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I need an online store service for digital delivery.
supabeast
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I am planning an online store for selling (licensing) software. I do not have the budget to pay someone thousands of dollars to develop the store. I have the skills to design and build it myself, but I do not not want to. For the sake of my customers I would prefer that dedicated staff are managing the security of the system. So I want to go with a hosting service that offers canned stores. I currently run my web site with Wordpress, so a service built on Wordpress would be great.
My requirements are:
• Integrated digital delivery. Using a third-party service is not acceptable. I just want one account and one fee to track.
• The digital delivery system must support delivery of content in the style of albums. For example, Project X has ten parts, 1–10. Project X gets a section of the store in which customers can purchase any part or the entire album.
• Customers must be able to choose a quantity of licenses from a drop-down menu, and the price for quantities will not scale linearly. For example, the default is five licenses, and ten licenses will be 180% of the cost of 5, not 200%.
• An integrated global payment system. I would prefer that users can entire their address and credit card info as part of the store. A third-party system is acceptable if fees are low, the payment system is relatively transparent, and the payment system is NOT Paypal.
• Allow me to collect email and snail-mail addresses (with custom permission)
• I must be able to download customer and sales data as a CSV.
• Predesigned themes that allow color and image changes. Additional charging for themes is fine if the themes are good.
• This will be a low traffic site, so shared hosting is fine.
• Reliable hosting on simple UNIX/Linux servers is a must. Hosting on unreliable systems like Media Temple is a no-go.
My requirements are:
• Integrated digital delivery. Using a third-party service is not acceptable. I just want one account and one fee to track.
• The digital delivery system must support delivery of content in the style of albums. For example, Project X has ten parts, 1–10. Project X gets a section of the store in which customers can purchase any part or the entire album.
• Customers must be able to choose a quantity of licenses from a drop-down menu, and the price for quantities will not scale linearly. For example, the default is five licenses, and ten licenses will be 180% of the cost of 5, not 200%.
• An integrated global payment system. I would prefer that users can entire their address and credit card info as part of the store. A third-party system is acceptable if fees are low, the payment system is relatively transparent, and the payment system is NOT Paypal.
• Allow me to collect email and snail-mail addresses (with custom permission)
• I must be able to download customer and sales data as a CSV.
• Predesigned themes that allow color and image changes. Additional charging for themes is fine if the themes are good.
• This will be a low traffic site, so shared hosting is fine.
• Reliable hosting on simple UNIX/Linux servers is a must. Hosting on unreliable systems like Media Temple is a no-go.
supabeast on
0
Posts
E-shop is a free plugin that supports most of what you've got listed there, but it's going to take a shitload of customization. They'd probably do it for a reasonable price, or someone would if you posted an ad.
Past that, there's no way in hell that you're going to find that kind of e-shopping cart cheap. I know the services provided by godaddy, ipower, bluehost, dreamhost, etc don't really handle most of what you're looking for.
Google Checkout has digital delivery options now, and so does Yahoo Shopping carts. You might want to look there.
I'd still budget at least $1000 to get anything custom built though.
Also, not to break apart your business model, but how are you going to manage these licenses? Do you already have an authentication database/server set up? I mean I get the store front, but if someone buys 100 licenses, what's to say they won't turn around and use them on 1000 machines? Do you have a system in place to verify that yet?
As for verification, that’s not going to happen. I’m selling fonts—so they’re sold as software, but there’s no way for them to report back. The best option I have is to only sell directly and keep an eye out for people with no license at all.
Also, it has a nifty option if you're just doing online sales through digital delivery that turns off all the shipping stuff and makes it work MUCH more lightweight.