Automatic or Manual?
January 23, 2007 – 8:28 pm
No I'm not talking about cars (although I have one of each!), I'm talking about online product selling. If you sell a digital product online is it a better idea to set your script up to automatically send the product to the buyer on a successful confirmation of payment from your processor, or is it wiser in this day of online fraud to manually check each payment for suspicious activity before sending the product?
I realise we're working on the idea of AIS meaning Automated and of course checking each payment before emailing the product is not very automated, but unless you're selling 10s or 100s of products a day (which I'm not!) is that extra 2 minutes of checking worthwhile or not?
Last year I had a template sale and only a split second before I was about to go and pay the original owner for the template did I notice an abnormality. The buyer's name differed from the name on the email address. After questioning the buyer (and receiving no reply) I refunded the money. Of course in this situation I couldn't run an automated site anyhow as a purchase on my site then means I have to pay which ever template owner and get the files off the owner to send to the buyer. However on other sites I have the products ready.
I realise selling digital products means that in theory you've lost nothing if you send the product out and then lose payment but I guess it's the principle of 'giving' the item to the fraud buyer.
Would you trust a site that says they'll send your product to you within 24 hours of purchase? Or if you don't get an automatic download link straight after purchase would you do a chargeback? I guess in my opinion it depends on the site and the seller.
2 Responses to “Automatic or Manual?”
I wouldn't purchase a digital product that I could not immediately get hold of.
It's simple to put in some error checking to make sure everything checks out OK. If not, present a "download being authorised" message.
By Burty on Jan 24, 2007
I like the 'download being authorised', didn't think of that one
I'll usually set up an automated system myself, but after that fraud purchase last year it has given me food for thought, afterall how do you make an automated system check the name of the account holder against the name on the email address? I know with PayPal you can't, you check for the amount, the to email, the transaction status etc etc.
However, I've yet to have a play with Chance's Secure Delivery and am intrigued by what that can do!
By Sarah on Jan 26, 2007