CoolTea Stores Now Offering Digital Downloads for Sale

While downloading music from online stores might be all the rage with iPod enthusiasts, business people could learn a thing or two about how to leverage their knowledge by selling audio content that is made available as digital downloads.

Consider three doctors from New York who recently released their new book, The Somatic Companion - Your 30 Day Emotional Makeover, as both a traditional audio book (cds plus printed booklet) and as a digital download (mp3 audio files with pdf version of the booklet).

This is a seven hour audio course that will change your life in 30 days, and CoolTea is honored to have created their CoolTea Store with our new digital download technology.

For customers on the go who travel and commute, downloading mp3 files to your computer’s hard drive then transferring to your favorite portable mp3 player (zoom, ipod, etc) makes tremendous sense. Not only is the digital version less expensive, it is available immediately upon successful checkout so there is no wait for shipping.

In these days of instant gratification, I’m really excited by this new download option. Part of the trick was how to make the download files private, meaning unavailable off the web root of the server and also making the download link secure so that it could not be shared with others - e.g., somebody pays for digital download and gets idea to highlight the url path (and code) in their browser’s url bar, then copies it to text file and forwards to friends with “Hey - I just bought this cool program and here is link if you want to go get a free copy on my nickel - just paste this link into your browser and enjoy.”

Our CoolTea technology does not use cookies (which can be easily hacked and/or forged) but uses a proprietary method that insures the client has only one option to click on the link to begin their download. Our technology is logging their browser session, their ip address and several other variables so in the event they encounter a problem, our customer service team can quickly confirm and make sure they get to a happy ending.

As more and more of us become knowledge workers, the opportunity to leverage our knowledge by bundling it into audio (and/or video) clips and products is a huge market opportunity.

After identifying your market, probably the most important step is making sure you have a quality production (e.g., solid sounding audio and/or good looking video), and then after that, having an e.commerce partner like CoolTea who can deliver 24×7x365 digital downloads in a secure, fast and friendly format.

I should also mention that our shopping cart with digital fulfillment is only three pages, including the confirming success page - i.e., page 1 - enter your info, page 2 - confirm your info, page 3 - success (or error if credit card is declined) with receipt and download option (if selected, otherwise tracking information for physical delivery is presented) - how cool is that 1-2-3 and downloads away!

Lastly, your bank or ours. If you have a traditional Merchant Account (e.g., you are already processing Mastercard and Visa) and your bank offers Authorize.net as their payment gateway, we can wire our shopping cart to put the money directly into your account. And if you don’t have a merchant account or authorize.net gateway, we’re happy to collect monies for you and send you your checks.

Stay tuned for my upcoming blog post about the joys of processing international credit cards - ka ching and to be continued! cs