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In today’s Q&A, we are answering whether or not you really need a shopping cart or should you just rely on Paypal.
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Resources Mentioned in this Episode
- Today’s question comes from Douglas Andrews at JobInterview-Coach.com
- Ejunkie – for delivering digital products
- Paypal – for accepting payments online
- Check out our consulting page to see how we automate this service
- Acuity Scheduling – our scheduling tool of choice
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all, you’re listening to Q&A with S&J.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome back to the Q&A with S&J. Today’s question is from Douglas Andrews at JobInterview-Coach.com.
SHANE: We’ve got a string of good domain names. People looking up around here, it’s pretty good stuff.
JOCELYN: Yeah, it’s pretty good. Douglas says:
“I understand how to use E-junkie and PayPal to collect money and deliver an ebook but can I do the same thing with just PayPal to create a link for services rendered? For example, I want to offer one on one interview services.”
SHANE: Okay, that’s a great question. Let’s take that into two parts. Let’s look at just the ebook. If you take payments from PayPal for an ebook or some kind of digital product, the problem is, you’ve got to get that file to the person who paid you money for it.
Now if you only have PayPal, you can do that. Starting out if you want to save $10 here and there and not set all that up, you could just take payments. You see it come through that someone paid you money. You can email them the file manually.
Now, there are a couple of problems there. #1) You’re not creating passive income. You’re having to physically touch every transaction. It’s like you’re having to go to your shelf and get the product off the shelf for the person every time they come in. #2) People are used to downloading things instantly. When they pay with PayPal and they are on the internet, they want their file now. They don’t want to wait for you to have to email it within 24-48 hours. They want to get their product. PayPal doesn’t do that. PayPal is not going to send them a file or anything like that.
So you are going to need a shopping cart solution to deliver things like ebooks. PayPal will take the payment. A shopping cart like E-junkie is going to send the file. Both of them are doing what they do.
For coaching, you could just set up a button and you could say, “Oh yeah, I want to do a coaching service or interview process.” You could take the payment and then you could do that. But the thing is, there are also other products out there that lets you schedule things automatically. For example, when we take consulting, you can get consulting with us at FlippedLifestyle.com/TalktoUs and if you sign up for our consulting services, you don’t get a file but what you do get is an email with a link to a calendar and then the person can go schedule the consulting call on their own so we never have to touch it.
We always want to create systems where we don’t have to touch anything. So even with something like interview services or coaching service, take the payment and then automate your scheduling, and you’ll be much better off.
JOCELYN: We use a service called Acuity Scheduling. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes. I love that one because you can take a payment for things like consulting and then it will take them actually directly to the calendar right after the time of payment. So that is a pretty cool way to do that.
We really like to try to use services for what they are used for, like PayPal is a payment processor. They take payments and E-junkie or different types of shopping cart software like that, those are made to automatically deliver products. Just like Shane said, you can do it a lot of different ways but the best way to do things usually is to use the products for what they are intended to do.
SHANE: It’s like this. We’ll give you a little analogy here. Kentucky Fried Chicken makes delicious chicken sandwiches. We all love chicken from Kentucky Fried Chicken. If Kentucky Fried Chicken all of a sudden started making hamburgers, are you really going to pass up another restaurant that specializes in hamburgers to go get a hamburger from KFC? No, you want chicken from KFC and you want a hamburger from the hamburger joint.
Basically, it’s the same thing online. Do you really want PayPal dipping into doing all these other services because they are focused on taking up money? They are not focused on delivering products. E-junkie works. It delivers the product. We have never once had a problem using E-junkie to deliver a product. It has worked every time somebody has ever bought.
PayPal takes the payment. That’s perfect. I don’t want E-junkie taking payments and I don’t want PayPal delivering files. So make sure that you’re using the right tool for the right job. You always want things to go smooth. You don’t want problems in your business that you’re going to have to deal with later.
JOCELYN: It’s a lot easier to fix things at the beginning than to go back and try to redo everything after the fact. We have learned this the hard way so many times.
SHANE: It’s not worth saving a buck. You would rather spend the buck than you would save the buck and deal with the problem. It’s always better to spend a little more upfront to make sure everything works on the back.
JOCELYN: All right, that is all that we have for you guys today. I hope that that helped you out, Douglas. If you have a question for us, you can head on over to FlippedLIfestyle.com/QASJ and we may feature you on a feature podcast.
SHANE: See you later, bye.
JOCELYN: Bye.
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Liz@HoosierHomemade says
Hi Shane & Jocelyn, I love listening to your podcasts and have gained a lot of information from them.
However, I did want to tell you that Paypal does send the link to an ebook or your site. I have used it several times and it works fine. This is the link to the YouTube Channel – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0Hd5Ou6P-A
~Liz@HoosierHomemade
Shane Sams says
Awesome. Thanks for adding to the content! We don’t have all the answers or a monopoly on good ideas! Thanks Liz!