Selling Digital Goods on eBay

Selling digital products and services on eBay has recently been made easier due to announcements from eBay that gives greater permissions to sellers. This guide will assist you in getting set up to sell digital products quickly. We will also show you the best payment and download hosting services. Finally, we will give you a checklist to refer to in order to avoid being shut down by eBay for non compliance of their guidelines.  We recommend you copy and paste this checklist into a word file and save on your desktop. This way you can easily refer to it anytime you are adding a new product for sale.

Getting Started Selling Digital Goods on eBay

The listing process for a new item is similar to a non-digital item; however, now eBay has allowed you to "List as a Digital Item" option in the Sell Your Item form - Selecting this option when you start listing lets eBay know you're selling a digital item, so you will not have to fill out sections that don't apply (such as "Shipping").

You'll also see a "Digital Item Delivery" field in SYI, where you can provide delivery information to your buyers (such as how to access the file once they've completed their purchase).

Payment and Digital Download Services

While eBay allows a variety of payment options, PayPal is the preferred payment option. Once the buyer pays for your product you will have to provide instructions on how to download the product. Note that this is the most important part of the process. As experienced consultants in this space, we can assure you that a seamless process here will greatly increase your rate of second and third purchases from the same buyer. Due to the unreliability of the download process from many sellers, once a buyer finds a seller that they can depend on they go back to this same seller over and over again. The repeat buyer rates are tremendous - often over 80%.

To place a simple link to  a page on your website where the buyers can download the product is not an effective solution. First, this is not secure, allowing the buyer to share this link with anyone. Another ineffective solution is to email the buyer a password with access to a page on your site where they can download the product. This is a slow and cumbersome process and very unpopular with buyers. It is our recommendation that you use a third party service to integrate with PayPal that will give the user a "download now" button upon completion of the PayPal payment.

Example of this process using one of the leading digital download providers:

Step 1 - Buyer is taken  to shopping cart where he is prompted to pay using PayPal:

Step 2 - Upon completing payment via PayPal account, the buyer is immediately directed to a confirmation page with a link to download the digital product.

Step 3 - Product Download is Complete - Buyer has Received Product. Buyer can return to this page in the future if they loose their digital product.

This example was using one service provider of digital downloads that integrates with PayPal. There are other services; however, I have not found them to be as seamless at the one offered here. Below you will find a list of service providers.

Featured Example: Payloadz

Other Providers:

Digital River

e-junkie

Summary

To setup digital products for sale on eBay such as eBooks, music, movie, and other propriatary content;

1) Sign up for a digital download service such as Payloadz or Digital River. You will host your products here and obtain a link for your buyers to click through upon completion of purchase.

2) Create an digital item to sell on eBay. Be sure to indicate that it is a digital good in the drop down menu.

3) Select a payment option such as PayPal that will integrate with your digital download service that you selected in step 1.

4) Test your product once you have it listed for sale in eBay.

We hope that you found this guide helpful. All comments and feedback is welcome.