In order to sell products, you need a way to accept credit cards on your website. In this post, I’d like to recommend 2 inexpensive tools that will work for you for a long time — at least they did for me.
Here are the 2 tools I recommend when you’re ready to start selling products.
PayPal
PayPal as a merchant account (which lets you accept credit cards and gives you access to your money) and as a gateway (which checks and process credit cards), is a great way to start.
People who buy your products don’t need a PayPal account; all they need is a credit card. That said, PayPal does emphasize its own service and makes the links to pay with a credit card small. Most people won’t have a problem with it.
PayPal will charge you 2.2% – 2.9% per transaction, so you don’t pay anything unless you sell a product.
To sign up for PayPal. go to www.PayPal.com and click the Business link. Click Sign Up for Free. You’ll have to give PayPal bank account information so you can transfer your earnings to your bank account, as well as some other information that it needs. PayPal will verify your bank account by making small transactions (less than 10 cents) that you’ll then need to verify. In this way, PayPal knows that you have access to that bank account.
E-junkie
E-junkie is a shopping cart. It has thousands of users all over the world. E-junkie has a number of features that you can’t get anywhere else for the price. And what is the price?
$5/month to start.
For that price, you’ll get a shopping cart, Buy Now and Add to Cart buttons, integration with PayPal (or other gateways and merchant accounts), discount codes, and an affiliate program. You upload your product to their server (although after you have a few products on their servers, you can store products anywhere you want).
To start an account, go to www.e-junkie.com and register for the free 1-week trial. Feel free to read about all the features during that time, but also test a real product on your website. You can set the price to $1 while testing.
I have since upgraded to a more feature-rich shopping cart, but it’s much more expensive. I still think that e-junkie is a great way to start. I used it for several years.
Digital Access Pass
Digital Access Pass (DAP) is mainly a membership site plug-in for WordPress. If that’s a feature you want (a membership site controls access to your products), it’s also a great option for a shopping cart, discount codes, and affiliate program. It costs $167 as a one-time cost, but you also need to pay annually (a similar amount) for updates and support. All in all, that’s VERY reasonable for all that you get. I don’t recommend it if you don’t want a membership site, because those features make it more complex than a simple shopping cart.
Here are some resources that might help you with setting up your first product.
- How to sell a product: Understanding the technology
- Free Buy Now buttons plus how to use a sales button
- Why my shopping cart is e-junkie
Are you selling products? If not, why not? Is yes, what technology do you use?