How to sell ebooks with Paypal on your website

Selling online with Paypal is fun and even moreso if you are selling something you already have the rights over such as an e-book you made yourself.

If you've written an e-book and also have a Paypal account, one of the great ways you can make money online with that is by selling the electronic book online using Paypal.

Paypal is a popular means of receiving payments online and one of the good things it offers is the ability to send Instant payment notifications when someone sends money to you on the platform.

There are lots of bloggers online already have a success story by selling their knowledge as e-books by using a Paypal payment system.

One of the first steps to selling with Paypal is setting up a buy now button. This is a button that contains details about what you are offering and allows others to send money to you as a seller.

When selling an e-book, you should first write the book and then convert it in a format that can easily be downloaded on the internet. The preferred popular format for now is pdf.

Things you would need
===================
- Paypal premier account
- Web hosting
- Paypal IPN script
- Your e-book securely uploaded

What to do
================
1. Create an upload the e-book
2. Create the Paypal button
3. Setup Paypal IPN
4. Set up an IPN handler on your website
5. Testing your site

Creating and uploading your ebook
==============================
- Write your ebook with Microsoft word
- Convert it to pdf using Adobe professional
- Upload your ebook to a secure site on your website and if possible chmode it in a folder to something like 700 to prevent unauthorized access

Creating the Paypal button
=======================
- Log into your Paypal account
- Go to Merchant tools > Button and add a new button
- Enter the details such as price, item id,
- Under Customize advanced features (optional)
- Enter other details like the return urls for cancellations or successful payments
- Also, set your return url. This is a thank you page and it would normally contain instructions for getting the email and for making the download.
- Select add custom variables in order to choose variables to be sent to your your ipn e.g custom, item_number or invoice.

Save the button

Setting up Paypal IPN
====================
- Go to your account
Under profiles > Go to my selling tools > Instant Payment notifications:
- Turn on the ipn settings and
- Enter your Paypal ipn url e.g http://www.website.com/cgi-bin/paypal.pl
- Save the settings

Setting up an IPN handler on your website
========================
You need to create an Instant Payment Notification script in your website and it can be in perl, asp, cgi or other active script.
The IPN handler should be able to receive IPN variables from Paypal, confirm it and then process it on your website. It should be able to create an account for the buyer so that he would be able to download e-books from your files as soon as payment has been made. It should be able to send a download url and key to the buyer.
Once you've created your script, you also need to upload it to your website and test it using paypal sandbox as well as live mode testing.

Setting up an IPN script is probably the hardest part on selling with Paypal.

Conclusion
==================
This is basically a simple way to sell with Paypal. How this system works is by allowing buyers to click on a button to buy your e-book, get taken to paypal, make payment and get to your thank you page while at the same time your IPN sends a download link to your buyers.