I have pulled together a list of questions which newbie designers often ask me about my graphics, blog or the way that I offer and create my graphics. As always, there’s more than one way to do things, and I’m not saying my way is the best way. You are however free to browse the questions and see how I do things.
I sell my kits through a Blogger blog, how can I set up a store there so that people can pay and download straight away?
You can use PayPal as your shopping cart – just set up your item in there and copy the button code (html) into your Blogger post where you wish to sell something. For the download you will need to host this somewhere (for example 4Shared – though better ones are available now) and then copy the download link into your PayPal form. That means that people can pay via your blog and at the end of the transaction, Paypal sends the purchaser to the download file. This is by no means a good way to offer files, but it’s ok when you first start out.
I want to purchase some shopping cart software that allows people to purchase digital downloads, what’s available?
Many designers use shopping carts such as X-Cart and Zen Cart. There is an interesting discussion on the relative merits of each here. Alternatively, if you have a WordPress blog you can use a plug-in called WPE-Store.
I bought the WP E-store plug in for WordPress but I don’t know how to use it to offer free downloads.
You can’t offer free downloads through the plugin so you will need to just link people to the actual download or scramble the link.
How can I scramble the download links?
You could use www.tinyurl.com or www.bit.ly. The second one also tracks the number of downloads for you.
