Selling Whitepapers online

Hello,

I am working with a company who wants to sell white papers by having their users buy them online, so the user would purchase the paper and then be able to download it after the purchase (there's no shipping or anything).

I've done a lot of development over the years, but I've tried to steer away from shopping carts. In my preliminary research, it seems as though things are a little more complicated than I would have expected, and there are a TON of solutions out there, but most seem geared towards buying a physical product and shipping it out versus making a transaction and downloading your purchase. The client doesn't want to go the PayPal route, and wants to have the purchase come from them.

So, my questions:
1) what are good resources for learning about shopping carts?
2) Are there any good solutions any of you have worked with where you are dealing with the type of content I am talking about?

My coding experience is in ASP and ASP.NET, so any ASP-centric solutions would be a big plus.

Thanks for your help.

Darryl

Hi Darryl,

Sounds like you will need a cart that specializes in digital delivery. There are both free (somewhat) and fee based solutions that should be able to help you with this. I personally work for a hosted monthly fee based solution. Below I've linked some very basic articles about digital file delivery.

http://www.morebusiness.com/running_your_business/profitability/ah_selldig.brc
http://onlinebusiness.about.com/cs/shoppingcarts/f/digital.htm

With all the solutions out on the market, look for some of the following features for security reasons.

* Customers never see the source URL (web address) of the product, and therefore cannot bookmark them.
* Customers' file access may be restricted by IP address, expiration date and number of file downloads.
* Orders can be modified by Store Administrators from any web browser.
* The IP address and date of all file accesses are logged.
* Access to files can be reset or stopped on an order-by-order basis.
* Ban specific email addresses, IP addresses, or geographic locations from placing orders, preventing them from placing orders in the first place.

I've personally worked with a few shopping carts that support digital delivery, mostly from moving clients from their old stores to ours... so I don't think I will be too.. objective.