Carving its own niche and providing means to market and sell downloadable products such as music, software, e-books and other files, PayLoadz offers an easy and powerful e-commerce service. If your company sells downloadable digital files, PayLoadz is definitely worth considering.
PayLoadz not only provides the means to sell software, e-books, music, movies, digital art, manuals, articles and anything that resides in a digital file and can be downloaded, it manages the transactions through eBay and provides the server space to store the files.
After uploading and configuring your products, PayLoadz generates software code that you simply paste into your Web site and that adds a "Buy Now" button. And beyond secure storage and transactions, PayLoadz carries out file delivery and handles product key registrations. Overall, it's a seamless path to selling digital goods on the Web.
In the Beginning
Setting up a PayLoadz account is a simple matter of defining your name, e-mail and PayPal account. If you don't already have a PayPal account, you'll need to create one and then configure PayLoadz to work with it. The service does a great job of walking you through this setup process. If you've already worked with eBay and PayPal, you should encounter no problems here.
With the accounts configured, you're ready to enter the products that you wish to sell. A product page asks for item name, ID number and selling price and allows you to write a "thank you" note that will appear in a customer's e-mail along with the download instructions.
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Lock and Load: The product detail screen accepts product information before uploading your files to PayLoadz' servers.
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You define the file format (pdf, exe, mp3 and so on), delivery file format (for example, "zip") and file type (video, music, e-book). After that, you can add product descriptions and link images as well as define keywords that will optimize Web searches and help customers find your site.
After defining each product, an upload function guides you through the process of uploading your digital files onto PayLoadz' servers. With files in place, PayLoadz generates code that you paste into your Web site that defines and presents a shopping cart button.
The Shopping Experience
When customers browse your Web site and decide to buy something, they simply click the "Buy Now" button that adds the item to their shopping cart. And when they're done shopping, they click the "Check Out" button and are prompted for their PayPal account information. If they don't have a PayPal account, they can still pay with a credit card.
After the sale, PayLoadz sends an e-mail to the customer that thanks them with your message and provides a link to download the product. The link serves a traditional pop-up box so customers can "save" or "open" files. As the vendor, you receive an e-mail that lets you know that someone purchased your product.
For security, PayLoadz supports keys that require customers to validate and register their products. As you would expect, these keys can be tied specifically to transactions. PayLoadz also offers an option to reference "remote key scripts" that are running on remote servers to create keys.
To tell you how you are doing, PayLoadz offers a complete selling history that lists transaction IDs, dates of sale, item numbers, item names, quantities purchased and customers' names and e-mail addresses. You can customize reports with your choice of starting and ending dates. There's also a product report that tells you the quantities of products sold and provides a purchase history.
What's In Store?
Optional features let you list an item on a PayLoadz eStore or PayLoadz eBay store. Here, PayLoadz offers an online store of its own that provides subscribers with an additional marketing channel. You can also work through PayLoadz to list and sell products through eBay auctions. And the service supports Google Checkout to charge credit cards, process orders and send payments to your bank account.
An impressive affiliate sales system allows other sites to refer customers to you and receive a commission for promoting your sales. With each sale, both you and the affiliate are alerted via e-mail. At the end of each week, PayLoadz calculates the sales for the period and makes a payment to the affiliate through PayPal.
Battling Storefronts
E-junkie is a competing, more comprehensive e-commerce service that offers the ability to sell physical goods in addition to downloadable digital products. As a result, it comes with lots of features such as abilities to calculate shipping and local taxes that support physical goods.
Surprisingly, E-junkie doesn't necessarily cost more to use than PayLoadz as pricing is based on the size of your files and the volume of your sales. As a result, E-junkie is definitely worth considering alongside PayLoadz.
In any event, PayLoadz is a first rate and competent service for selling downloadable goods. Don't overlook this one when you're ready to hawk your digital goods online.
Pricing
PayLoadz offers two types of pricing: 1) a flat monthly fee that is based on the size of your files and 2) a fee that's a percentage of your sales, typically 15 percent. At press time, PayLoadz was offering the first month of service for free. You can visit this page to view pricing information.
Wayne N. Kawamoto is a regular contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com.
Review: PayLoadz Pays Off
