4 Strategies for Protecting Your Online Business

4 Strategies for Protecting Your Online Business

I was sure this will happen. After all "There is fun in taking challenge
when the stakes are high!".

You will be wondering what am I talking about, yes, I am talking about the Online Info product business which is the biggest business online. Information products are selling really hot online for prices ranging from $9-$900 and with this there are attempts to
break the system and get these product for FREE!

Following, I have outlined 4 strategies that you can use to protect your Online Business from theft.

1) Order Page:

You will think "Why on earth should I be concerned about order page?". Yes, you are correct to some extent, this is THE page which is very crucial and decision making for your sale and you will try to lure the user to order your product, won't you?

But, here is the main concern area, if you are offering PayPal as the Payment option then we have to be careful for the order page.
PayPal is really great payment option, because it costs no service charge to the customer and it is very low charge to you the merchant, but the only problem is that you have to give the return URL i.e. download page location in the order form itself. So, anyone who knows how to view the source of page will be able to see the download page and will go straight their without paying!

Don't worry there is solution available for this, there are several HTML Encryptors available for this which will scramble the code of your Paypal code, so, those prying eyes will get to see only scrambled characters and will have to work hard (pull their hair!) to
decipher the path of your download page.
I know of one free software which does this, go to:
http://www.snazzypromotions.com/software/paypalfree/index.html

2) Download Page:

This is THE page where your customers will be directed after they complete the purchase process, for downloading the product they paid you for.

Your download page should never have following names:
download.html
thankyou.html
thanks.html

Don't keep .htm by the same names either. These page names are too predictable and are the first ones to be tried by novice hackers.
So, you should give some creative name related to your product which some ordinary hacker can not even think of. e.g. If you are selling ebook related to Online Marketing, consider keeping
something like onmkt.html or you may consider adding numbers also to have added security e.g. onmkt03.html etc. Just be creative.

3) Product:

If you are selling PDF(Portable Document Format) ebooks then better not keep it for download as PDFs, that is keep it in zipped format.

There are two advantages of this:

a) The file size reduces, so, in turn bandwidth saving for you when so many people are downloading the file from your site.

b) Search engines are now indexing PDF files, that is if someone searches your site and if you have not blocked the access to PDF files on your site by specifying in robot.txt (this is the file that Search engine spiders read when they visit your site), then it is
very easy to find out and download the file, but if it is in zip format then no one will find it on Search Engine!
You can download Winzip for FREE from: http://www.winzip.com

4) Download Location:

Never ever reveal your actual download location to people.
You can use several options for preventing your download location from getting circulated.

The two main options are:

a) Use some password protected area where the user has to login to download the product. Here the system of delivering the product doesn't remain instant as you will verify the order and then send the user her user name and password.

b) Use server side language e.g. CGI, PHP, ASP etc. for the download page where the download location is specified in the page as a variable and the user won't even know the actual download location by doing view source of the page. This method will allow
you to do the instant delivery which is the most desirable method of delivery on the net. Won't you like something delivered to you instantly over something you have to wait for?

In conclusion,

- Encrypt the source of your Order page to prevent user from knowing your download location.

- Never give common names to your Download page that can be easily guessed.

- Keep your product in zipped format, saves bandwidth while downloading and prevents from getting indexed on search engines.

- Use server side language like cgi, ASP, PHP for protecting your actual download location from prying eyes.

I hope these 4 strategies are useful to you in protecting your online business from those illegal downloaders.

Amar Mehta.