How to get your ebook to the customer in line with their expectations.

When I started out selling ebooks my method of delivering my product to the customer was to manually send the customer an email with the ebook as an attachment to the email. Before I offered the product as an ebook, my partner and I would spend an afternoon copying our printed book, making covers for it, punching holes into the edges of the printed copy, binding it with a spiral binding, and assembling it all for later delivery. Our method of delivery was to send it via U.S. media mail to the customer.

At the time, we only accepted checks or money orders. Luckily for us, we got a gig with the local paper righting for their "Rentline" column and we would always plug our website in our landlord tenant columns. The columns generated interest in the printed book which led to emails from potential buyers wanting to know where they could send their checks. So we were able to sell a lot of printed copies. Of course, this was quite a bit of work.

I later got the idea to convert our original file into an Adobe Acrobat pdf file, eliminate our printed version sales, and exclusively sell our product as a pdf file. I know, it doesn't sound too exciting but at the time (around 2000) we thought we were geniuses. Although Adobe Acrobat Reader existed and was in use at the time, it was far from ubiquitous. So we received the inevitable complaints from purchasers of our ebook who had know clue what Adobe Acrobat Reader was despite efforts we made to indicate to them how to obtain a free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Emailing our ebook to the customer got the product there a lot quicker then the U.S. mail. It saved us a considerable amount of time and effort as well as expense. We no longer had costs for supplies such as paper, bindings, toner, envelopes, etc.

The problem was that as the internet became more and more familiar to people, the expectation of having your needs and wants instantaneously fulfilled became greater and greater. I wasn't willing to sit at the computer 24/7 to immediately fulfill orders by manually sending out a reply email with the ebook attached. But this is what people expected (and even more so today). This is what I expect if I order an electronic file online whether it be an ebook or software. If I have to wait five seconds to get what I just bought, I've waited four seconds too long.

The problem of order fulfillment continued to grow. The best I could come up with at the time was to set up an automated reply email that indicated that I would fulfill their order usually within 24 hours or receiving their payment. I thought this was a reasonable time period until I considered my own expectations. If I bought it, I want it now and not within the next 24 hours.

And within 24 hours was not satisfactory to a number of purchasers. I was selling an ebook concerning landlord and tenant legal rights and often in the world of legal problems, people want to know their rights immediately.

I toyed with the idea of creating an automated email reply that contained the ebook attachment but as we added more and more ebook products, it didn't seem feasible. We had too many products and such a system relied too much upon the vagaries of the email program, the computer operating system, and the electric power supply.

I also tried the paypal redirect. Customers made their purchases through paypal.com and then, theoretically, paypal would redirect the customer to another web page that I had set up where the customer could click on a link and download the product. Unfortunately, this was not 100% foolproof as many customers either were not redirected or didn't understand what was going on or how to download the product.

Finally, I found a service that has fit the bill so far. PayLoadz.com works in conjunction with paypal. The process goes like this - customer purchases product through paypal - paypal sends an instant payment notification to payloadz - payloadz sends an email to customer from me providing the customer with a link where they can download the product they have ordered. This all occurs immediately after payment is made. This is the solution that I have settled on for now to meet the immediacy expectation of ebook purchasers. It required little work to set up the payloadz service. I signed up for an account, entered my product information and uploaded the products. Payloadz charges me based upon the dollar amount of transactions that have occurred.

Pros of Payloadz -

Instantaneous delivery to customerFree until you reach $100 in sales in a rolling 30 day periodIf you have more than one product, payloadz will list your other products for sale in the download page of the purchased productPayloadz provides a download link that expires in three days offering some protection for your ebookPayloadz has its own estore where you can list your product for salePayloadz has its own ebay store where you can list your product for saleWorks in conjunction with paypalProvides sales statisticsAllows for export of your transaction logNow supports Google Checkout

Cons of Payloadz -

Can get fairly pricey especially when coupled with paypal fees on top of payloadz feesNot completely foolproof when it comes to customers downloading your product