Derick W J Tan

Alright I’ve done some more research on how to sell stuff online and apparently it’s quite easy to do it and have it done securely as well.
By the way, this post might sound like an advertisement but it’s not.

There are basically two major items here.

- Paypal
- E-Junkie

I’m sure we’ve all heard of paypal but if you haven’t then it’s basically this website that allows you to easily send or receive money online, by creating an account (totally free) and then topping it up with money from either your bank account or your credit card.

E-Junkie is basically what’s going to turn the website an online shop.

What E-Junkie does is that it will link up with my paypal account and create a ‘Buy now’ button. If you want to buy my eBook, all you have to do is click that button and it’ll take you to a paypal page where you fill in your account (This means you need to have a paypal account of course) details to make the payment.
I think it might be possible to just pay through a credit card without a paypal account too.

Once you’ve made the payment, E-Junkie will automatically redirect you to a secured page with a randomly generated web address. All you have to do is click that address and you’ll be able to download my eBook straight from their servers. The randomly generated web address is actually to help me prevent people from spreading the link to other people. And it adds another security layer for me by allowing me to set an expiry date for that link. This means that after you receive your link and you’ve downloaded it, I can set the link to expire after a certain amount of days or after a certain amount of downloads.

Of course, if you need to download the file again but the link has expired, I can easily arrange for some validation thing like a screenshot of the payment transfer, and then I’ll just either e-mail you the file or re-activate your download link.

In other words, with E-Junkie, you don’t have to wait for me to send you the eBook after you’ve made your payment. And I don’t have to worry about making sure that every single person who made a payment has received their eBook. It’s all automatic.

And I can easily create step-by-step guides for the entire process and also on how to create your own paypal account.

Everything up there is free for you except the part where you pay me money for the eBook. But I am required to pay a monthly fee of 5USD for the E-Junkie service, which to me sounds very cheap and reasonable considering all the services that they’re providing.

Ultimately what this means is that it is very possible for me to create a safe and secured online shop – much safer and much more secured than most blogshops that you shop at.

And that’s really the most important thing.

With that issue settled, I think it’s very likely that I’ll be selling eBooks in the future once I’m done with Project M.I.G.H.T. which, again, I assure you will remain free. I might, however, compile the entire Project M.I.G.H.T. series into a single eBook, or five different eBooks, and sell them as a bundle for like $5 or $10 (lol, it’s so cheap yet I still make a killing) which means it’ll only cost you a dollar or two for each story. Then maybe I’ll employ some simple marketing strategies and add like exclusive companion stories to the bundle to trick lure entice convince you guys into buying it =D

So what’s next?

More research.

I need to find out more about this whole online shop thing. I’ll be asking my friends who have their own online shops to see if there are any problems that they face that I should take note of, or whether they have any advice for me. And then I’ll probably get another poll up or a survey to see how willing people are to pay $5 for an eBook, or whether they’re even interested in buying an eBook for that matter.

Honestly though, unless the survey comes back with like a 5% will buy and 95% will not buy result, I’m most probably going to do it.

- Derick