Below, you will find an unedited excerpt from my new book about building Internet-based businesses, Online Business from Scratch. To receive updates about the book, visit www.fromscratchbook.com.
There are several companies that produce software and services geared toward people selling digital products. Here are some software packages and services you might consider using as part of your product launch:
- ClickBank – ClickBank (www.clickbank.com) is an established platform for selling digital products, such as e-books, tools and guides. ClickBank will process orders for your digital products and deliver them to customers after purchase. ClickBank has a built-in affiliate marketing network, where other website owners can promote your products to their audience in exchange for a commission for each sale that they generate. ClickBank charges a transaction fee of 7.5% of the sale price plus $1.00 for each transaction.
- ClickFunnels – ClickFunnels (www.clickfunnels.com) is a web-based sales funnel creation platform that you can use to collect email opt-ins and sell products. ClickFunnels offers a friendly drag-and-drop interface and numerous premade templates that you can use to create landing pages and check-out pages quickly and painlessly. ClickFunnels is sold on a subscription basis and starts at $97.00 per month.
- Creative Market and Envato Market – Creative Market (www.creativemarket.com) and Envato Market (market.envato.com) are two digital marketplaces that allow designers, developers and other creators to sell things like WordPress themes and plug-ins, logo templates, audio clips, original photography, fonts, 3D rendering assets and more.
- Gumroad – Gumroad (www.gumroad.com) is a service that facilitates the sale and delivery of digital products. You can use Gumroad for your digital product’s check-out and ordering process. Gumroad will process payments on your behalf and will automatically deliver your digital product to your customer after purchase. Gumroad also offers some unique features, like light-weight digital rights management tools that discourages sharing of your products, license key creation, support for multiple currencies and a “pick your price” option. Gumroad charges creators $10.00 per month to use their platform plus a transaction fee of 3.5% plus 30 cents per charge.
- Leadpages – Leadpages (www.leadpages.com) is the industry-standard landing page creation software. You can use Leadpages’ drag-and-drop interface to easily create attractive landing pages that will push readers to sign-up for your email list and buy your products. Leadpages is sold on a subscription basis and starts at $25.00 per month.
- MemberMouse – MemberMouse (www.membermouse.com) is a WordPress plugin that transform your website into a membership website. The software creates a password-protected members-only portion of your website, facilitates the check-out and sign-up process for your membership site and integrates with a variety of payment providers to handle recurring payments. MemberMouse also comes with solid reporting software that will help you track important metrics, such as life-time customer value, retention rates and refund rates. MemberMouse is sold on a subscription basis and starts at $19.95 per month.
- Stripe – Stripe (www.stripe.com) is a credit card processing company that caters to software developers and online businesses. Stripe integrates with most shopping cart and membership website software packages. Stripe has an extensive API, which makes it very easy for developers to integrate their software with. Stripe can also process Bitcoin and ACH Payments. Stripe has no monthly fees and charges a credit card transaction fee of 2.9% of the charge amount plus 30 cents per transaction.
- Udemy – Udemy (www.udemy.com) is an online education platform that allows anyone to publish their own online courses. Udemy features state-of-the-art design tools that make creating an online course as simple as uploading your video recordings and your other content to their website. Udemy processes customer payments for you and handles all aspects of the delivery of your course and customer service. As a course creator, you keep 100% of the revenue when you promote your course and 50% of the revenue when Udemy promotes your course for you.
- WooCommerce – WooCommerce (www.woocommerce.com) is a WordPress add-on that adds e-commerce functionality to your existing website. You can use WooCommerce to setup a shopping cart on your website or sell digital products through your existing website. The primary benefit of using WooCommerce over another service to sell your digital products is that your customers can purchase products without ever having to leave your website. WooCommerce integrates with Stripe, Authorize.Net and many other payment providers. WooCommerce is also very extensible and comes with its own ecosystem of plugins and themes. WooCommerce itself is free, but there are a variety of plugins and themes for WooCommerce that cost money.