by Michael Fitzmorgan
The DLGuard download sales software has been the perfect tool in recent years for web-masters wishing to independently sell digital media from their websites. This DLGuard review highlights the tools applicability for automating sales and downloads for an ebook business.
Over two years ago I was writing ebooks and researching ways to sell them online. At the time the options were (i) sell via one of the large online sites or (ii) sell from my own website. Each has their pros and cons and, of course, using a combination of both increases the chances of sales. I opted for using DLGuard to sell from my own domain.
The product’s scripts integrate in with your own website to provide shopping cart and checkout pages along with the back-end logic to communicate with payment processors. It has all the regular features you’d expect to see in a cart (incl promotional coupon support & multi-item sales).
Where it really starts to run your ebook publishing is after the sale is made. It emails customers a unique download link to their purchase. If link security is poor then there is a danger of it being shared and your ebooks mass-downloaded without you benefiting. DLGuard stops this link sharing through time-limiting the link and capping the number of download attempts. The customer & download tracking reports allow you to see if this is attempted.
Aside from the initial setting up the scripts and configuring your inventory of ebooks (file locations & meta-data) the sole time-consuming part was customizing the checkout pages to match my site. In hindsight, this could easily have been outsourced or simply gone with the default.
Using DLGuard allows you to capture customer data for mailing lists and securely sell your ebooks. The level of automation means you only need to intervene when refunds are requested. This frees you up to promote/market your ebooks and build even more traffic to your site.
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