Selling eBooks is a good way to make money at home. Before you start selling eBooks there are a few things you need to do: 1) get a clear understanding your market and what is in demand, 2) find good authors, 3) figure out whether you are going to sell individual downloads or a service. You will want to know if you are selling downloadable eBooks or if you are going to allow people some access before they buy the EBook.
You could for example allow people to download the E-Book before paying, read part of it, and then either pay to download part two, or get a password to read a second part. You will want to think about what rights your customers get. Is the E-Book just for their personal use – or – can they sell or transfer their copy of the E-Book to other people? You want to make sure you check your website. Double check your site clearly explains exactly what you’re offering.
When selling EBooks you will need to decide on a price. How much do you want your eBook to cost? This is a difficult question – pricing is more of an art than a science. Look around at your competitors and use their prices as guidance for setting your own prices. You could do a market research on selling eBooks. For example ask what people what they would be prepared to pay in a survey.
Getting your price right is very important. If you under-price your product, you will be throwing away money that customers would be happy to give you. If you over-price your product, few customers will buy, and many of those who do, may demand refunds. So it is worth spending some time to research the right price – it can make a big difference to your profits! There’s even a web site that’s been put together as a tool for helping you find the right price – it’s called Make Your Price Sell.
When selling eBooks you need to be ready to accept payment. Putting credit card payment options on your website is not that difficult depending on which method of processing payment you select. There are several ways for you to accept payment. Click Bank is a low cost service, available to many people in many countries. Basically they deal with all the complicated technical stuff required for processing credit cards securely, and they send you checks for your sales (less a deduction which is based on the number of sales you make – this pays their fees) up to every 2 weeks. There are other sites out there like Click Bank. Paypal has online store functionality for customers that you can embed in your website.
Most people are used to using Paypal and seeing that icon gives them a sense of security about their information. Your web service provider or web hosting service usually has eCommerce options for your account. Its usually just a matter of dropping and dragging the widget into your web page.
Who needs an SSL certificate?
If you are going to be accepting or processing secure information from your website, such as credit card payments online, or other sensitive information, you will need an SSL certificate. SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. Data shared between users’ computers and the server are encrypted for safety.
There are different grades of SSL certificates. Price ranges from very little money, to hundreds of dollars per year. The more sensitive your information, the more you’ll probably need to spend on an SSL certificate.
Important: Most applications can get by with certificates costing less than $100 per year. If you are accepting Credit Card payments directly from the server, you will need to contact your bank or credit card payment gateway to determine their requirements. Some are quite strict.
Server Requirements
Your server needs to have capability for secure connections. This is probably nothing to worry about because most do.
Dedicated IP Address
You will need a dedicated (unique) IP address. If you are on shared hosting plan, you will need to ask your hosting company for a dedicated IP address. SSL certificates cannot be installed on a shared IP unless the certificate is shared. That is not a common scenario at all.
Some hosting companies will move you to a dedicated IP address for free. Others charge a (usually) tiny monthly fee for a dedicated IP address.
What you will need to buy the certificate
You will need to generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR). If you’ve never had an SSL certificate on your site, you may have to generate a “Key” first. These are both done from your server’s control panel.
SSL Certificate Purchase and Installation
Log on to your server. Generate the key if there is not one already. For SEO purposes, you will want to be consistent. The industry standard is to include the “www.” with the domain name. Once the key is generated, then you will need to generate the CSR. Be sure to select the proper key if you have more than one to choose from (The one with the “www.” most likely) . Enter the information that the server asks for (Country, city, state, etc.) and the server will display a page with the new CSR on it, or email the CSR to you. Keep that page up, or copy and paste the CSR into a plain text document such as Notepad (Regular word processors such as Microsoft Word may mess it up) A CSR Looks like: —–BEGIN CERTIFICATE REQUEST—– *** There will be several lines of random-looking characters here. *** —–END CERTIFICATE REQUEST—– Be sure to include all the dashes before and after the “begin certificate request” and “end certificate request” when copying the CSR When you buy an SSL certificate, there will be some way to configure the certificate. They will all be a little different, but instructions should be available from the vendor. You will need to paste the CSR into one field, and contact information in as many as three places. You will need to input the owner of the certificate, name, address, email address, etc. For most vendors, the same applies to the technical contact and the billing contact. (These may all be the same person) Once you submit the CSR and contact information, you will need to select an email address for the approval. The certificate signing authority will send an email to the address you choose to approve the transaction. The email address for the approver must be authoritative for the domain or server. A common email address that would be acceptable is admin@mydomain.tld (where “mydomain.tld” is the actual domain that the certificate will be installed upon.) There are many others, such as “webmaster” or “ssladmin” that will work as well; you may need to check. Once the officer approves the certificate, the requester will be sent an email containing the certificate (and possibly a “CA Bundle”). The certificate will look much like the CSR but will be larger. Be sure to include all characters from “Begin Certificate” through (including) the dashes after “end certificate”. A certificate will look something like: —–BEGIN CERTIFICATE—– *** There will be several lines of random-looking characters here. *** —–END CERTIFICATE—– There are usually two ways to install the certificate. Some servers will require you to paste the certificate (and CA Bundle if applicable) into a field on the server. Some will allow you to upload the certificate from a text file or email on your computer. The server will then install the certificate.
If you’ve done everything correctly, it should install without problems. If you receive errors or warnings, you may have to contact your server administrator for help.
Before you run a successful online store, first there are many factors needing consideration before you even think about opening online store. These factors range from the payment method, security, advertisement, to website building. Simply put, e-commerce hosting is not a game, and like everything else in life, you have to do your homework before you can be successful.
To run a successful online store, first you have to have an idea on what type of business you want to do. The best strategy for online store lies in it being a niche market. Hence customers that come calling usually know what type of items they wanted; and good online store will have that specific product because the store specialize on the market.
But before you have customer come knocking to your online store, your store must first be known. Just like in real world, a store that is not known by anyone will not be able to sell its product. This is why online store need advertisement. There are many ways to advertise your online store including using twitter and email campaigns. The better the media of campaign you use, the higher the traffic it will generate. High traffic generally means high number of potential customers.
However, just advertisement is not enough. Once you have customer, you will need the tools for customer to do transaction with. You will also want your customer to know that your online store is reliable hence you might want to consider using e-commerce hosting. This is the hardest part for online store. The reason being you can hire a programmer to make a website for you and integrate tools that your customer may need; but you cannot buy credibility and reputation.
What your online store needs to encourage users to buy your products are credit card merchant account and PayPal with security features on your website. First of all, the most known payment tools are credit card. If you do not have a merchant account, how will you accept any credit card payment? Exactly, you cant. Now the other method of payment which is quite well known is PayPal. For customer that wanted the added security, they may want to use PayPal instead of credit card payment and hence is the reason why your online store needs to have both type of payment tools. The usage of security feature in your website is just that, to provide security.
The very first thing a consumer will want to have before he or she buy a product is the security that their account will not be stolen when used for online transaction. For this reason, there is something called e-commerce hosting. This e-commerce hosting is basically a shopping cart hosted by trusted website on which customer may have their personal data stored hence the added security for both buyers and sellers.
All in all, it is not easy to run a successful online store. Additionally, it is an extremely good idea to use e-commerce hosting in order to induce purchase from customers.
One of my friends likes credit cards so much. In her daily activities, she never forgets to bring the credit cards inside her pocket. She will feel not comfortable if she doesn’t bring this stuff when she goes to other city. But, unfortunately, the loan from credit card has interest rate for every month. Because of that, my friend will always settle the bill every month and she never has trouble from her credit card. Beside that, she has chosen the Top Credit Cards which has low interest. My friend’s habit may become your inspiration about using credit card or maybe as consideration when you want to Apply for Credit Card. For me, credit card is a special payment tool. That’s why there are many people have used this card. For example, if one of your family’s members is sick and you don’t have enough money to pay it, you can use your credit card. With Business Credit Card, you can pay your business needs. There are many emergency payment can be solved soon by using credit card. This day, merchant credit card is more than debit card merchant. Even though there many people are also afraid using credit card, actually you can get a lot of benefits from your credit card. First, credit card can replace your cash money function and it is more practice and safer. Second, it is suitable for urgent need. Third, it can be used as ATM card too. Fourth, the amount of credit card installment is up to you. You can pay all bills, a half, or just a little. You don’t have to pay the credit card payment at the same time with your transaction because you are allowed to pay it hen the bill has come to your house. Fifth, the way to calculate the interest rate of credit card is relatively easy.
Credit card payment is one of the most popular payment options on the Internet. If you own a small business and do not have a merchant account, you might find it difficult to accept credit cards. However, it is advisable to find a means to accept credit cards on your website because it is the best way to expand your customer base. Moreover, the money transaction will take place within a week.
Small businesses can accept credit cards through 3rd party processors, who will handle the entire processing. For the small business community where cash flow is less or sometimes tight, this is a most welcome alternative. Credit card processing is not very cheap. A standard fee schedule for a small-volume account with less than 1,000 monthly transactions would be a start up fee of around $200, and monthly processing fees of $20.
If you have your own website, secure and encrypted connections are the foremost requirement you need for safe credit card processing. You should also have fraud prevention tools to prevent credit card scams.
Credit card processors whom small business owners can rely on are of several types; banks are the most dependable though. Third party credit card processing companies, independent sales organizations, financial service providers, etc. act as credit card processors. While there are several credit card processing companies, the two important factors that one should look at before setting up an agreement would be “price” and “customer service potentiality” of the credit card processors.
The merchant account provider you sign up with, might require an assurance that you have a thorough knowledge of your business environment, can identify the possible risks, know how to prevent or reduce fraud etc.