*This is a post I made a couple of weeks ago on CartoTalk.
After I posted about my new Colors For Maps booklet (available here), someone suggested I write-up my experience building a webpage to sell items online. I think my advice will only apply to those who want to sell electronic products, but you never know.
The short answer is: I hired a good web designer and she did all the work. 
The longer answer is that the web designer chose from a variety of products and possible combinations of things. In the end we decided to use E-Junkie (terrible name but a good product) in conjunction with PayPal and Google Checkout. E-Junkie is only $5/month to sell up to 10 separate products as long as they are under 50 mb in size. I happened to find a 90 day free trial coupon as well. My booklet is about 3 mb in size so it was no problem. Large map files would be more expensive to sell through this site.
E-Junkie interfaces with PayPal and Google Checkout – you have to get accounts at all three of these places. So the user can choose which option they want to use to pay. My booklet has only been for sale for one week now but I can tell there’s a definite preference for using PayPal – around 80% of the purchases are through PayPal. Both PayPal and Google Checkout charge you every time there is a sale. If you won’t have a high income through your sales you’re looking at something like 59 cents per item sold.
The nice thing about PayPal is that the buyer can use a credit card – there is no need for the buyer to have a PayPal account. Why not just use PayPal and Google Checkout – why use E-Junkie? Because E-Junkie handles the order fulfillment process. I don’t manually send the purchaser anything. All these services give you the email addresses of the people who are purchasing though Google allows the buyer to use an encrypted email address so that the seller doesn’t see the real address. Even though I have sold my GIS and Creativity webinar through Google Checkout for a long time now, I would never use the email addresses for marketing. Most individuals and businesses wouldn’t – I hope! I sell the webinar through Google Checkout (it’s a pretty big video file) and I have to fulfill the orders myself. Perhaps I will shell out the money to get this done through E-Junkie at some point though.
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