Selling Stuff Cheap 2: Digital Stuff

I decided I wanted to offer just the DVD for "These Cards Don't Count" as a digitial download for DIY types. There are a lot of advantages to that for me. I dont need to spend money on either a DVD+R blank or building the props myself. I don't have to deal with shipping. And it takes me no time to prepare. All that is worth money, so I figured I could sell the digital version for half off the hard version's price.

Both Google and Pay Pal claim to be able to handle digital merchandise, but when you dig into it all they are really able to handle is selling a code and pointing someone at a URL. All the code creation/verification and download you have to build.

Now, its not that hard to build if you know some PHP BUT that requires a server that allows server-side scripting. Google sites doesn't. Furthermore, it means development time on my part, which is a cost. So i went searching for a no upfront fee digital download service I could use. I found two, Digital River and Kagi. Neither is cheap on fees. For my product its about $1.25 - $1.50 per sale, but with my other costs reduced so far I could afford that. The decider for me was that Digital river still does not host your content for download, while Kagi says they will (for free.)

I am currently awaiting approval of my Kagi merchant account. Then I'll report on how that went....