Downloads or Cds

[haggul]

For my sins I have agreed to help a family member setup a site - it's an advice / community sort of site for a niche-ish service she provides based in the UK.

As part of the site she wants to produce fact / activity sheets (prob in PDF) that she would like to sell.

I've built several dozen eComm sites but they were all for companies selling physical stock - using their own merchant accounts for payment.

My questions are :

1. Would you offer files for download (or email delivery) or physical stock on CDs?

2. As an individual can she use Worldpay or similar to accept payments directly through the site (well with a jump into their pages) or shoul she look just at Paypal?

3. Will the payment service chosen dictate the answer to number 1?

Cheers for any help - I feel out of my depth with this supposedly more simple setup!

[pmkpmk]

Please be aware that there is a legal difference between Donwload and CD:

If you buy a CD, you obtain the ownership. Among other things, this means there is no way to prevent you from reselling the CD you bought.

If you buy a download, you only obtain the license to use the widget. In this case, it depends on the license terms if you are permitted to resell it.

Right now, Oracle is battling with a company who resells 2nd hand software licenses about exactly this definition.

[haggul]

That's cool - I guess we can't stop that - although it's a world away from someone knocking out their own copies and profiting - it'll be fairly small scale and so hopefully won't attract that sort of attention anyway.

It's the practicalities that I'm really worried about - as I say my day job is setting up sites to flog physical products using merchant accounts - this downgrade in scale has left me pondering.

Thanks Again.

[David_M]

1. My experience, started by selling CD's but moving towards a new product that will be digital. The advantages of going digital are very strong, and I'm sick of giving so much money to the post office.

2. Worldpay should allow an individual- they allowed my partner on the digital business. They charge a set up and yearly fee though. I havent used paypal, but their is no start up fees. Google payment may be another option, or you could look into systems which handle the delivery and payment system, maybe clickbank?

Good luck on your penance/new venture!

[edited by: David_M at 11:22 am (utc) on Aug. 30, 2006]

[pmkpmk]

I'm sick of giving so much money to the post office

Have you considered using a company like Element5/DigitalRiver? They stock products for you and handle all the shipping, AND they can do custom-labeled CD's on demand. So the customer can chose whether he wants it digital or as a CD delivery.

[Leosghost]

for a payment processor for digital products you may also want to look at "element5"

PMKPMK beat me to it ..( hi M ;-)

[edited by: Leosghost at 11:32 am (utc) on Aug. 30, 2006]

[RailMan]

I'm sick of giving so much money to the post office.

why are you giving money to the post office?
give money to your kids / nieces and nephews / charity or whatever, but please, not to the post office .....

or do you mean you're paying postage charges for your customers? if so, why aren't your customers paying the postage?

[RailMan]

in answer to the original questions .....

1 - digital downloads make it "easy" cos of no extra production costs, but there is a high fraud risk as you cannot guarantee that the person downloading is the genuine cardholder
physical goods shipped directly to the cardholder's address are safer and give you greater protection against chargebacks, especially if you require the customer's signature

if you search back you'll find lots of previous discussion of "physical vs digital" and security and preventing chargebacks etc

2 - individuals are "sole traders" and are allowed to use worldpay - no problem there - take a look around and you'll find discounted worldpay accounts

3 - no

[haggul]

Thanks for all the replies everyone.

It's given me something to think about - I like to think I'm a pretty good coder so I'll probably look at building my own digital delivery system then - it seems the way to go - I will research the providers though but costs may prevent that.

Thanks for payment service heads ups also.

[Corey Bryant]

Clickbank is another company you might check out for digital downloads. You should consider extra scrubbing on these transactions since you are making your product available almost immediately.

-Corey