An Ecommerce Solution for Selling Digital Products

By Mark J. Donovan

ECommerce Website Design and Creating Custom Paypal “BuyNow” Buttons

One of the most important aspects to consider when selling digital products online, and implementing a new ecommerce website design, is how to provide a secure and easy payment solution for the immediate delivery of digital products. Paypal offers most of the ecommerce payment solutions necessary for an ecommerce website business, with a couple of minor, but significant exceptions.

When developing an online ecommerce web site that sells digital products, such as Ebooks and Edocs it is imperative to enable customers to automatically download the products immediately after they purchase them. This is one of the main reasons why people buy digital products online. However it is also just as important for authors and artists to protect their work from Internet hackers. Thus an ecommerce payment solution needs to protect both the buyer and the seller. Paypal addresses most of these needs by enabling online purchases via the use of encryption technology and “BuyNow” ecommerce Buttons.

However, there are limitations to Paypal’s standard ecommerce encryption and “BuyNow” Button tools that can make the online purchase of digital products less than a positive experience.

With Paypal’s standard merchant tools a seller has the ability to create unique encrypted Paypal payment buttons with unique return URL hyperlinks displayed on the final Paypal payment page, however there is a significant limitation.

The advantage of creating separate return URLs is that the seller can create separate download pages that have hyperlinks to each separate downloadable digital product. The problem, however, is that the URL is referenced by a fixed “Return to Merchant” title message on the final Paypal payment page. This “Return to Merchant” title is unclear to the buyer and consequently many customers do not click on it to go to the download page. Instead they get angry and frustrated and contact ecommerce website designers and webmasters to vent their frustrations.

The simplest way to solve this problem is to be able to change the return URL title “Return to Merchant” to something like “Click here to Download Your Order”. However this is easier said than done as it is impossible to do with Paypal’s standard Merchant tools for creating Paypal “BuyNow” buttons. The major reason for this is that most ecommerce website designers select to have their Paypal buttons encrypted when creating the Paypal buttons using Paypal’s “BuyNow” create buttons tool. They do this so that Internet hackers can not easily find the download pages on their website and effectively steal the product. The root problem thought is that when the encryption option is selected under the Paypal “BuyNow” buttons utility tool, it becomes impossible to edit the “Return to Merchant” text.

After much research into this problem I was able develop a process and solution to this ecommerce problem. The solution enables ecommerce website designers to change the “Return to Merchant” text AND encrypt the “Custom” Paypal button. This solution has been documented in a new Ebook titled “Selling Ebooks Using Encrypted Paypal Buttons”. The Ebook provides easy-to-understand, step-by-step instructions for solving this problem on both Windows XP and Windows 2000 computers. Within 1-2 hours of reading this Ebook, ecommerce website designers can begin creating their own unique and custom Paypal “BuyNow” buttons. For more information on this product see: “Selling Ebooks Using Encrypted Paypal Buttons Ebook”

About the Author: Over the past 20+ years Mark Donovan has worked as an Electrical Engineer and Marketing Manager in the high tech industry. His other passion involves building homes and additions to homes. His projects have included: building a vacation home, building additions and garages on to existing homes, and finishing unfinished homes. For more home improvement information visit http://www.homeadditionplus.com/ and http://www.homeaddition.blogspot.com/