CommerceCubes

Digital Goods and The threat of Theft

Ever since I started doing my initial review of Secure Delivery earlier this week I’ve actually come into a few outside conversations with other business owners (One being my dad and the other being a small business owner I’ve been talking to online) involving digital goods; specifically the sale of digital goods and the issues surrounding their security after they’ve been loaded online to your site. For those of you unfamiliar with what a “Digital Good” is; it’s a product that is digital in manufacturing that can be sold to the masses, like an eBook, music, games, etc.

The first conversation I got into was with my father, who is a Management Consultant that runs a company called Arnold Sinden & Roth Management Consultants. We were talking the other evening about a client he was doing some work for with respect to developing a Compensation Plan (something my father has done a few times before) and just then an idea popped into my head… “Why not resell the documents he creates for his customers?” If any tweaking is needed he could easily do this and it would be yet another way to showcase his work. Secure Delivery allows you to create a product… track it, manage it, sell it and do all this securely. ** Not an advertisement for Secure Delivery**

Theft in any kind of business exists and also is something that needs to be watched and prevented if possible. Technologies like Authorize.net, Secure Delivery and others try to help businesses rid themselves of worrying about theft and fraud. When it comes to selling intellectual property online theft and copyright issues will always be a problem because some people actively look for ways to defraud companies of their assets daily. Naturally the more value we assign something the more it is sought after and in turn the more people look for ways to steal it. Look at music or software because those are two industries that have problems making sales because of theft, fraud and piracy.

Now getting to the other situation where Secure Delivery talk came up. I was talking to Torsten who runs English-test.net over the past few weeks and he expressed that he was looking for a solution to sell his company’s PDF related products through. One of my first thoughts was “How would I prevent fraud and theft of these digital goods?” Again the fact being that most people don’t give a lot of thought to someone actually stealing their digital products and reselling them under a different name is a scary one but it has happened in the past (Just look at Apple and Microsoft and the battle that errupted after windows released its Operating System that looked a lot like Apple’s OS).

I am not a fraud expert but it is something that I think about when selling online. Anyone whose sold online to some extent has seen or heard about fraud, theft and shady practices and while there are solutions out there to curb this sort of thing most people either do not know (until it’s too late sometimes) or they think its too costly to put measures in place to stop from happening. The truth is that you need to protect your business from competition and pirates.

Luc