually after you have made a sale. Selling digital products using shopping cart software is a whole different ball game however. Obviously we could use any of the shopping cart  software to sell digital products online, and deliver them manually when we were notified by the software or our payment processor of a sale, but that kind of defeats the object of selling digital products online.

To keep life simpler, you need the whole process from the buyer putting digital items in the cart to the product being delivered to be automatic. The whole point of selling digital products from your online store is that it saves you the bother of sending out links to download the file, or emailing attachments. So any shopping cart software you choose for your online store needs to carry out the task of delivering the digital products to the buyer without your intervention, and that’s where a lot of the shopping cart software falls down.

As we already said, all the software could sell the products and accept the payment, but when it came to delivery most of the shopping cart software would leave the customer with no idea of where their new purchase was. In the worst cases the shopping cart software would require us the seller to send a download link to the customer which would then leave our product download links open to the less scrupulous customer passing the link around for others to download it without paying, or move the digital products after each sale, not good at all.

Only slightly better was the shopping cart software which would give the customer a link inside their login area. In this case the link would usually be obfuscated and unique to the individual buyer. The downside was that after buying most of our customers wouldn’t go and log back in to find their downloads and we’d get support  requests or in some cases be accused of  taking money and not delivering. The worst cases we had the customer initiated complaints with our payment processors.

Finally we found shopping cart software which we could use to sell digital products which ticked all the right boxes. The shopping cart we use now integrates with our payment processor, it offers a cart which can hold multiple items and it delivers them automatically after payment as a download link. The shopping cart we chose also gives the buyer a login account which they can return to later and download the product again should they lose it on their hard drive after downloading.

Hopefully this gives you some idea of what you need to look for when you choose shopping cart software to sell digital products from your online store.
Visit our online store for discount downloads of digital products for everyone. http://www.thediscountebookstore.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 3:41 pm and is filed under DEWDigest Newsletter. 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.