One of the questions I am most commonly asked by my readers is how do I sell digital products online?
E-commerce sites can be complicated to set up but, thankfully, I can recommend two very cheap and very easy ways to sell digital products online with E-junkie and Clickbank.
Selling digital products with E-junkie
E-junkie pros and cons
- $5/month (free for the first few weeks)
- Product is uploaded to their server and distributed by them
- Money goes direct to you (PayPal)
- Annoying site with Flash
- Create and manage an affiliate program for your product – you have to “manually” pay your affiliates each month
- Multiple payment choices for buyers: PalPal, Google Payout, Credit Cards, etc.
- Unlimited number of products, bandwidth and transactions
E-junkie first came to my attention through Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income. If a clever chap like him is using this service, it can’t be too bad! It may have a terrible name but it does have a good reputation.
E-junkie set up
I found with E-junkie I could literally set everything up in 5 minutes.
- Set up a PayPal business account
- Set up an E-junkie account, giving them your PayPal email address
- Upload your product and get the button code
- Paste the code into your site next to the product
Your website visitors will see an e-Junkie “BUY NOW” button which will take them to an external page where they can choose their payment process (Credit Card, PayPal, etc.) and confirm their order.
However you may want to amend the code to show your own purchase button rather than using the generic E-junkie one. If you wish to do this you can. The only important bit of the code you get from E-junkie is the link.
E-junkie integrates through a default business PayPal set up so you should get the money from each sale straightaway. However, I had to manually approve my first sale through PayPal (meaning my first customer had to wait for their product!) I solved this by changing a setting in my PayPal profile but keep an eye out for this.
E-junkie is an extremely popular platform – cheap and featurefull.
Selling digital products with Clickbank
Clickbank pros and cons
- $50 one-off charge (plus they take 7.5% of product price)
- Product remains on your server
- Customers pay Clickbank and then Clickbank pays you
- Ugly site but at least it doesn’t have Flash!
- Create and manage an affiliate program for your product – bigger affiliate market than E-junkie and your affiliate payments are taken care of automatically
- Multiple payment choices for buyers: PalPal, Google Payout, Credit Cards, etc.
- Unlimited number of products and transactions
Clickbank is another long-established, highly recommended option for selling digital products online. It is particularly popular in the info-product market and has a real “Internet Marketing” feel to it. It is the place to go to find information products to sell as an affiliate.
Clickbank set up
Setting up a product for sale for the first time at Clickbank will take you a bit longer than at E-junkie but it really isn’t difficult. Here’s what you need to do:
- Set up your sales page with the price, the 2 month money back guarantee visible and your contact page link clearly visible. Add this code to your “Buy” button: <a href=”http://ITEM.VENDOR.pay.clickbank.net” target=”cb”>CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE</a> – replace ITEM with the item number of the product (1 if it is your first product) and replace VENDOR with your Clickbank username
- Set up the thank you page with a link to download the product
- After setting up an account with Clickbank go to Account Settings > My Products > Add Product and fill in the form
- Perform a test purchase. Go Account Settings > My Site > Testing Your Products > Edit and you will get some fake Credit Card details in order to make a purchase for which nobody pays!
- Wait for Clickbank to approve your product
Clickbank will then get back to you within 24 hours to say whether or not the product has been approved. They are really helpful if you have made any errors.
This is only the first time. You don’t have to get your product approved this way for any of the subsequent items you wish to sell.
The money you make is sent to you by check or can be paid direct. You pay a $2.50 processing charge so increase the payment threshold to make sure that doesn’t eat into your profits!
General tips for selling digital products online
With payment gateways, affiliates and other things to consider selling products can be a confusing business. However, it is important to keep things ultra simple for the end user.
- Get other people involved – show your sales page to as many people as possible, persuade friends and family members to buy your product (give them the money) and see what they say
- Buy your own product – this isn’t going to cost you much money (7.5% of the sale price in the case of Clickbank) but it’s well worth it for the piece of mind
- Show currency conversions – typically the products will be for sale in US Dollars and the payment gateways will show conversions to local currencies on checkout. However, it won’t hurt to put some Euro and Pound Sterling conversion estimates on the sales page for your customers. Just make sure they realise they are estimates!
Which is the best way to sell digital products?
It depends on what you’re looking for. If you have an info-product that you are hoping to get affiliates to sell in great numbers then definitely go for Clickbank as they will have greater numbers of potential affiliate partners looking for products.
If you just want to sell a digital product and you’re not too bothered about getting affiliate partners then E-junkie is more simple to set up and provides an excellent service.
Over to you now!
Have you ever sold digital products through a website? Ever used E-junkie or Clickbank? What have your impressions been?
Or are you thinking of doing this for yourself or a client? Was this article useful?
And, tweet me, like me, +1 me! Thanks.
The links to Clickbank and E-junkie sites are affiliate links and I will make a few dollars if you sign up for their services after having clicked them. If you don’t want me to make any money just Google them and I’ll forgive you! 😉
Nice article.
Personally i like clickbank and plimus.
I’ve heard good things about Payloadz and Plimus – there are certainly many to choose from. Thanks, Earl.
I have only used ClickBank as a publisher, so I haven’t tried selling a product. While it is a popular site, I also notice that there are some questionable products available for selling.
Hello Paul. Yes Clickbank does have an IM feel to it. I’ve never seen any questionable products there but it wouldn’t surprise me that there are some. The user sees the Clickbank logo on the checkout screen and Clickbank on their credit card or PayPal bill. So if you think your users will have negative connotations with that it’s certainly something you have to factor in.
Hi Rob,
Great sharing, as I am pretty new to IM, so only heard of Clickbank, will check out the E-junkie.
Cheers!
Best of luck, Richard, if E-junky’s the right fit in terms of functionality – they won’t let you down.
Hi Rob,
Good article. I’m the founder of DigitalDeliveryApp which you might be interested in as it’s quite similar to e-junkie but without the annoying flash interface. We also integrate with Clickbank so you can have access to the worlds largest affiliate marketplace whilst protecting your downloads (Clickbank just points to a URL by default). In addition we’ve have lots of additional functionality not available on the other servies such as the ability to send updates for free, subscriptions and an API, so it might be worth a look.
Anyway sales pitch over! Keep up the good work,
George
Hello George, good sales pitch! You’ve found a great niche in that you have all the affiliates Clickbank can offer but with the security of delivering the file yourself plus other benefits as well. For this you have to pay $15/month? Great idea! I wish you all the best for DigitalDeliveryApp in the future.
Rob, that’s right. We’re actually going to be launching our own affiliate system soon too, so you can manage your own affiliates and not pay Clickbank’s exorbitant fees. One to watch for the future!
Thanks for the heads up, George. 🙂
I went with E-Junkie when I set up my first product. I didn’t want to pay the upfront fee for Clickbank since cash was really tight at the time.
Looking back, it would have been cheaper to go with Clickbank since I didn’t really promote the product well (it’s been in revision for Version 2 for a couple months to re-try). If I had some sales volume and/or more than 1 product (which I will soon) then E-Junkie is cheaper cost wise as you can host up to 10 products for the $5/month.
The one area you didn’t mention was payment of affiliates. E-Junkie leaves that responsibility to you while Clickbank takes care of payments. That is one of the reasons that affiliates like Clickbank so much — no worries about someone stiffing you if you promote their product.
Hello again, Bill, thanks for that. I’ve actually amended the text to incorporate that important point. I hadn’t stayed with E-junkie long enough to find that out. I think I’m marginally better off selling an e-book through Clickbank as well.
I never sold digital products yet but I’m planning to, that’s why I find this article so helpful. I realized that e-junkie is the best choice for me since I don’t want to get involved with affiliate partners. I just want to sell the product on my own website and see what happens. Thanks for the tips!
You’ll find E-junkie super easy to set up, Cristian. Best of luck – let me know how you get on.
Great piece of information. I personally, use clickbank dot com for my ebusiness.
Thank you, Joby.
Nice Article! Personal I use clickbank and click2sell
Jon Smith
Thanks, Jon, I’ve heard good things about Click2Sell.
This is very valuable information because I am planning to sell a digital product. After reading your review, I prefer to choose Clickbank since it is easiest to manage and bigger affilate connections.
Thank you for share great reviews about selling digital products!
Glad you liked it, Wilfried. Best of luck selling your digital product. I’ve been really happy with Clickbank.
I have accounts with all of them. It looks like a lot of product launches are moving to clicksure lately.
I think they are IM product launches that couldn’t get approval on Clickbank, Joshua. But it’ll be interesting to see how Clicksure goes from here.
I love your blog.. very nice colors & theme.
Did you make this website yourself or did you hire someone to do it for you?
Plz answer back as I’m looking to create my own blog and would like to know where u got this from. t
The theme is Streamline from Genesis but I modified it quite a bit. You can search on this blog for posts about how to use Genesis
I’m thinking of setting mine up with clickbank, its a tennis ebook, think I will bite the bullet and use clickbank. Should I get someone to set up the sales page or is it easy to do myself you think, thanks.
Hello Thomas, Best of luck with selling your new e-book – it’s an exciting time! You don’t necessarily need someone to set up the sales page it’s a matter of copying and pasting a link from Clickbank to the buy button or buy link on the WordPress page. Some people like to create a new page template in WordPress and remove the header, the footer and the sidebar to remove all distractions from the all-important buy button.