Buying products that you never really get to touch or hold in your hands was an unthinkable concept years ago, and would have been deemed either a scam or an idiotic concept. But nowadays, with millions of people buying music, eBooks, videogames and movies online and then downloading them straight onto their hard drives and devices, the idea is suddenly brilliant.
This gives the chance to many creative and young minds, like you, to sell your creations without the hassle and costs of creating physical items. You can sell your art, games, books or music in a myriad of sites, but if you are looking into creating your own store, there are a few useful free tools out there for you.
Getting the Goods to Your Customers
The trickiest part about digital content is that you need a system to upload your goods and to send them to your clients after a payment is made. Doing it yourself by providing some link once payment is made is unwise, as it is cumbersome and time consuming, and there is no guarantee once a purchase is done, you customer won’t share the link. Your best option is to use a tool such as eCommerce for WordPress. Essentially, through the use of several plugins and widgets, you will be able to set up an easy and secure system for your customers to download your products automatically after a purchase, ensuring things like product licenses are respected and the download link is not abused or filtered out.
Payment methods
Another issue to keep in mind when you want to sell your digital goods is the payment. You don’t want to limit yourself on that one, so your best option is to find a shopping cart payment system that offers many different payment methods. Even if your goods are digital, many of your customers might find it easier to pay with cash or checks, not only with credit or debit cards. There are plenty of people that for several reasons don’t have a credit card, like age or bank issues, or theirs is just not suited for online payment. This is not a problem at all and you can easily find a payment gateway that lets all kinds of customers buy from you by using other methods.
Go Abroad
Dealing with currency exchange and conversion, language barriers and such other problems derived from selling your goods abroad might seem like it’s not worth the trouble, but think about it. You have already to your advantage that you don’t need to worry about shipping costs and many of the other problems that arise from it. Losing the chance to sell to the millions of people that live outside of the borders of your country is bad for you. That’s why you definitely want to add an app to your online store that helps you out on this matter. Many of the payment gateways mentioned above will also have an option to deal with different kinds of currency, and you can find another app that lets your customers set the shop to their language without you having to go through the impossible task of translating, editing and downloading every single instance of text you update on your shop.
