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E-junkie is an incredibly cheap and powerful online service for selling both downloadable and tangible goods. At it’s most basic level, E-junkie is a shopping cart program. But this is a shopping cart that does a lot more.
E-junkie provides several buttons that you can install and use, and they provide you with all the snippets of code that you need and then help you install them. But what is really cool is WHERE you can install them. Not only can you put these buttons on your own website, but you can put them into your MySpace pages, eBay, Craigslist, and most other sites where you would normally not think of inserting your own personal shopping cart. Think of how useful it would be to include a “Buy Now” button for something you were advertising on Craigslist or to include your own mini-store on your MySpace page.
E-junkie allows you to sell both downloadable items (ebooks, reports, prints, audio, video) and tangible goods (the stuff you pack and ship yourself). For downloadable items, you store those directly on E-junkie so when they are sold they are delivered immediately to the customer. You can also include all sorts of discount and promo codes, download links that expire after a few days, and a list of codes that are stored and doled out as each product is sold. What I am referring in that list item, the stored codes, are such things as pin codes to be used for downloadable calling cards or keys for software. You can also use a packaged product feature which allows you to sell, say, mp3s for one price and the entire album for another price. (They also collaborate with SwiftCD which will create and deliver physical CDs as they are ordered, sort of a print-on-demand setup.)
You can also sell your tangible goods with E-junkie, you just pack and ship them yourself. The great thing about E-junkie is that you can include all sorts of options for each product; such as size and color. It also has both packaging and shipping calculator. The packaging calculator is set up with your own specifications. For example, you can say that up to 4 prints can fit into the same container, but if there are 5 to 8 prints, they have to pay for two containers. It then uses the USPS tables for shipping and a shipping table that you help set up for international orders. You can also choose one rate for the first item and then another rate for additional items. There are enough choices to handle any combination that you want to throw at it.
This next part is where I think you will really be sold on E-junkie. For each product, you can configure a thank-you email, instructions or any other follow up message you can think of. Once someone buys a product, they are automatically put into the buyer group for that product. You can then send as many follow up emails or newsletters as you want to everyone who bought that product. If they refund the product, they are automatically removed from the buyer group. You can also add people manually to any buyer group so they are included in the follow up emails. You can also view and download a log of transactions, including buyer emails, so you can send your own follow up emails outside of the E-junkie system. This kind of interaction and follow up with your customers is very important, as I discuss in this week’s Marketing Monday article.
There is one last feature I want to discuss to conclude this review. E-junkie also includes an affiliate program that you can set up with any product. This allows you to pay a commission to people for selling your product. You determine which products are included in the program and you also decide if you want the seller to receive a percentage of the sale or a flat fee. Once you set it up, E-junkie handles all the rest of the details for you. Affiliate sellers sign up for the program themselves and the system automatically assigns them a referral link they can use to sell your product. Whenever they make a sale, E-junkie handles the payment and you do not have to lift a finger. It is a very effective way to help other people sell YOUR product.
E-junkie has many more features that I just did not have time or room to discuss. Go take a look and decide for yourself. Oh, I almost forgot to mention… the price is unbelievable inexpensive! If you sell 10 different products or less, you only pay $5 per month. And that is only after a one-week free trial. Isn’t that a crazy low price? I thought so.
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Chris O’Byrne
www.OnlineArtsMarketing.com
www.YourArtMarketing.com