Sunday, August 9, 2009

An Ecommerce Solution for Selling Digital Products

- ECommerce Website Design and Creating Custom Paypal BuyNow Buttons -

One of the most important aspects to consider when selling digital products online, and implementing a new ecommerce website design, is how to provide a secure and easy payment solution for the immediate delivery of digital products. Paypal offers most of the ecommerce payment solutions necessary for an ecommerce website business, with a couple of minor, but significant exceptions.

When developing an online ecommerce web site that sells digital products, such as Ebooks and Edocs it is imperative to enable customers to automatically download the products immediately after they purchase them. This is one of the main reasons why people buy digital products online. However it is also just as important for authors and artists to protect their work from Internet hackers. Thus an ecommerce payment solution needs to protect both the buyer and the seller. Paypal addresses most of these needs by enabling online purchases via the use of encryption technology and BuyNow ecommerce Buttons.

However, there are limitations to Paypals standard ecommerce encryption and BuyNow Button tools that can make the online purchase of digital products less than a positive experience.
With Paypals standard merchant tools a seller has the ability to create unique encrypted Paypal payment buttons with unique return URL hyperlinks displayed on the final Paypal payment page, however there is a significant limitation.

The advantage of creating separate return URLs is that the seller can create separate download pages that have hyperlinks to each separate downloadable digital product. The problem, however, is that the URL is referenced by a fixed Return to Merchant title message on the final Paypal payment page. This Return to Merchant title is unclear to the buyer and consequently many customers do not click on it to go to the download page. Instead they get angry and frustrated and contact ecommerce website designers and webmasters to vent their frustrations.

The simplest way to solve this problem is to be able to change the return URL title Return to Merchant to something like Click here to Download Your Order. However this is easier said than done as it is impossible to do with Paypals standard Merchant tools for creating Paypal BuyNow buttons. The major reason for this is that most ecommerce website designers select to have their Paypal buttons encrypted when creating the Paypal buttons using Paypals BuyNow create buttons tool. They do this so that Internet hackers can not easily find the download pages on their website and effectively steal the product. The root problem however is that when the encryption option is selected under the Paypal BuyNow buttons utility tool, it becomes impossible to edit the Return to Merchant text.

The key solution to this problem is to use open source encryption tools such as OpenSSL (Open Source Secure Sockets Layer). OpenSSL is a free tool kit that can be found on the internet and that allows ecommerce website designers to create and encrypt custom Paypal buttons.

To learn more about ecommerce website design and creating and encrypting Paypal BuyNow buttons see: http://www.homeadditionplus.com/Bid-Sheet-Ebook-info/
Selling-Ebooks-Using-Encrypted-Paypal-Buttons-Ebook.htm

About the Author: Over the past 20+ years Mark Donovan has worked as an Electrical Engineer and Marketing Manager in the high tech industry. His other passion involves building homes and additions to homes. His projects have included: building a vacation home, building additions and garages on to existing homes, and finishing unfinished homes. For more home improvement information visit http://www.homeadditionplus.com and http://www.homeadditionplus.com/Bid-Sheet-Ebook-info/Selling-Ebooks-Using-Encrypted-Paypal-Buttons-Ebook.htm

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