How To Stop Loosing Money Selling Infoproducts
In a recent post i adressed one of the TWO major problems of selling digital products: the delivery nightmare (1).
Not delivering your infoproducts timely and properly will result in a loss of customers and money.
But you might loose even more money without being aware of it by …
… dishonest customers and determined thieves!
Yes, sad but true. The wonderful weird and wicked world of making money online is not only full of scams, skunks and ripp-offs. Oh no, theft and fraud are common issues too, pobrecito.
So better get prepared to face them.
Whenever you sell a digital product online, there are various ways for a customer to steal from you.
Ok, you could verify all your payments manually - which is very time consuming - and check everything yourself, to keep the damage minimal.
But if you are like most ebook- and eBay-sellers, you might just be using an autoresponder system to deliver your products.
If you got one of the “smarter” autoresponders, you can set it up to respond to the payment notification that you get from PayPal or other payment processors. This way, whenever a “payment received” email arrives, your autoresponder will send out a copy of your digital product - blindly.
Also, when you use an autoresponder to send an email to your fulfillment house to autoship a CD or a DVD, you have no real
idea if your customer paid you enough to cover your costs (lets say it costs you $9 to create and ship a CD through a fulfillment company).
If your customer decides to be tricky and only sends you 1 cent, your autoresponder will still be triggered and send
the order (yeah, and you are out $8.99) - blindly again.
And it’s the “blindly” that will get you every time.
You see, even the smartest autoresponder can’t figure out if you were actually paid.
First of all, payment notification emails can be forged and a lot of buyers know that.
Secondly: what happens if your customers manipulate your payment link (what’s really easy to do), and sent you .01 instead of the real amount that you are charging? An autoresponder doesn’t know how to detect that either.
Third, what if your customers are paying you with an e-check? Of course, you didn’t really get paid until that e-check clears, but your autoresponder is going to fire up and send the product anyway. You have to hold your breath and hope that the check doesn’t end up bouncing.
And fourth, what if you sell into a global market and your buyer paid you in Yen instead of your actual currency? You could end up with .06 cents instead of what you were expecting to receive for real. Again, your autoresponder isn’t going to care and your customer gets a real splendid bargain.
You need to protect your infoproduct business by using a really smart payment verification!
You need a solution that will take care of theft too.
Because determined thieves will simply click the “view source” button on their browser and examine your payment and return links for clues to where you product is stored.
Then they simply type in the URL and bazong … off they go with a free copy!
And if that wasn’t bad enough, many of these jesters will post your return URL on hacker message boards and social bookmarking sites.
And before you know it, hundreds or thousands of people are stealing your digital products!
Even more worse: some of them not only will steal from you, they’ll set up their own web sites and sell YOUR product for themselves.
Sure, you could use PayPal’s encrypted button security, but the day it was released a whole underworld community went to work to learnhow to hack it. Plus, if you accept other payment processors who have less secure methodology it’s even easier.
Regardless of the security protection your payment processor offers, there’s NOTHING that beats not having your return URL appear anywhere in the process. The concept of a return URL is old fashioned and obsolete.
But people can’t steal when there’s no return URL existing!
That’s the kind of bullet-proof protection you need if you want to run a profitable selling business, and that’s the kind of protection you should expect from a top-notch digital product delivery system.
If you use a system that handles the entire transaction from verifying payment to delivering the product properly, you will benefit from
- an automated, unattended product delivery 24/7 even while you’re offline or sleeping
- full payment verification
- no stolen products
Summing it up, the investment in a very good delivery system for your infoproducts might be one of the most important steps you can make to secure the future of your online business.
To Your success,
Michael
Tags: Business Building Basics, delivery, delivery system, digital products, earn online, ebay, fraud, free report, making money online, online-profits, security, theft
2 comments
hi michael,
first of all thank you for visiting my blog and drop some valuable comment. i appreciate that.
if you ask me, my answer was that i’m follower of that market(so far). i’m not a big company and not enough to MAKE the market yet. but my ambition is to think towards that and i know this is not an easy process
edwin’s last blog post..How much to advertise here
You’re welcome, Edwin!
Don’t underestimate yourself. You may be no big company, but you can try and make the maerket for yourself, your blog etc.
Hope to see more of you in the future …*-)
Michael
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