Website Optimization Techniques

In my previous post I mentioned about the imminent launch of my first product. Well, this product is ready apart from the sales page. In the process of setting up the product delivery system, I decided to turn my IPN script into a product too. If you don’t know, IPN (Instant Payment Notification) is one of the ways you can automate your product payment with PayPal.

With IPN you can send a download link by email to a buyer of your product and log the transaction in a database. IPN is the most secure way to do this rather than the other method PDT which relies on a buyer proceeding to a Thank You page to get the product. The problem with this is that they may stay on the Pal Pal site and wonder, where is my product. Or, the URL of the Thank You page may end up in Alexa search results so anyone can search for the download page of your product.

The Thank You page should only really be used to thank the buyer and remind them to check their email for details of the transaction and comply with PayPal’s Thank You page requirements.

I have one PayPal business account but multiple products and sites, so I also wanted a solution to send buyers to a particular Thank You page, send them a download link by email (or not if they are paying for a service) and be able to test multiple sales prices.

This is easily done with non-encrypted buy buttons, but I wanted to use encrypted buy buttons. This prevents people changing the price and avoids having to check that the price is correct with a database look-up. The reason I don’t want to verify the price is so it becomes easy to split test various prices. I simply have separate button code for each price.

I also made the code easy to integrate with testing software where the IPN script pings the relevant conversion goal file.

So in summary, this new script allows you to set up unlimited, automated product sales pages where you have an encrypted buy button on the page and hooked into one PayPal account. Also, it ensures that your buyers get their product details delivered and facillitates accurate tracking of sales conversions.

I will aim to release this product this week. Stay tuned…