E-Commerce - how to prevent theft download

If you sell digital products online, you are probably already familiar with the growing problem of your e-books, etc. stolen. Here's how it works and how you can prevent.

A site visitor buys the product, such as an e-book. Immediately after downloading your purchase, you visit a forum and provides a link to the page containing the download information for all members. Before you know it, thousands of people are downloading your e-book! These people are stealing from you and you are not aware of your loss!

Many of these would have bought your e-book, so you may have lost hundreds of dollars!

Take another case. You can set your sales page through PayPal. Now your script simple PayPal button is visible in the sales page if anyone cares to "View Source". They can see where to download and skip the payment page. PayPal now allows you to encrypt your button so incomprehensible shows only the source. But I found a problem because you can not include redirect and thankyou pages inside the script, so you can force people to pay, but then the supply of their goods is messy and involves email back and forth, and so on.

In another case I have seen, the PayPal page is encrypted to prevent access to a download page, but the payment amount may be modified, so that an expensive item could be bought for 1 cent!

Fortunately, there are ways to avoid this download theft. The simplest method I've encountered recently involves using a third party that provides an encrypted script that protects your PayPal payment link or other data and information that you download a copy on your website.

All downloads are managed with a safe and automated process, it is not necessary to confirm orders and send the download link for customers in email manually. On top of that, the system will send you a confirmation email each time a buyer to successfully download your products. This is great for your record keeping, you know how many people actually downloaded your products. Your customers can download the product confirmed a few minutes to order it! They do not have to wait to send their emails to receive a download link or go to the page after page to confirm the order. Only 1 point for them!

There are two systems of this type that I suspect, but I am not affiliated with either. One is provided by businessbazee.com This system is free to use and easy to configure. What we will do is give an ID and a success URL of the payment page that your customers see when they have paid for your products on PayPal. This is a page specially designed, which has the potential to control who is on the page and then display the content accordingly.

If someone comes along just at your checkout page without pay, will be displayed in a way If someone just paid to PayPal to sell you something, show something else. Then confirm the order and sends the appropriate information for the buyer to download and an email notification to you that this person just downloaded the product. The best part is all free. All businessbazee.com complete details.

The other is a more comprehensive service provided by Sam Stephens called DLGuard. This is a powerful script that simply upload your web site.

DLGuard supports the three types, or methods of sale on the Internet: the single sales factor (including bonus products), sales of items and multiple membership websites It also has the advantage of being fully integrated with PayPal, ClickBank, 2Checkout, Stormpay, PayDotCom, Ebay, EA Script and even tracks your free product downloads.

This service protects the products against the most common forms of theft:

1. Prevents sharing the download link, as in our forum that before. Each download link can have a time limit that ends well as a maximum number of download attempts. This means that you can give to your customer, for example, 2 hours to download the product with a maximum of 3 attempts to download. Even if your client just posted the download link itself on a public forum, the link would become useless before the real damage is done. If your client has no real time to download their product within this time then you can easily reset the timer or download count. You can make your security as tight or loose as you see fit for your customers.

2. Ignores insecure thankyou / download pages: a common form of "hacking" is simply searching for insecure download pages via popular search engines. The term hacking is used loosely, since there is no skill in the search for insecure download pages, but the effect can still be devastating. You can lose thousands of dollars. Google includes PDF files in its search results.

If the download page or e-book is not safe, then people might actually be reading your e-book without even realizing that they are stealing your product. With the guard in a download, even if the whole world knows the URL of the thank you page will not be able to download your products. The system verifies that the payment of success has been made before allowing access to the download.

Test marketing and successful business owners tell us once again that to maximize profits is to create a list of loyal customers. This may be difficult or uneconomical by using customer signup forms as a large percentage of your customers are not registered. First you need to convince them to buy your product and then you need to get them to subscribe to your mailing list as part of the watch of download which will automatically add your customers to your mailing list after a sale is made and keep a record of monitoring and file reports for you on who has downloaded the product. DLGuard services is not free, but it is affordable and well supported if the user forum is any indication.

What are your alternatives?

* Change the file location of every month or so, as part of website maintenance.

* Please rename the download page frequently.

* Provide download from a different domain.

* Use encrypted pages to prevent right click and pull-down menu from the source code detector

* Do not connect to the download pages from any other page on the site and manually provide the customer a fee.

* Keep the page to download more than 3 levels down in your web space. (How domain/directory1/directory2/directory3/file). This may prevent the search engines to achieve your files that for the most part the scan only 2 levels down.

* Send your e-book in Acrobat pdf

If you decide to use PDF files, you could do all the materials of image data files that are named in the file to a secure web location. I am aware that Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Pro has collaboration features available that can be used in combination with file encryption and password feature blocked. Using the collaboration features, you could keep a log of access, as a sort of check-out process for the file (s). Remember if using one of the "protectors" of the products available in the market to wrap the pdf file (s), you are actually making them non-Mac friendly, as they become. Exe file.

Remember you can not prevent theft entirely, you can not prevent anyone from sending the product to a friend or resale on its site illegally, though most people do not go so far and there are remedies you can take with Their web hosting service and legal action....