Automatic Delivery - Digital Goods

By: Keith Lock

The key advantages to selling digital goods online is that in most cases there are unlimited copies of your digital good available and that automated delivery of the digital good, instantly after payment, can take place. No effort to ship the item each time you make a sale and no waiting for the product to be shipped is necessary.

Keep reading for tips on setting up a product for auto-delivery and a free resource that is available to make this a simple, hassle free process for you.

Examples of digital products or digital goods that can be setup for automatic delivery are: Software, e-Books, music, movies, digital art, manuals, articles, certificates, forms, files, and anything else that can be downloaded.

Simply placing a link on your web site where a customer can download your product is not a viable solution. It is not secure and can be easily shared with others which will quickly result in a decrease in profits. Even password protecting the page and sending an email to your customer with the password is not a great solution because this process is slow and cumbersome and the password can be easily shared as well. Automatically attaching the file to an email after payment is also not the best idea because some email software has limitations to file sizes that can be attached and a lot of email programs will simply strip off attachments that could be potentially harmful to the computer. Some people do not feel comfortable with email attachments either because of the mass amount of viruses that are spread in that fashion. There is a better, more secure, more convenient way to deliver the digital product to your customer. You can create a script, or utilize a service that already exists that interacts with your payment software (in most cases PayPal or Google Checkout) to provide a secure link to your customer immediately after payment.

When creating a script to handle this or using a 3rd party service to handle the process for you, the following features are important:

* the ability to offer your digital goods for sale from anywhere on the Internet including your web page, eBay, Google or from an email
* the automatic download process should work when accepting payments through the major payment providers; PayPal and Google Checkout
* secure file storage
* secure unique link automatically created for your customer after payment is made
* the secure link having a life span that make sense to the situation; i.e. the link should expire after x amount of downloads or after x number of hours or days



This should be all the information that you need to assist you in getting your digital products to your customers in a timely fashion. Remember, once your digital delivery method is in place; let the customer know because that will certainly be a great selling feature. In fact, it is something people have come to expect when buying digital products.