Searching for an e-commerce solution for your Internet business? E-Junkie’s shopping cart system may be the online selling solution you’ve been looking for.

One of the first big decisions that any new Internet business faces is figuring out how to sell and deliver products. Simple solutions like PayPal’s ‘Buy Now’ button and shopping cart tools are attractive because they are free to setup and easy to use. But, they come with some very severe limitations. They don’t have secure digital product delivery options (you have to set that up separately with 3rd party software on your own server), there are no tools for processing sales/VAT taxes or shipping charges, and there are no tools for running an affiliate program.

When you’re business grows, you will have to drop the simple solution and completely rebuild the infrastructure of your business to use a new e-commerce solution.

The other extreme is to run your own shopping cart software from your own server and use companies like PayPal and Google Checkout to process your payments. This provides the most flexibility for running your business, but requires a significant upfront investment of time and money to get started and ongoing security and maintenance work.

In the middle of these two extremes are hosted shopping cart solutions like E-Junkie that provide many of the features of the high-end solutions, but with the low cost and ease of use provided by the simpler options.

E-Junkie E-Commerce Shopping Cart

The E-Junkie e-commerce shopping cart system offers an extensive range of tools for selling digital downloads of MP3 music, podcasts, PDF e-books, software, videos, and just about any other downloadable product you can imagine. It also includes a full set of tools for selling physical products as well. So, you don’t have to find a new solution if your business expands to include both digital and physical products.

Key features of the E-Junkie Shopping Cart:

• Easy to use, centrally managed service
• Secure storage & delivery for digital files & codes
• Multiple payment processor support
• Copy-paste Buy Now and Shopping Cart buttons
• Support for variants and physical products
• Shipping and packaging calculator
• Sales tax and VAT calculator
• Product bundling (Great for selling groups of MP3 files as an ‘Album’ or creating bundled discount offers)
• Inventory control
• Product promotion
• Discount codes
• Affiliate management
• Autoresponder, updates & newsletters
• Sales tracking with built in support for Google Analytics
• Customization for branding
• Download link renewals
• Easy integration with 3rd party and custom services
• Logs & e-mail notifications
• Works with multiple currencies
• GeoTrust secured service
• PayPal and Google Checkout certified
• Integration with SwiftCD
• Integration with Aweber

Using the E-Junkie Shopping Cart

Setting up and selling digital products using the E-Junkie shopping cart can be done in minutes. You simply select the ‘Add New Product’ option from the administration menu on their site and fill in the details of your product as prompted. When you have filled everything out, you will be prompted to upload your digital file.

If you need detailed help with the setup process, there is a very good e-book available called “Selling Digital Goods Online with E-Junkie” that walks you through the process step-by-step with screen shots of every important setting.

When you have created your new product in your E-Junkie account, you provided with the code for a ‘Buy Now’ and ‘Add To Shopping Cart’ button. You simply copy the code and paste it into your web page and your product is ready to promote.

That’s all there is to selling your digital downloads!

E-Junkie offers many more options than this to customize your sales process, but none are required to get started earning money.

Payment Processing Options

E-junkie Shopping Cart buttons give you the option to let your buyer pay via PayPal Standard/PayPal Pro, Google Checkout, or Authorize.Net

E-junkie Buy Now buttons give you the option to let your buyer pay via PayPal Standard, Google Checkout, Authorize.Net, 2CheckOut, or ClickBank.

Secure Digital Downloads

When you let E-Junkie deliver your digital downloads for you, they host the files securely on their servers and manage the entire delivery process to protect your files from theft. You can set the number of downloads allowed and/or set an expiration date for each customer’s download link. None of the links point directly to the files themselves, so your content is safe from digital thieves.

But, for users who want to deliver files from their own servers or integrate with more complex product delivery systems, E-Junkie will allow you to completely customize your product delivery. So, you are not locked into a one-size-fits-all solution.

E-Junkie - What Is Missing

The E-Junkie shopping cart is an amazing product at an equally amazing price, but it is not perfect. Before you get too dependent on it, you have to decide if these limitations are deal-breakers for your business.

Here is what is missing:

• Recurring Payment Support
• Multi-Payment Support
• Free Trail Period Options
• Refund Processing for Affiliate Sales

If your business involves subscriptions or memberships, E-Junkie will not work for you at all. You will either need a separate solution for for these aspects of your business or you will need to find an entirely different option for your whole business. I contacted the company to ask if they were planning to add recurring payment support and was told that, due to technical issues, they had no plans to include recurring payments to the shopping cart service. PayPal has a very easy to use recurring billing option, but you don’t have the option of an integrated affiliate program.

If you sell big ticket items, one popular marketing strategy is to allow customers to pay in installments or sample the material during a free trial period before purchasing. E-Junkie does not allow for these selling options either. PayPal does allow for trial periods and you can set a multi-part payment using the recurring billing feature. But, again, you lose the powerful feature of a built in affiliate program.

E-Junkie does have a robust set of affiliate tools built into the shopping cart. You can track sales by affiliate. You can set special commission rates for your top performers or joint venture (JV) partners, and they generate a PayPal ‘Mass Pay’ file every month so that you can quickly send out commissions to your affiliates. One big flaw is that there is no way to track refunds back to the referring affiliate and deduct them from their next commission payment.

Any business will get a certain number of refund requests no matter how great their products. Without a tracking system for refunds, the seller ends up paying the commission portion of each refund out of their own pocket. As your business grows, this could become a major problem - particularly if you rely on affiliates for the majority of your sales.

These limitations are significant, but E-Junkie may still be the best solution for your business.

E-Junkie’s Competitors

E-Junkie has several competing services. Payloadz, PayDotCom, 1 Shopping Cart, offer similar solutions, but none matches the performance, price and flexibility offered by the E-Junkie shopping cart.

Payloadz allows you to sell digital downloads and also on-demand CDs (E-Junkie has an integrated solution for this in partnership with CD Now). They even offer a free service (limited to $100 in sales per month.) All of their price packages include limits to your monthly sales and the cheapest is $15 per month (with a sales limit of $250.) The other option is to pay them a whopping 15% of every sale. In both cases you are limited to 10GB of total storage space for your products. By contrast, E-Junkie’s service starts at $5 per month, charges no transaction fees, no setup fees, has no limits on bandwidth for delivering files or the number of transactions allowed, but gives you a smaller 50MB of storage space for your digital files. The most expensive E-Junkie package ($125 per month) comes with 999 MB of storage and each additional 1GB costs $20 per month. The primary choice between these services is storage caps versus sales caps. With E-Junkie, you can choose to deliver the files from your own server and bypass the cap - with some additional setup, software (and possibly bandwidth charges) required. The Payloadz sales caps are severe (for the $135 per month fee you can only process $2500 in sales), and there is no way around them. But their online storage limits are very generous.

PayDotCom has no monthly fee, but charges a fee per transaction as well as a $29 activation fee. Their transaction fees are lower than others but, if you sell 5 items a month or more, you will exceed the base fees charged by E-Junkie. PayDotCom does have one significant advantage in that you can sell products with recurring fees.

1 Shopping Cart charges a minimum monthly fee of $34 for a shopping cart. They allow for many more payment gateway options, but don’t provide secure digital downloads for your products unless you upgrade to their ‘Professional Package’ at the cost of $99 per month. The high end service price does include a robust autoresponder service and other marketing tools built in, but may not provide enough value to justify the huge fees.

Choosing E-Junkie

The E-Junkie shopping cart solution is a very robust option for selling and delivering products on the Internet. They have no setup or transaction fees, there are no limits on transactions, no bandwidth charges for product delivery, and monthly fees start at only $5. It is an extremely flexible service and can easily be customized and integrated into your website(s). With the few exceptions noted earlier, it offers everything needed to run almost any small to mid-sized online e-commerce site.

You may still have reservations about using E-Junkie. For that, they offer a free 1 week trial. Visit the E-Junkie website, open a trial account, and setup a few products. Test the system out and see if it works for you.

If you need a little extra help setting up and selling your products, the “Selling Digital Goods Online with E-Junkie” e-book will lead you through the process, step-by-step, with illustrations for every critical setting you need to make. This inexpensive guide is sold using the E-Junkie service, so you can see the tools in action when you purchase your copy.

If you are listening to the podcast version of this article, visit us online at www dot go to guy enterprises dot com for more Internet marketing insights.

How do you protect the download pages for your digital products? A surprising number of digital publishers seem to be relying on some very weak solutions.

A common approach to download page security that many beginning marketers use involves choosing names for download directories and pages that include a random string of numbers. Something like, “/download17826/”. The idea being that digital thieves trying to guess the url to the download page would not be able to do it easily. An extra measure of security that is often used is to employ ‘no-index’ tags in the robots.txt file and the individual HTML pages on the site to ensure that the search engines didn’t include the pages in their index.

The logic behind this simple solution is, “If you can’t find the page in the search engines and it is nearly impossible to guess, the download page is safe from casual thieves and all but the most determined hackers.” But, will the search engines really obey your ‘no-index’ tags?

If this is how you have your download pages protected, I have some very bad news for you. One of the major search engines is ignoring your ‘no-index’ tags and including your download pages in their search results for anyone to find.

I first became aware of this after reading the promotional copy for a recent product offer. I couldn’t believe it would be as easy as conducting a quick search to sneak directly onto a download page without paying - but, it is! A little more research revealed that this information on how to steal digital products is pretty widespread online. You don’t have to be a hardcore black-hat hacker to figure it out.

I’m not going to give details of the exact search engine and search methods that will expose these vulnerable download pages because I don’t want to encourage digital theft. But, when I learned about how easy it was to locate and access ‘protected’ download pages, I decided to test some of the hottest information products on the market and searched for their download pages. The results were astonishing.

In my tests, I was able to successfully locate and access over a dozen download pages for some very well known products. The search engine made it easy to locate the download pages and the sites offered no resistance to my visits. Ironically, one of the products whose download page I was able to access was for a software product promising to protect your download pages (either the software isn’t very good, or they don’t use it on their site.)

The lesson here is this, if you aren’t using a software solution to protect your download pages, you could be getting robbed blind by digital thieves. Hackers know how to exploit this vulnerability and they talk about it openly on their forums. Some malicious individuals even locate download pages and publish the links on forums and newsgroups to encourage theft. If your product isn’t well known yet, you might be safe. But, if you start seeing success, you will be targeted - count on it.

There are several products available to secure your download pages: DL Guard, Digital Product Guard, and Download Defender XT are three popular options that work. DL Guard is one of the best solutions available.

In my testing I uncovered several download pages that were secured with DL Guard (a unique bit of text shows up in the URL for the download page) and every one of them successfully blocked access to the download page. I personally know several marketers who use (and swear by) the DL Guard solution.

The download protection approach that I use involves employing a 3rd party system to process orders and deliver the digital goods. The service I use is E-junkie. I upload my files to the E-junkie servers and they process my orders and deliver the products automatically. The files are protected through their site and I don’t have to worry. They never offer a direct link to the files and product links can be set to expire after a specific time or number of downloads. E-junkie also manages my affiliate program and has a number of other valuable features built in. The costs are very low and the benefits are very high.

Whatever solution you choose, just make sure and implement it ASAP. Don’t leave the core of your business unprotected. Stop the digital thieves in their tracks using software like DL Guard or services like E-junkie.

If you are listening to the podcast version of this article, we encourage you to visit www dot go-to guy enterprises dot com and explore our other online marketing articles.