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Secure Delivery Review Part 2: Signing up and using Secure Delivery

In my original posting about Secure Delivery I talked a bit about the team behind Secure Delivery and the technology that makes it a good service for people who produce and sell their own digital content. I also talked about the pricing structure that is currently in place for this service. In this article I am going to take you through the setup of a Secure Delivery account and some of the basic things that you can do with this service. I will throw in some screen shots because words alone cannot do it justice and discuss some of the finer points of this technology. Sit back, relax and get ready for it!

Step 1 – Sign up to Secure Delivery with a Payment Gateway

Clarification by Jason Chance:

you say during sign up for SD (Secure Delivery) that you have to select your payment processor. For SD, all subscription payments are through PayPal, and they can then use any of the payment processors they want for their products without setting anything up later. In other words, you pay for SD with PayPal, and then you can use any of the three supported processors to sell your products.

When doing the initial sign up to Secure Delivery you will be asked to register using your choice of Payment Gateways (PayPal, Click Bank, Pay Dot Com). I personally decided to use PayPal because I have an account and it was really easy to setup. Comments in the last article raised the question of whether or not other payment gateways such as 2CheckOut or Authorize.NET are supported and Jason Chance of Secure Delivery has this to add…

As for supporting 2CheckOut, ask and ye shall receive

Secure Delivery is a new service and we supported the most commonly used payment processors out of the gate. Our system is modular and we can add more payment processors as they are requested by our users. If you have a specific payment processor you would like to use, just tell us- We’ll do our best to implement it in a timely fashion.

Source: Jason Chance; Portal Labs

… So as you can see Jason and Company are willing to work with you to ensure that your needs are met. Getting back to the business of setting up an account using PayPal I was directed to a page setup for Portal Labs and asked to sign in with my PayPal account ID. After you do this (and pay of course) you are then taken back to the Portal Labs and “Secure Delivery” Service Login page. You’ll have to enter the username and password you selected to enter the site and start taking advantage of Secure Delivery.

Step 2 – I’m in! Now what do I do?

Once you login to Secure Delivery you are taken to a page that looks like this…

… Notice all the options that you have available to you. The sections of the member’s area are broken into 3 sections including Subscriber Tools, Documentation, and Help and Support. For this article we will be focusing on the Subscriber Tools Section of the Secure Delivery Service.

Creating a Digital Product Securely

Click on the “Create New Secure Delivery Product >>” under the Subscriber Tools section in the main area of the site. You’ll notice on the next page to come up that your next step is to give your digital product or “good” a name. Once you’ve done this click on the “Next” button at the bottom of the page. On the following page you’ll see that you can enter the product details that range from the Product Name (Yes you can edit at this stage if needed), Quantity Limit, Payment Processor (PayPal, Click Bank or Pay Dot Com). Depending on which one you choose from the list you can then set certain attributes ranging from Price, PayPal Product ID and Upload Document.

The most interesting thing about this part of Secure Delivery’s “Product Details” page is that you can create a digital product and select a quantity of allowed downloads for a given product by entering an amount in the Quantity Limit field. If you have a digital good that is highly in demand by people you can drive that demand, control it and track the sales.

Click the “Next” Button again and go to the “Delivery Options” page where you can set everything from a Download Time Limit to Enabling a Download Limit on a per purchase basis to 2 downloads (just in case your customer loses the first download). Another neat feature found on this page is the ability to enter a tracking code from a program like Google Analytics so that you can track conversion rates. This is definitely great if you love stats (I know that I do )

After clicking that “Next” button at the bottom again you will then come to a page where you can select a button and generate a button link code snippet to insert into your site where you are selling your digital goods. I personally like the Secure Delivery buttons it’s a little different then having a PayPal button on your site. Then again, PayPal is recognized by 100,000,000 people currently online so if you do select a PayPal I am sure that the Secure Delivery people will not mind but that’s an article for another time.

Lastly you are going to want to click the “Finish” button at the bottom of this page and you are done. If you want to see the product that you just created in Secure Delivery then all you have to do is click on the “Go to Product Delivery Overview” to see what you just created or get the snippet of code you need to insert into your site and you are done.

As you can see from this brief yet very detailed run-thru of Secure Delivery it is a very easy product to use, it’s NOT full of bugs (I couldn’t find any) and it’s quick to create a digital product. These are all pluses in my book but you be the judge. Sign up for a 7 day trial account and try it out for yourself.

Luc