Interspire I can’t recommend at all while the software is good the company policies are deceiving and misleading.

They sold their SendStudio software including support and update plans (which in the past included all updates and upgrades) until the day they renamed the software to Email Marketer as part of a small update wanted all customers to pay again regardless whether they had active support plans or not . The support forum quickly filled with many very upset users so the threads where deleted and users banned.

Interspire is not to be trusted!!!!!

James Bird
Life Coach

We’ve been grappling with the same problem as you – there are so many darn general choices, yet few for a shopping cart solution with an affiliate program (for e-products).

We’ve moved beyond the Clickbank option – realizing it to be much less than favorable. We’ve also considered hosting our own cart and affiliate solution, though still we’d prefer more automation.

For a hosted cart without an affiliate module, allow me to suggest this one:
http://www.securenetshop.com/sc_features.htm
samples > http://www.securenetshop.com/wb_samples.htm

I understand securenetshop integrates well with most affiliate tracking solutions.

For the do-it-yourselfer, 2checkout matched with Shareasale seems to a viable option for selling e-books.

2checkout – $49 signup, 5.5%
Shareasale – $350 signup, 20%

One problem with the above scenario is that you’d need an expiring URL to prevent download abuse. This issue though can be easily resolved using Linkloc:

http://www.vibralogix.com/linklok/
http://www.vibralogix.com/linklokurl/

Currently, we are negotiating with esellerate to improve upon their affiliate tracking facility. By far, esellerate has the best overall features for the money. They appeal mostly to software devs, yet their 10% – 15% FOR EVERYTHING including handling sales AND affiliate payments is very, very attractive.

Tip: Jakob Nielsen uses esellerate to sell some of their reports.

http://www.esellerate.net/pricing.asp

See a live example of esellerate enabled store:
http://www.mscorecard.com/mscorecard/index.php

Best of luck to you.

Above all they have great support and have walked me through many things. If any one wants to see it in action just email me. I will send you a test link so you can see how the downloading works from the buyers point of view.

Thanks
Charles

When I used clickbank I also used easyclickmate to expand clickbanks functionality. It’s too bad you have to buy another product to make clickbank do what you need it to. Otherwise, it was ok. I am not fond of their reporting, etc. Plus their product price maximum limited what I could offer as an upsell.

All the best finding a good system.

We have been using WebMarketingMagic which is a provider of 1ShoppingCart and have had great experiences. We sell a variety of online and tangible products and discarded the idea of Clickbank early on. No regrets and we love the affiliate, autoresponder, and reporting management features included.

We use the database feature included, but also have a script service that writes all sales and contact info to our own SQL server. Redundancy is a great thing!

If you need digital product delivery and an affiliate module then you’d have to go for the Pro package ($79mo or $799/per year). It’s not cheap, but if you’re serious about selling eProducts it’s a good investment.

On the other hand, I’d stay away from ClickBank. You are right: it has a bad reputation and is mostly filled with 90% rubbish. The backend and reporting are alos very basic.

If you want more simplicity go with a PayPal/Payloadz setup. I’ve had good success with that in selling pdf stuff.

I too recommend ClickBank…I’ve used them VERY successfully since 2000 with great success, both as an affiliate and as a vendor.

Good luck!

Richie

Perl is a scripting language just like PHP. Anyone who knows PHP should be able to learn Perl relatively fast. And let’s face it, your server guy learning Perl is not just something that benefits him for this one time, it might be helpfull in the future as well. Even better, he might enjoy learning Perl.

I think your choice should be driven by the functionality you need, and much less by what is needed to get that functionality.

Can’t see where it would do affilliates though.

Also, the end buyer’s experience with the system can be a bit detrimental due to the long “getting in” process.

http://marlincreek.com/content/view/60/35/

You can see what I’m talking about at the link above.

If they fix that and do an affilliate program, it would probably be a pretty good system.

For the shopping cart I don’t think you can beat osCommerce (Open Source). There is an affiliate bolt-on module available as it doesn’t provide one natively. The community support is fantastic!
The only thing missing is the autoresponder and, as all the information is stored in a DB, it would be easy to export it into an external autoresponder; my favourite being SendStudio from Interspire:
http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=16229&U=152045&M=4623 (aff)
http://www.interspire.com/sendstudio/ (non-aff)
Again, this is a PHP/MySQL product that is fully customizable and can be easily integrated with osCommerce and the guys (and gals) from Interspire are very helpful – yes, I do use this product as well as their ArticleLive CMS :)