Selling Digital Goods Part 1

One great facility allows you to upgrade your site with added features and functions.

Upgrades include: New customised website design, More WebPages, Website statistics and hits package, Blocks of extra shopping basket products, Register another domain name, Transfer another domain name, Professional POP3 email and web mail service, More email accounts, 10MB extra video storage, 10MB extra music storage, 10MB extra document storage, 10MB extra storage for electronic goods for sale, 100 extra password protected users.

We’re going to start by looking at Electronic / Digital Goods for Sale.

This tutorial is in two parts. There'll be a link to part 2 at the bottom of this blog.
With all E-commerce websites (Gold or Platinum), you can store and sell Electronic / Digital Goods. Such products might include: E-books, Guides and Manuals, which you might offer in: Text, Word or PDF formats. MP3 music tracks, albums, soundbites and podcasts. Digital artwork, icons, fonts and graphics, which you might offer in Jpeg, Gif, and / or Png formats. Digital products can also be stored in Zip files. However, while yes, it does take up less storage space, it is far less convenient for your customers as they will have to unzip the files, once they have downloaded them. If they don’t already have WinZip – an archiving program, used to compress and uncompress zipped files, they will first have to download WinZip’s free 45-day evaluation version.

To Upgrade your website with storage space to sell Electronic / Digital Goods Storage, click the Add new features button on the left in your main control panel window. Electronic / Digital Goods Storage costs just 25p per MByte per month (available in blocks of 10MBytes).
 

When selling digital / electronic goods, the file’s format does need to be considered. If you’re selling files, which specifically require a certain programme to access and view the file contents, you will need to provide your customers with a link to where they can download that programme. One solution is to offer products in a choice of the most popular formats, which allows customers to choose the files, which are compatible with programmes they already have.

There are three steps to setting up your website to sell Digital Goods online:

1. You need to enter each item into our database.
2. You need to tell the shopping basket the address of each item to be downloaded.
3. Set up automatic messages and emails so your customers know what to do.
 

Step 1

Add your item to your Shopping Cart in Step 4 Groups and Items. Click New Item, choose an existing group or create a new group for the item. Enter the name, A Unique Code (which is very important, we’ll explain why later), the price, an image (if required) and a description of the product.

Next you need to upload the item into our database:
To do this go to your control panel and click the ‘Upload Files’ (Manage Pictures and Files) button, which you’ll find in the column of buttons running down the left hand side of the window. Click ‘Digital Goods for sale’.

Make a note of the items name, code, location address and price.

Use the ‘Files for Sale Wizard’ to upload your files into our database. You need to make a note of the location address of each file you add, which is shown in the wizard table after you add the item. To do this, right click the file and go to Copy Shortcut. Create a word or text document, paste each of these location shortcuts or addresses into it, along with the respective items' name, code and price and then save it with a clear name such as “DG File Locations” into a relevant folder so you can find it quickly and easily. You will need these addresses for the next step, which we will cover in Part 2. 

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