Advice on selling digital pdfs

[Erica C.]

Hi FQ community,
A client is who sells some books and documents is considering offering them in digital form as pdfs. This way he could avoid coping with shipping. He uses PayPal to sell the physical documents. I thought PayPal might have an option to do this but didn't see anything obvious.

Specifically the problem would be how to provide a link after payment and restrict it to the customer.

I welcome any thoughts or suggestions.

Thanks!
Erica

[Syneryder]

Originally Posted by Erica C.

A client is who sells some books and documents is considering offering them in digital form as pdfs. He uses PayPal to sell the physical documents.

You might want something more sophisticated than Paypal for selling digital goods - global taxation laws have changed & many countries now require you to collect tax for that country (VAT / GST) when selling digital goods like PDFs to customers in those countries. The EU is the region that started it, but since then Australia & even several US states now require it too. Calculating the tax amounts in every country and state is an absolute nightmare.

So you probably want to find an ecommerce service provider who will handle all the taxation calculations and admin on your behalf. In return for a cut of the sales (usually 10% or less), they'll handle tax admin & delivering the PDF downloads to customers, keeping records of the sales, etc. There's lots of companies to choose from, personally I use FastSpring for my software sales.

For selling PDFs, something like Gumroad will suit you better - they even mention on their site the ability to digitally stamp a PDF with a customer's name so that they can't share it without identifying themselves, plus the ability to restrict the number of downloads. Here's their page on how Gumroad deals with EU VAT laws. I've bought a few digital books through Gumroad, and some even come with video files and other things.

SendOwl is another company worth looking at. They'll digitally stamp PDFs and handle PDF downloads too. I've met the founder and he was an exceedingly nice & generous guy, and I like that they're a small business that grew naturally (Gumroad is one of those companies that took venture capital investment to try and become a "unicorn" as big as Uber). Sadly it's not clear if SendOwl will handle & remit taxes for you to each country, here's what SendOwl says about how they handle digital taxes.

Anyway, hope that helps! I'd take a look at SendOwl & Gumroad, and search for competitors of those services too.

[Erica C.]

Thank you very much! That's incredibly helpful.

Erica

[kevin21]

Paypal does not have specific options for these. You have to integrate the api by their permission.

[Erica C.]

That's more than I'd want to take on. Good to know.
Thanks!

[davidblut125]

On a website that sells homemade items like on etsy, the seller provides a book or document in digital format, such as training material. This book becomes available for download immediately after payment. But for commerce, you need to use paypal, which is open for business. You can do this in your personal account and link it to your main account. When the buyer pays, the store's system opens access to a link where the buyer can download the material. That's all. When I made a presentation for the master class, I did it in yourcoursetextbook.com. You can also choose the format there.