Sell Books — Yours or Others’ — with e-Junkie

Selling stuff is supposed to be easy on the Internet. Just put it “up there” and watch the orders roll in, right? If you stick with Amazon or eBay as your marketplace, it’s not all that hard — but they take a pretty sizable cut! Or you can set up your own shopping cart system and maintain it and get a merchant account to process credit card orders — if you have a lot of technical know-how and some extra money. And you’ve got to market your product, which probably means advertising, which means more money.

Enter e-Junkie. For $5 US a month, e-Junkie provides you with an online shopping cart, storage for digital downloads, order processing, inventory management, email autoresponders, and a lot more.

Let’s say you’ve written an e-book. You upload the file to e-Junkie, write a sales page on your own site, and insert e-Junkie’s code to place a “Buy it now” button on your page. When visitors click through to buy your e-book, they’re directed to your e-Junkie shopping cart, where they can pay via PayPal or Google Checkout (or a couple of other services) and instantly get a download link.

e-Junkie will also handle physical products — it works the same way, except that when an order is placed, you get an email with the details so you can fulfill the order yourself. You can offer several variants — say, a paperback and hardcover of the same book. e-Junkie will even calculate the shipping costs and sales tax (where applicable).

What makes e-Junkie especially compelling is the ability to set up affiliate programs so that other people can promote and sell your product. You choose how much you’d like to pay per sale — say, 20% of the sale price — and e-Junkie will provide your affiliates with a tracking code they can use to send sales your way. e-Junkie doesn’t administer the affiliate program; at the end of the month, you’ll get a tally of affiliate sales and you have to pay off your affiliates (via PayPal, usually).

Of course, you can always join the affiliate program of any of your fellow e-Junkie sellers. Signing up is easy — find a product you like in their affiliates directory (under the “Affiliates” tab), and click the link at the bottom to join their affiliate program. You’ll get a choice of either a text link to customize or a “Buy Now” button you can put on your site — the idea is, you write your review, sales page, blog post, or other copy, and the author pays you for your help.

Although e-Junkie allows sellers to market a wide range of products, it seems designed with e-books and software — downloadable products — in mind. Tough luck for everyone else, but good news for writers!

Go check out e-Junkie. As far as I’ve seen, they’re the only ones offering this kind of service, and they do it very well.