Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Ebay Slaps Ebooks - Digital Downloads and What you Can Do About It

Digital Download Ebooks, Ebay Slap

The gist of this is Ebay has recently changed policy about selling digital ebooks from their site. Many of us sell ebooks through the Ebay site and although there are some grey areas in the sales, many of us sell bonified products.

I sell a niche ebook for a fixed price, and this return has been very good for me. The delivery sytem was very slick. The customer reads my sales page, likes my product, buys through PayPal and is automatically transfered to the download page. They then click on the link and download my book and 10 minutes later can be reading it. Simplicity and elegance.

Well ebay now demands that all digital downloads be sold through classified add system. Which you pay $9.95 for a month. I don't have a problem with the price provided I sell enough ebooks to cover the cost (should be able to in 30 days). The idea behind the classified ad system is the purchase is off site. I already have off site ebook sales so this is not a problem to set up and can be easily done through PayPal.

My main issue is every time I have tried to use the classified ad tab I have had problems with it. I will of course try again (sure to be proven wrong). In theory the classified ad system should work as well or better as you can get the sale and or capture the lead for future sales down the road.

The best reccomendation I have had so far is to sell the ebook as a cd (hard good, no classified ad) then email your customer and ask if they would like to recieve the book as a digital download while they wait for the backup copy to come in the mail. Once again Happy customer but more contact and work on my part.

As many have said with internet marketing never rely on one source of income as they will change the rules at some point.

I will be exploring othe auction sites that do still allow digital download as well.

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