[Lab] Introducing TugBits.com - a marketplace for makers.

Darcy Whyte darcy at siteware.com
Wed Jun 8 18:50:41 EDT 2011


For sites that sell an artifact, many postal and shipping services have an
API that lets you calculate shipping in real time. Even post Canada has one.
Ebay used the US postal services one. Well they may have others I'd have to
check but around here Canada Post and US Postal Service are pretty well it.

Of course you also have a handling cost you'll want to add on so it becomes
shipping and handling. (Boxes, tape, glue, labeling, printing, postal
losses, string, bubble wrap, time).

 For software, some sort of digital rights management solution is usually
used. That's because once people have your software, they'll share it and
will post it all over torrents and the rest of the Web. Then of course
there's version management and update management that is often built into
the software. If you can solve that problem th

For non-software (cad files, jpegs, plans, pdfs, mp3s without DRM), you have
a lot harder time stopping people from sharing so the best you can do is
managed downloads and updates for your digital goods.

There are open source shopping carts that have some support for digital
products.
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/open-source-e-commerce-shopping-carts-best-of/
Some
may plug into Joomla or Wordpress.

Or you can sign up to a system that's designed specifically to sell digital
goods. https://www.payloadz.com/ The music business has lots of places to
sell digital goods. Napster being one of the more famous.



<https://www.payloadz.com/>


On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 5:44 PM, Andrew O'Malley <aomalley at gmail.com> wrote:

> Tom, Darcy,
>
> Interesting convo  . . .  From a seller point of view, I prefer to
> have my stuff listed on various sites, as they can all attract their
> own traffic.  As for Etsy etc. vs. Paypal buttons on my own site, I
> only did a bit of digging w/ Paypal, but one thing that seemed to be
> missing (that Etsy offers) is the ability to automatically charge
> shipping based on the buyers location -- is there a simple way to do
> this via Paypal directly?
>
> ao.
>
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> http://artengine.ca/mailman/listinfo/lab
>
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