Sometimes selecting an easy way to process and automate the payment of your information products online can be a bit of a mine field. If you are looking for a simple answer to this question and a few easy ways to help you start making money from information products sooner, then read on.
You have researched your niche, developed the product, written the sales copy and put up the website. Now, the big question, how are you going to accept payment?
Well, the great thing is, that if you are selling information products like eBooks or software, or some form of electronically downloadable product, processing money online and then providing your customer with the product for them to download can be setup very easily.
As with so many things on the internet, there are many ways for you to achieve the same result, but here are 3 easy ways to accept money online. They may not be the cheapest, but many people use them to make large amounts of money online, so give them a try and see whether these could be a good solution for the information products you are going to be selling off your website.
1. Clickbank.com – you may be familiar with this option, but basically, creating an account with clickbank.com will allow you to process money online from your website, using their services. They will be able to process payments via VISA, MasterCard and PayPal and will also allow your customer to see what the value of their purchase is in their own currency.
They will process the payment for you and hold it in your clickbank.com account for payment into your bank account or via cheque. Once you have setup an account, you can setup your products in the products section, making sure that you provide clickbank.com with your product download or thank you page. Simply copy and paste the thank you website address or download page into the field when requested.
Clickbank.com will then provide you a purchase now link for the product that you have just created, which you then have your website master add to all the “order now” buttons on your website. This is a very straight forward website link, which would look something like this : http://product#.ClicbankID.pay.clickbank.net/
You can test the link and money processing of your product is going to work, by setting the product you want to test to test mode in clickbank.com. The other great thing about Clickbank.com, is that you can at any time login to your online account and change the prices of products that you are selling. You can also have multiple clickbank.com accounts for various products you sell.
Your customers account if they use MasterCard of VISA for they payment, will display “Clickbank.com” on their bank statement. Remember too, that people can also pay via PayPal into your Clickbank.com account, so you get the best of both worlds so to speak.
Remember, that the advantage of clickbank.com is that you can also set this up for affiliates using clickbank.com to sell your products and services on your behalf.
So you can have an army of people selling your product, with all the money from their sales and the payment to you and the affiliates being entirely managed by clickbank.com. Pretty neat for selling information products online.
2. PayPal for processing: PayPal is possibly one of the biggest and most used online payment processing services on the internet today. It is easy to setup and works in the same way as clickbank.com as far as accepting money via various payment methods and then holding this money until you are ready to transfer it to a linked bank account that you nominate. PayPal allows you to accept more payment options, including MasterCard, VISA, Discover.
Simply setup an account, if you don’t have one already. You will need to verify your bank account linked to the PayPal account, to make sure that they are paying the money that is going to be owed to you, into the right account.
When you are ready to setup your products in PayPal, login and then go to the Merchant Services area. Create your product and the price you are selling it. Remember, again you want to make sure you include the thank you or download website address for your product, so that your customers’ are sent there once the payment is accepted.
You will be given different types of PayPal payment buttons, that will show you how your buy now button will appear on your website. Once you have selected the button you are going to use, you can proceed.
The great thing is that PayPal will give you the exact HTML or website code to add to your website, that will display the “Buy Now” button that you selected, so there is no need for you to design this. Do this yourself or get your web master to add this code. The link to add this to your customers shopping cart is also already in the code as well. Really simple and straight forward, all you have to do is watch the money come in, and then transfer it out of PayPal once the balance has reached a certain level.
The advantage of PayPal and Clickbank.com is that the customer’s financial details are never shared with you, so the security of using such big and recognised online processing systems provides some reassurance to the customer.
3. Setup your own online merchant facility: Setting up your own merchant facility with your bank and arranging a payment gateway to process online payments is another option. This is generally more costly up front than the above options, but basically your costs per transaction can be greatly reduced. If you are going to go with this option, you will need to contact your bank to arrange a Merchant ID. You will need a payment processing gateway, of which there are many. Make sure the one you select will work with the banks systems. Remember to check what currencies you will be able to process. To make it easy and simple to sell information products, I would recommend online shopping cart systems like World Internet Office (1shoppingcart.com).
This will allow you to setup and accept payments for information products, but more importantly provide your customer with the thank you or download website address once the transaction is complete, automating your online business.
Personally, I use a combination of the all 3 of these services as it really depends on what I am doing, the product that I am selling and the price point. These are just 3 options, but I would certainly recommend, that if you are just looking for a quick and easy solution for accepting online payments and something that can be pretty much automated, I would go with PayPal or Clickbank.com.
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