You’ve no doubt made one or two (or a million!) online purchases. At this point, two decades after the rise of online shopping, it probably seems pretty straightforward.
And it is. You put something in a cart, enter your shipping and billing address, enter your credit card number, click the buy button and boom… a few days later (or immediately, if it’s an electronic download) your product arrives.
That’s the buying side of online purchasing. The selling side, while a bit more complicated, is also very straightforward and it’s what I’d like to share with you today.
In short, online selling involves four parts:
1. The Product. The first thing to do is to create your product. It could be a physical object, but if you’re new to all this and just want to get your feet wet, a downloadable something is a better place to start. That way you don’t have to worry about shipping, returns, taxes and all that. Let’s take the example of an e-book.
Once your book is written and edited, you’ll want to add your logo and copyright and contact info to the document and have it formatted for sale. I suggest turning it into a .PDF (Portable Document Format), which is something you can do easily in Microsoft Word. This preserves the format of the document and makes it easy to print (it also makes it a bit harder to steal).
2. The Sales Page. You’ll need to create a “sales page ” somewhere on your website. This doesn’t have to be complicated. The idea is to simply describe what the product is, include some testimonials (if you have them) and explain the benefits. There’s a ton of information on the web regarding how to do this well to maximize sales, but for starters, the important thing is to just create a page (you can always improve it later).
Here’s a very simple example from my friend Michael Katz, who’s offering a podcast recording for sale.
3. The Buy Button. The buy button is the thing that your visitors (now almost customers!) use to pay you for your product. Here as well, there are many more complicated options, but I recommend PayPal to get started.
Simply open up a PayPal Business Account (it’s free) and follow the instructions for getting your account “verified.” Verification links your PayPal account to your bank account, something that makes it easy to move the money out when a sale is made.
To create your buy button, log into your PayPal account and click the Merchant Services Tab. You’ll see a box that says “Create payment buttons for your website.” Click that and you’ll be guided through a series of questions about your product. You can create a custom button if you like or just use the standard PayPal button graphic.
After you’ve created your button, PayPal will display the html code that you’ll need to add to your sales page. Drop this in (or ask your web master to do it) and your button will magically appear!
4. The Download Page. During the button set up process, PayPal will ask where to redirect customers after the purchase is complete. The answer is your download page.
The download page is simply a place where you thank customers for their purchase and post the PDF for download. Make sure your product is uploaded to your website before you set this up. If you know how to do this, great. If not, just e-mail the PDF to the web master and he can easily get it done for you.
That’s it! Four steps, all very doable.
Well, what are you waiting for? Time to start selling products and making money from all your years of knowledge and experience.Let me know how it goes!