Most of you know that I’ve been selling a WordPress System for Adsense publishers for a few months now. I’ve also just launched my second product, ClickBump JumpStart. The success of this system and the comments I’ve received from the owners have been complete validation of the value of these products.
With two products now shipping, and more on the way, I went out searching for a means of securing my product thank you page and download routine (vs what I’ve found lots of people do by just changing the URL at frequent intervals).
This, plus the fact that I found, much to my dismayed surprise, that lots of people bookmark their product download links on delicious.com which makes them instantly available to anyone searching for your product! Lots of people are getting ripped off right now and probably have no idea.
After several days of research, along with some “pulling my hair out” moments trying to figure out how to manage Paypal IPN, PayDotCom and ClickBank APIs via PHP, I finally found a little gem of a service called Digital Product Download that takes care of it all for as little as $5 a month!
I figure the time I’ve spent trying to figure all this out, and the peace of mind from not having to manually manage product download integrity was more than worth a few years of secure hosting and payment gateway protection provided by the folks at PDC.
The kicker for me was that they also offer affiliate program management for my products, all for $5 a month. Someone pinch me! No per transaction fees like PayDotCom or ClickBank. Another critical thing they do automatically is to prevent the user from manipulating or altering the price prior to Paypal checkout. They check all of this information before authorizing the download.
I’ll be doing a separate review on the DPD affiliate management console and tools, but thus far its been super simple to add an affiliate program to my product mix. As I’ve already mentioned, but it bears repeating, there are no transaction fees for managing affiliates (like with PayDotCom and ClickBank). You get all of this included with your $5 monthly subscription and they interface with those services too if you just need secure download protection of your files.
The process of adding affiliates is as simple as (1) Enabling the affiliate option to your product (you can manage up to 10 products with the basic $5 a month service and they offer incredible value if you have more products to sell and manage) and (2) Sending your affiliates a link to your affiliate sign up page. You can also set up custom affliate links for specific affiliates that you want to track separately. Its a pretty incredible value and very well done from what I’ve seen thus far.
Anyway, this review is about how they offer secure storage of your products and that’s really what they excel at. They can replace your Thank You / Download page altogether and provide a secure, expirable, unique link to allow paid customers to download their purchases.
One really cool thing they offer for e-book authors, is the ability to watermark your PDF file with the customer’s email address and order id information. This helps tremendously to prevent unauthorized sharing of your file since, who want’s to share a file with their email and order information on every page? Its pretty ingenious in its simplicity.
The setup process is perhaps the crown jewel of the DPD service and its the best I’ve seen anywhere. Once you’ve signed up for a DPD account (free for 30 days to try with no restrictions) they lead you through the process of adding your products in just a few steps with a drag and drop uploader for your files.
They even have the capability to allow you to combine products into one package. For example, in my case, I just bundle everything that the customer gets into a single zip file, but if I wanted to have multiple files in which the user could download with their single purchase, I could do that. Very impressive.
The real benefit of this service is that you don’t have to worry with PHP scripts or APIs or 100 page Paypal IPN manuals in order to secure your Thank You pages and product download links. DPD manages all that for you and more!
I am highly recommending the DPD service to all my customers who offer digital downloads, whether software products or e-books, you owe it to yourself to check out this service.
Click here to sign up for DPD with a special 30 day trial.
