I Want To Install on Several Domains

The licence for SmartDD allows you to install it on as many domains as you personally own. 

As you've probably realised when you've updated the PayPal IPN setting, you can only set a single static IPN. So you might be thinking there's no point in installing SmartDD on more than one domain.

And if you're selling on eBay, then one domain is probably all you need.  But if you also have a few websites where you sell goods by PayPal, you may be perplexed as to how you can get SmartDD to work in several places.

Well don't worry, because you can install SmartDD on a domain, and then use the built in PayPal button generator to generate the button code, decription and price widgets.  When your customer pays for an item after clicking the button, they're returned back to your website.

The email is sent from that same domain, and when your customer clicks the link, they're taken back to that domain to download their purchase.

It works because SmartDD uses a dynamic IPN string which it sends to PayPal, and which overrides the static one.  This is the same principle at work if you have other web applications running on other sites which use PayPal to accept payment.

 

The Licence Won't Work

The licence generator we use is a 3rd party bit of software called ionCube Encoder.  It can cause problems sometimes when trying to recognise the domain.

Normally, you would generate a licence in the format of www.domain.com, but sometimes, depending on the configuration of your web server, it may require a licence to be generated as domain.com instead.

We've also found that if you use cPanel's "Add-on Domains" feature to add a domain to your hosting account, then the licencing software has problems with that too.  It seems to find the main domain rather than the add-on domain you'd expect it to find.  Then because it doesn't match the domain licence, it fails.

You can fix this by generating a licence in the format of www.add-on-domain.maindomain.com OR add-on-domain.maindomain.com (without the www in front).

It should then recognise the licence as being valid. 

UPDATE: A customer of SmartDD has pointed out to us that you can generate a licence using the IP address of the server your domain instead.  We've found that so far this has worked in 5 out of 6 cases, so it looks like a good tip to include here.

To get your IP address, open up a command prompt (also known as an MSDOS box), and type:-

ping www.yourdomainhere.com

and you'll then see the IP address appear as the domain is pinged.  It will appear as a "dotted quad" - e.g. 128.45.65.89.  Enter that IP address into the licence generator instead and download the new licence.

 

Emails Aren't Being Sent Out

Check the transaction screen, and check the email log.  Carefully.  If SmartDD says the emails have been queued, then there were no errors and SmartDD has done its part.

You can check that SmartDD is working by resending the emails, but sending them to yourself instead.  If you get them within a minute or two (often immediately), you can be certain that it's working okay.

The only reasons your customers aren't getting their emails are they're either using spam filters or there is a problem with your host.  Try using webmail and sending yourself a test email to your ISP email address rather than your domain email address.

Again, if you receive it okay, then you know SmartDD is working as it uses the same method to send as webmail.

 

Customers Aren't Getting Emails

If you know SmartDD is sending the emails out okay (see above), then it's likely that it's your customers spam filters putting your emails in their bulk or spam folders.  All you can do is educate them, and ask them to whitelist your email address.  Once enough users of a particular ISP whitelist you, then you should find that all your emails get through okay without being filtered.

I know it's a pain, but we all have the spammers to thank for this problem. 

 

Getting "Order Failed" Emails

The primary reason you're getting order failures is because SmartDD can't find the item you're selling on eBay (usually) in its database.  Check that the title on eBay EXACTLY matches the title in your Items panel.

If there's even a single space or character different, then the order will fail.

You'll also get order failures if your inventory product doesn't point to the download file correctly - look out for typos as being the cause of this problem!  Or  maybe you've forgotten to upload the file.

We've also found a case where eBay is mangling the pound symbol (£) and sending it across as £50 for instance instead of £50. After going through PayPal as well, it arrives as just a single question mark (?).  There's not a lot we can do about this unless eBay decides to sort it out at their end (they're using ASCII - so no £ symbol) which we think may be unlikely.

The work round for this is either don't use the £ symbol at all, good practice would be not to use any special symbols such as $*?/@"+£ and just stick to letters and numbers instead, as it's key words that people look for when doing a search.  OR, you can create a copy of the item you're selling in your database but for instance use ?50 instead of £50.

But even then you may get intermittent results depending on what eBay and PayPal do.  It's best just to avoid special symbols altogether.

The only other reason you may be getting order failures is because you're also selling physical goods on eBay, but again you probably wouldn't want to have physical goods loaded…

 

Selling Physical Goods

You CAN use SmartDD when selling physical goods.  Or at least, what you can do is use SmartDD to coax your customers onto your mailing list.

After your customer has purchased the physical item, say a CD for instance, and if that item is loaded into SmartDD, you can send a customised email out to your customer.  In that email you can thank them for their purchase and offer to give them a digital download of some other useful related digital item in return for signing up to your 3rd party auto-responder / mailing list.

The follow-up email can be set to remind them to do the same thing 24 hours later.

Then you would set up your 3rd party auto-responder, e.g. Aweber, to send out a link to the download in the first email it sends after they've double-opted in to your list.  It shouldn't bother you too much that it won't be protected by SmartDD.  After all, you now have them on your mailing list and you can sell to them again in the future.

You should always try to get every customer onto your mailing list.  If they've bought from you once and were happy with their purchase, then why not sell them something similar at a later date?

It takes a little bit of effort to set up initially, but once you've done it, it can bring you great rewards as you now have a captive audience and can sell them goods from your website instead of through eBay.

Remember, it's between 5-12 times harder to sell to a new customer as it is to an existing one.

DON'T LET YOUR CUSTOMERS BECOME EX-CUSTOMERS.

 

Building A Mailing List

I mentioned above about how important it is to get people to sign up to your mailing list.

Well, some people sell ebooks on eBay for one reason only.  And that's to build their mailing list.  That's why you see so many ebooks being sold for $1.99, it just about covers the auction expenses.

In fact, if you can get things set up correctly, using a combination of SmartDD, eBay's Turbo Lister and Selling Manager Pro, you can build your mailing list on autopilot.  The trick is to break even while building your list.  i.e. you want to bring in at least enough money to pay for your listing fees.

Some people aren't even bothered about that, because they know that once they have someone on their list, they can sell to them over and over again.

Let's put it another way.  For every person you have on your list, you can expect to earn between $0.50c and $1.00 per month per person.  That's if you send them details of carefully selected offers that match what they were interested in when they bought your ebook.

If you "spray and pray" then you'll get much lower returns than that.

So think very carefully about what you've just read.

If you know your metrics, and you know how much you can expect to earn per person on your list, i.e. you know their lifetime customer value, then you can afford to pay half that and still make a profit.

For example, if you have a good set of offers you can make directly to each person.  And you know that you'll get a total return of an average $25.00 per head, and it only costs you $5.00 or less to get them on your mailing list, then you're $20.00 in profit per person on your list.

There are an increasing number of marketers that have become clued up to this, and are now working eBay to build their list.  Don't worry about it becoming too overcrowded, eBay is HUGE, but if you aren't using eBay to build your list today, then you should seriously stop to think about it.

If you want to learn more about this, then I strongly suggest you try out EPA and learn all about how it's done by a professional marketer.

Or you could just ask me and I'll see if I can put something together.

 

Pending Payments

SmartDD is unique in that it will handle PayPal echecks.  These show as a "Pending" payment, and your customer will receive an email telling them they'll get a further email when the echeck clears.  You will also get an email to tell you the purchase is pending.

A few days later when the echeck clears, PayPal sends a further mesage to SmartDD to let it know that the transaction has now completed.  SmartDD will then send out an email to your customer with the download link, and you'll also get one to let you know the payment has cleared.

If the payment doesn't clear, then both you and your customer will get an order failed email.

 

Don't Use Your Personal Email Address To Run Your Business With

As you have a domain to install SmartDD on, then use it properly! 

It looks very unprofessional to your customers to receive email from a personal or free email address.  It's very easy to set yourself up an email address that runs off your domain, such as sales@domain.com.

 

Use IMAP Instead Of POP3

Once you've created an email account on your web server, then I suggest you use IMAP to fetch your email - most hosts support IMAP as well as POP3.  If you have a hosting account that uses cPanel (such as my favourite - Hostgator), then you can definitely use IMAP.

Why?  Well, IMAP leaves your emails on the server.

Imagine what would happen if your hard drive crashed, and you're using POP3.  All your emails are gone forever, and you have absolutely no record of any of your transactions or conversations with customers.

It's happened to a LOT of people…

With IMAP, your PC will only read and copy the emails from the server.  They don't get removed after download.  So if your PCs hard drive ever did go bye-byes, it doesn't matter, you still have all your emails safe on the web server!

Other nice things about IMAP are you can share an email account across several PCs.  For instance, my wife and I both have local copies of emails on our PCs.  And my developer partner Paul lives over a hundred miles away but sees all the same emails that I do.

If either of us respond to an email, IMAP saves the response in the Sent Items folder on the web server, so we can both see it.  If one of us saves a draft email, the other can see it in the drafts folder.  If one of us flags an email, the other one gets to see it too.

It's really cool, and keeps us both synchronised!

And if you use Windows and Outlook Express (OE), there's another bonus too.  If you use IMAP, then OE creates completely separate accounts and folders.  So you get an Inbox, Sent Items and Drafts folders for every account, keeping everything separate instead of all jumbled up in the one Inbox etc.

Believe it or not, here's a tiny picture of some of my different email accounts.  I have over 30 set up in OE, all with their own folders.  With IMAP they're very easy to manage.

You can see the usual local folders, plus the IMAP accounts and folders underneath.  As an additional benefit, it makes it easy to copy and move emails between accounts too!  My second PC also has all the same email accounts too as a local backup!

 

And Finally…

That's it!

If you've followed these instructions, then SmartDD is now all set up to start delivering your digital goods.

© 2006, 2007 Frank Haywood and Paul Freedman.