Tutorial:
How to Put Ebook Sales and Delivery on Auto-pilot

Introduction

This short tutorial is a snapshot of one part of the overall process of publishing and selling ebooks over the Internet. It focuses entirely on the issues of accepting credit-card payment for your ebooks and then automatically delivering them once payment is complete.

If you need help with broader issues like creating your own ebooks, designing websites to sell ebooks, promoting ebooks, and so on, then please download your copy of "Your Step-by-Step Guide to Success on the Internet". This is a fully comprehensive guide to every aspect of successful ebook publishing. In it you'll learn how to identify the best ideas for best-seller ebooks, how to convert those ideas into a finished product and how to promote and sell that product online. Everything is explained in simple, but very detailed, steps. To get your copy, click here.

And now, on with the tutorial...

Some thoughts on accepting payment online

As with any online venture, credibility is vital to the success of your ebook business. It doesn't matter whether you're selling your own original titles or titles with resale rights, if you don't give off an aura of credibility and reliablility, your business will suffer.

Nowhere is this more important than in your online payment system.

If your customers fear that there's any risk involved in entering their credit-card details on your site, then they will not enter them. Complete security is absolutely essential, and your customers must be sure that this complete security exists.

The other crucial factor in any online ordering system, is that it be both easy and quick.

With those points in mind, let's look at putting a secure, easy and quick payment system on your site.

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The 'traditional' complex approach...

In the normal scheme of things setting your website up to handle receipt of payment by secure credit-card transaction can be both complex and expensive.

Usually you need to have the following components in place to set up a secure shopping place online:

• Shopping cart software:
  To allow your customers select the product they wish to order.
  
• A merchant account:
  An account with a credit-card clearing bank which facilitates the transaction of funds from the customer's credit-card account to your bank account.
  
• A secure payment gateway:
  A secure web page where customers can enter their personal and credit-card details without fear that they'll be intercepted by others.
  
• A credit-card authorization service or software:
  To check the validity of the credit-card details entered by the customer.
  

There are many ways you could approach putting these four basic components in place.

You could, for example, buy shopping cart software with built-in credit-card authorization facility, open a merchant account online, and use the secure payment gateway offered by your webhost (if they offer one).

Alternatively, you could open a merchant account with a local bank, pay an annual fee to get your own secure payment gateway license, use the shopping cart provided by your webhost and use a service like Authorize.Net to verify the credit-card's validity.

In short, there are many ways to approach setting yourself up for e-commerce, and, even for a small budget there are solutions available.

Fortunately, there's now an easier way...

Until recently, no matter what type of e-commerce setup you opted to put in place, the one thing you were required to have was your own merchant account.

A merchant account is an account with a credit-card clearing bank which facilitates the transaction of funds from the customer's credit-card account to your bank account.

Setting up a merchant account can be tricky business. And if you're not careful it can also be expensive.

Now, however, you can start selling online without the need for a merchant account.

In fact, not only can you begin selling without needing a merchant account, but also without needing shopping cart software, a secure payment gateway or a credit-card authorization service.

This can be done thanks to the advent of order fulfillment services known as third-party processors.

With these services, just about anybody can start selling online in no time at all, with a minimum of fuss and with no technical know-how whatsoever.

How do third-party processors work?

The principle of third-party processors is quite simple.

The processor becomes the merchant (i.e. the business that is selling the product) and you become a supplier to the processor.

Your customer pays the processor for the product and the processor in turn pays you for supplying the product. The processor charges you a percentage of the sales value for each transaction.

Because you're not selling the product directly to the customer you don't need a merchant account, credit-card authorization or a secure payment gateway. The processor takes care of all of this, because it's they who are making the sale.

In fact, all that you need to do to get set up, is place a simple hyperlink on your web page (or e-book or newsletter or whatever) that the visitor clicks to order the product.

This link will have your product information 'built into it' and will lead the customer to the secure payment gateway on the processor's server.

In the secure payment gateway the customer enters his/her credit-card details as usual. Once the payment has been authorized the customer is taken to your 'Thank You' page where he/she can download your e-book.

Most processors will send you a confirmation e-mail every time you make a sale, and you can also go online and view sales reports for your product.

These services will also take care of refunding your customers if they're not happy with your product or if they dispute the purchase.

In fact, they'll take care of just about every aspect of the selling process, leaving you time to get on with the altogether more satisfying job of promoting your business.

The processor takes a percentage of every sale made, and sends you pay-checks for your products on a regular basis (usually every week, every two weeks or every month).

Thanks to this payment structure you can be sure that your e-commerce system is only costing you money when you make a sale and, instead of having hundreds or thousands of customers, you have just one -- your payment processor.

The main players

This is an overview of some of the main third-party processors operating on the Internet.

ClickBank
ClickBank enjoys a very good reputation and is the service of choice for a huge number of websites involved in the ebook and software businesses. To find out more about ClickBank, click here.

PayPal
PayPal is probably the most well-known third-party payment processor. It also differs from most other payment processors in a number of ways. To find out more about PayPal, click here.

Other processors
For a brief overview of a number of other main third-party payment processors click here.

Automatically delivering your e-book

Once your customers have paid for your e-book, they'll be directed to a page on your website where you thank them for their order and give them the book they've just ordered.

Basically, this is the 'delivery' side of the e-commerce setup.

To learn how to set this up click here.

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Using this with Resale Rights Sales Pages

When you buy the resale rights to an ebook or software, you usually get a sales page to go with it. In most cases you'll get the page, together with any graphics it contains, packaged together in a ZIP file. To get that sales page online and making money for you, just follow this procedure...

• Unzip the sales page on your PC. The page and the images may all be in one directory or separate directories.

• Open the sales page using your website creation software. Change all the order links on the page to your own order link using the URL from your third-party processor.

• Open the Thank you/Download page and set up the links to point to the ebook files (as explained here). If a download page isn't included in the resale rights package, you'll have to create one of your own. Simply use the layout of the sales page as the basis for your download page.

• Using FTP software, like WS_FTP, or using your web software publishing tool, send the sales page (together with the images), the download page and the ebook file(s) on to your host server. (If you're looking for a reliable webhost, I highly recommend the Ultimate Marketing Center which includes high quality webhosting - and a whole LOT more - for one low fee).

• Start promoting! (This article will will give you a great start).

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