Q: What’s the best way to deliver digital or electronic products? Clickbank makes it easy but what about other shopping carts? I don’t want to be limited to using Clickbank.

A: ClickBank definitely has its limitations. The system itself doesn’t allow you to keep in touch with your customers or affiliates, so you’d have to set up a system where you could have customers and affiliates add themselves to your mailing list. But on the plus side, ClickBank takes care of all the order processing and paying your affiliates. Plus, they have a huge pool of affiliates that can start promoting your product for you (if they find your product and are interested). Still, you’ll have to consider the large transaction fees that can add up for you.

I personally prefer to have much more control over my customers, prospects and affiliates – and like having everything managed and automated from one place.

I can’t recommend a lot of systems because I haven’t tried them. I personally use QuickSales for my digital products and it is a complete ecommerce system. It is a web-based service and is hosted on the QuickSales servers, but your data is easily exported and backed-up, should it be necessary.

Here’s a few reasons why I like it and whether or not, you use this system doesn’t matter, my list might help you find a system that is right for you:

- Easy-to-set up secure digital downloads. You just load the digital files into QuickSales and the delivery is taken care of.

- Affiliate program with the ability to set up multiple links and multiple products. You can easily mass email your affiliates or even set up an autoresonder series to train them.

- You can set up lifetime cookies for your affiliates. This means, if the visitor doesn’t buy the first time, they can get credit for the purchase or purchases at a later date. This is a great selling point for recruiting affiliates and encourages loyalty.

- Your affiliates can link to any page of any web page that you own. This encourages affiliates to link to your content pages, blogs and other pages. That way, your referrals buy a product in the future, they get credit for the sale and you get extra traffic.

- Unlimited autoresponders where you can create highly-targeted lists to send specific information and product offers. You can easily move your prospects over to your customer lists.

- When a customer purchases a particular product, you can add them to a special customer list for that product and keep following up with them to reduce refunds and make future product offers.

- You can easily email all your customers (no matter which product they purchased), so you can make a special offer.

- Built-in ad tracking. You can keep track of which advertising campaigns result in leads (people who sign up for your mailing lists) and sales. You can even split-test your landing pages with the ad trackers.

Before you make any decisions on what system to use, make sure you know what YOU want in a digital delivery system. Not all systems are created equally and they may not all suit your needs. Definitely do your homework first.

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