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Selling E-Books
Once you've set up your web site
and finished preparing your E-Book you're ready to start selling your E-Book.
Before you start selling there just a few things you still need to do:
- Decide exactly what you're selling:
It's important to know exactly what you're selling. Answer these
questions before you start, and you'll avoid problems later such
as disatisfied customers, and requests for refunds.
- Are you selling the downloadable E-Book - or - are you going to going
to allow people some level of access before they buy?
You could for example allow people to download the E-Book before paying,
read part of it, and then either pay to download part two, or get a
password to read a second part.
- What rights do your customers get?
Is the E-Book just for their personal use - or - can they sell or transfer
their copy of the E-Book to other people?
- How are you going to deliver the product? Over the Internet (as a
download), or will you ship media (disks, CD-ROMs etc.) to your customers.
- What guarantees do you offer your customers?
- What level of support do you offer your customers?
- Check your web site:
Double check your site clearly explains exactly what you're offering.
- Decide on the price:
How much does your E-Book cost?
This is a difficult question - pricing is more of an art than a science.
Here are some ideas for pricing your E-Book:
- Guess - not recommended - but a lot of people end up doing this as
they can't figure out the right price.
- Look at your competitors - and use their prices as guidance for
setting your own prices.
- Start with a high price and gradually cut the price until your
sales take off.
- Do market research - for example ask what people what they would be
prepared to pay in a survey,
Getting your price right is very important. If you under-price your
product, you will be throwing away money that customers would be happy to
give you. If you over-price your product, few customers will buy, and
many of those who do, may demand refunds.
So it is worth spending some time to research the right price - it can
make a big difference to your profits! There's even a web site that's
been put together as a tool for helping you find the right price
- it's called
Make Your Price Sell.
- Get ready to accept payment:
The next decision you need to make is how to accept payment for your
E-Books. You must accept payment by credit card or you could end
up losing 90% or more of your potential orders!
Integrating credit card payment in your site need not be that difficult -
depending on which method of processing payment you select.
The ideal that
you are aiming for is an automated system (so you can concentrate on
marketing rather processing orders) - but be aware in order to set up a
fully automated system, you may need to make some minor adjustments in your site.
There are several options for how to accept payment, each of which has
advantages and disadvantages:
- PayPal
PayPal is a service for sending and receiving money online.
We do not (and have never yet) used them, so we don't
keep up with details of their service - which we presume, may in any
case, change from time to time.
The main reason that we do not use PayPal is that we do not feel that
it is convienent for our business, nor for those of my customers who
do not already have PayPal accounts (as they would have to join PayPal
to pay our company).
- ClickBank
ClickBank is a low cost service, available to many people in many countries.
Basically they deal with all the complicated technical stuff required for
processing credit cards securely, and they send you checks for your sales
(less a deduction which is based on the number of sales you make - this pays
their fees) up to every 2 weeks.
According to the information on their site (as of October 2002),
they are infact retailing your product for you, and this is how they view themselves.
It's their name (not yours) which appears on the customer's credit card
bills (we've seen it on ours when we have bought from other ClickBank sellers, and their site says that sellers are required to
tell your customers this).
Technically, I guess you could say that it's them, not you, accepting the customer's credit card,
but that aside, the key point is that by using them you get to sell your products online
with relatively small amounts of hassle.
We have been using their service for some years, and have found them to be extremely reliable and responsive
- we don't consider their fees too high - and so, in summary, based on our experience, we can recommend them.
ClickBank is good for many (not all) products that are delivered electronically over the Internet
(by e-mail, as a download or on a web page) - but it is especially good for selling E-Books
- and Activ E-Book Compiler
includes a number of features that make it really easy to sell your E-Books using ClickBank.
(Another big advantage for me of ClickBank is they offer affiliate tracking at no extra cost - we'll talk
about this more in the chapter about marketing).
There are also other Payment processors, which are in many respects similar to ClickBank. These include:
- Get a Merchant Account:
Probably the ultimate in credibility, flexibility, and lowest fees per transaction,
are Merchant Accounts.
The downside to getting a Merchant Account is that it may take a little more time and effort to set up
than the other options, and you may have to pay a monthly or annual fee just to maintain the
account.
Getting your own Merchant Account is often the best option if you are dealing in high volumes of sales -
but for many smaller sites (and even some larger ones),
ClickBank may be a better option.
These companies offer help in getting a Merchant Account (most are for US merchants only),
you can find a list of several here:
merchant account providers.
Note: You can find more options for
accepting payments, plus a more detailed
comparison at MerchantKit.com.
- Test Everything:
Before you unleash your sales web site on real customers. spend a bit of time to make sure
everything works as it should. Test it once - then test it again.
You can find more information about setting up a web-based store at MerchantKit.com.
These tutorials will show you exactly how to set up your sales process with
popular combinations of software and payment processing options:
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