Product Selling Online
October 3, 2007 – 11:18 pm
I'm finally putting the finishing touches to our main income site which uses AdSense, Text Link Ads, Affiliate Sales and Products for its income streams. I know it's a lot to rely on one site, and that was never my intention, but hey we may as milk as much out of it whilst we can!
My work on the site over the past year (it's taken far longer than hoped) has been to take our products, which were sold in groups, and set them all up to sell as single items. The reason the work has taken so long, besides lack of time and motivation, is because I'm writing the scripts to deal with the sales and auto downloads from scratch.
Unfortunately for this site I cannot use the Digital Product Delivery that I wrote about recently. The reason being that we have over 80 products already on the site and a further 20 or so to add afterwards, plus I would not be able to set up a shopping cart using an external service.
So what's the plan? Fairly simple and straightforward front end scripting to allow visitors to add one or more items to their basket. They can of course view and update the basket, then on confirming their purchase they create an account and go on to PayPal to pay for the products. Using PayPal's IPN (Instant Payment Notification) system I can automatically update the database to show the user has paid for their products, so that by the time they return back to the site and log into their account they'll have access to download their purchase(s).
The front end work is pretty standard and works the same for any type of shopping script. The user's login/admin area is what will take longer to do simply because I've not set one up before. However it's also the part where I hope to push some extra products, perhaps offer previous buyers the opportunity to buy new products first, or maybe at a discount for a limited time. To be honest, the login area will be more fun as there is plenty I can do with it!
So far I'm almost finished with the front end work and at the bare minimum I need to set up the download area for buyers. All in all this shouldn't actually take me that long. I just need to sort myself out a little more!
