Digital Stock Photograph Site Design – Part 2
Your web site should be setup in a manner where small (hopefully useless) images (thumbnails) are displayed so a prospective customer has an idea of the image contents. There must also be some mechanism where the user can view a larger image if they are interested in the stock photograph. This larger image is usually rendered useless because of a watermark or some other semi-destructive methodology.
The user adds items they wish to purchase to the shopping cart provided by PayPal. Once the user is satisfied and has purchased the items, you owe that person the full un-adultered file for that image. An ideal way would be for that user to be able to get to the purchased stock photograph with out bothering you with requests or shipping and without having the ability to take any other files you may have.
PayLoadz offers this service. Signup is free and there are no monthly fees as long as you don’t qualify for one of their paying accounts.
PayLoadz works with PayPal to provide you the ability to sell and deliver digital items from your own website in a secure manner without your intervention!
The following steps describe how PayPal and PayLoadz work together transparently to make your website a “self serve” stock photo service station.
1. The customer, while browsing your web site, clicks “Buy Now” links to add items to their shopping cart. The “Buy Now” links are generated by PayLoadz and the shopping cart by PayPal. You simply added the links to your HTML.
2. When the customer has completed shopping, they click on the “Check Out” button to pay. Again, this html code was generated by PayPal and you also simply added this to your HTML code.
3. The customer is prompted by PayPal to pay by either using their PayPal username and password or by just using a credit card. The user is also given the chance to create a PayPal account at his time.
4. Once the payment process is complete, PayPal notifies PayLoadz of the transaction and what was purchased. This process is completely invisible.
5. PayLoadz emails the customer a thank you note that also contains a link to your product. Note that this link is not related to your website in any way. It is encoded so that the location of your original file is completely secure. Also, PayLoadz sends a copy of this thank you note and links to you the merchant.
6. The customer clicks on the link to download the file.
7. You receive an e-mail from PayPal letting you know that payment was received.