Pay-Per-Download site up and running!
Robert Leitch | 29.08.2007 | Views: 377I think it's now safe to say that my pay-per-download site is finally up and running. There are still some 'tweaks' to be done, like making the markup and CSS standards-compliant, as well as some imporvements to the admin side and the overall design, but these are minor matters and otherwise all is going to plan.
At the moment the site only sells one item - my own e-book about teaching English in Russia - but in time I will add more. The first candidates to go up for sale will most likely be some of the MySQL databases that I downloaded and 'cleaned up' some time ago.
The site, which is at http://public.interlingua.co.uk is in a CSS-only template of my own creation (I refrain from using the word 'design'!) and a CSS version of the catalogue used on ToPetersburgWithLove. Tables are used only very sparingly and only where absolutely necessary.
It has an improved (but not yet finished :) admin panel and is integrated with 2checkout for accepting payments and authorising downloads. It can also, in theory, sell tangible goods alongside downloadables and offers a link for immediate download of free items.
In the nearest of time, I plan to put the final touches on the project in order to use it in 'commercial' projects (at the moment the back end is not really complete enough).
So far it has proven that it does the job it was designed to - people can come along and pay for instant downloads. An off-the-shelf shopping cart with similar functionality would have cost a small fortune (by my standards, anyway).
Since the main purpose was originally to sell the teaching e-book, it would have been mad to splash out so much money for selling an item which has such a narrow market.
Again, it may (or may not :) be interesting to note that this is another site that only has links from my own existing sites. Admittedly, this makes sense since the one item on sale is likely to be of most interest to the audience of VisaRus, but the fun fact is that it is working and making money (sales from the book are to be channeled into the renovation of VisaRus).
Already built into the system are test versions of:
- Affiliate commission system, based on the referring URL and not on tracking cookies or URL query strings (works only with IE, sadly not with Firefox). The system automatically emails the affiliate (optionally) when a sale is made and informs him of the commision he has earned.
- Author commission system - making it suitable for selling other people's work. The owner of the material sold receives an email informing him of the sale amount and the commission earned.
Both of the above still require some final tweaks and a login area to view reports and request payments, possibly also a mailer to send out daily/weekly/monthly earnings summaries, but all in good time.
The beauty of it is that it would allow authors to have a combined author/affiliate account, meaning that they could sell their own materials by advertising from a link on their homepage or blog and earn both sets of commission.
At the moment the default commissions are set to 50% for authors and 20% for affiliates, but those can be altered in the system settings for each user. This would mean that an author selling his own work via a link from his own site would receive 70% of the sale value, leaving me 30% from which to pay 2CO fees and run the site, which is not a bad deal at all.
Published in sections: Shopping Cart & Catalogue : Pay-Per-Download Site : Development : Interlingua Publications : InterLingua : Projects :
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bobs12 wrote on 13.11.2007 at 02:30:30:
Quick update: the site is working nicely at http://public.interlingua.co.uk, and I am working on a site to use 2checkout for activating memberships/adverts etc. Watch this space!
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