The demand for digital products has increased tremendously in the past few years and is thereby easily made available at online stores as well. However, security and payment processes online have always been an issue among the potential clients in making the purchase for digital products. Google Checkout is certainly an answer to the fear of all such paranoids. This checkout process collaborates with shopping carts so as to provide customers to make a quick and secure payment with the help of a password and username at Google Checkout. Once the purchase has been made, credit cards of the customer are charged via Google Checkout, orders can be processed, and the payment can be received in the bank account of the owner of the shopping cart where purchase has been made.
Processing via Google Checkout program permits you to sell the digital products and also integrate your campaigns of Google AdWords with your selling efforts, thereby assure more powerful ads. There are several options that are made available by Google Checkout to deliver the goods digitally for order. Access to the digital content and communicating instructions to access the digital content can all be determined by you. The delivery options for digital products made available by Google Checkout are:
Digital schedule – You can determine the time when the instructions will be received by the buyer to access the digital content that has been purchased by him/her. There are two schedules for delivery that has been determined by Google for the same:
o Pessimistic delivery – This is the default method that is employed by Google Checkout for processing orders. This delivery option takes place when the digital content that has been purchased by the buyer isn’t made available to him/her for access until their credit card are authorized for the payment amount of the order placed by them. There is generally a delay of a few seconds in the time when the order is confirmed by the buyer and the time when the buyer is given instructions to access the digital products purchased by him/her.
o Optimistic delivery – This method involves receiving of the instructions to access the digital products even when a valid authorization of the buyer’s credit card is not obtained by Google after 20 seconds. If you are looking forward to sell digital products via Google Checkout, it is advisable to use the optimistic delivery options only if it is possible to withdraw buyer’s access to digital content in case Google could not authorize the credit card of the customer.
Delivery method – You may also specify the method by which instructions to access the digital content will be provided to the buyer. There are primarily three methods that are employed by Google in this context:
o Email delivery – This involves sending instructions via email. This method should be used only if your orders are submitted to Google through HTML API or if you employ XML shopping carts for submission together with the base64-encoded cart and digital signature, which will be exhibited to buyer.
o Description-based delivery – This involves providing information to access the purchased digital content in Checkout API request.
o Key/URL delivery – This involves providing URL to the buyer where he/she can access the content or provides the key to unlock the digital content purchased by them.
However, most of merchants only need a simple system where they could just add their product, place payment buttons and customers would be able to pay them. Then the product would be delivered (if product is digital – instantly) and the order information would stay on merchant’s account. Google Checkout is not really well suited for digital product owners, since you have to do many configurations on your side and not everyone is familiar with that. However, there is a solution. Click2Sell.EU (http://www.click2sell.eu) is a merchant platform and affiliate marketing network that has completely integrated Google Checkout into order processing, so you can easily start selling your products – whether they are digital or material products – within few minutes. This way you can easily start profiting online without much trouble. Happy selling!
Digital Products 