Hi, I'm starting to get a reasonably big collection of ebooks, and was wondering if I should open an ecommerce store to sell them in. Is it worth it? If it is worth it, how would I go about doing it? Would I need specialised hosting, what's the best script? Also, maybe most importantly, do I have to set up a business account in Paypal to be able to charge customers like sites like name.com do??? Thanks, Simon
Don't sell ebooks, you'll just look like one of the thousands of other idiots here. But to answer your questions: It's 100% profit, so you could argue that it is but you're credibility here will tank. You create a website that has the sales page, and you have a 'thank-you for ordering' page which has the link to download the product. Then on the sales page you simply create a link to Paypal, and pass a variable through to send people to the thank-you page when an order is complete (see the Paypal documentation). Alternatively you can use clickbank.com to do it, they'll handle the ecommerce part and they have a huge network of affiliates looking to push shit like what you are trying to sell. You don't need specialized hosting, and you don't need a script. Clickbank.com can provide you with the detailed documentation on how to do it, but it really only takes about 20 mins to setup. It would help but it's not essential. Business accounts pay less fees than personal ones, but if you do everything through clickbank.com you won't even need a paypal account.
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Christian, thanks for the excellent reply: I've repped you Sorry, but I've already become an idiot. I was going to buy a few for this idea I was trying, but then I got offered a package, and it went from there, like a stamp collection I suppose Can't stop buying them now lol. Do people really dislike ebook sellers that much? Why?! I'm not really sure I want to go with affiliate programs just yet. I'm a student at the moment, so really don't want the commitment as I don't want to promise time to it if I'm not going to follow through. I'm the sort of person who says 'if you're going to do something, you should do it properly', and I think I will sign up to a network in the future, but not just yet, want to start off with smaller websites to learn some effective marketing techniques and things first...
Always a good thing People dislike ebook sellers here because 99% of the ebooks out there are absolute crap. Have you actually read these ebooks that are you going to try and push? Do they have anything useful? The other reason people hate ebook sites is because they put so much hype into their sales pitch, then the product itself isn't that great. A common example are those super long ebook sales pages that offer you some marketing secret and they make it sound really juicy. Then you spend the $99 on the book, and you get this lame 14 page PDF file containing information that gets discussed here on DP every day. If you go with clickbank you don't need to worry about managing affiliates, they do it all for you. If you are going to pimp ebooks you might as well do it the right way, otherwise all the promotion is entirely up to you. ebooks don't really get updated much, and they don't need much end-user support, so it's not exactly a huge amount of work once they are running.
Yeah, I had a quick read through, and they all actually seem suprisingly good. I was expecting pretty much what you said when a bought a few of them, but they seem pretty decent, I would definately be happy with them if I bought them. I'm selling one of them individually and the review said that he thought it was worth around 3-4 times what I was asking, so yeah, they aren't bad. If I'm honest I've never really bothered with sales pitches, purely because I've never sold outside DP, and the people that come on DP seem like the kind of people that don't want to site there for 20 minutes reading 'It is great' repeated 100 times in different formats. In all honesty, this is one of the reasons I started buying these books, so that I could practise selling effectively. Like I said, I probably will do some work with Clickbank and similar programs in the future, but right now I'm just not ready.
Well, most important, the ebooks that you are selling are unique and have good quality content. Try to maybe JV with some authors ebooks and promote their ebooks via your site. Doing a niche kind of ebooks would be great, and make sure that its not easily found on the Internet. I believe there's too many ebooks on Internet Marketing and focusing on Niche kind of target would be better. Good luck.
If the amount of your ebooks are not so many , you can try fastcommerce.com which can give you free service. 1. First, get a search Engine Optimized website from it. 2. The website will automatically publish your product catalog to Google Products. 3. It's free.