AP 0290: Are There Free Alternatives to E-Junkie?

AskPat 290 Episode Transcript

Pat: What’s up, everybody? Pat Flynn here and thank you for joining me today. As always, I am here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week. This is Episode 290 but it's also March. March 2015 already. Crazy.

I hope you are making progress on your Q1 goals, your quarter one goals for this year. If not, now is the time to get it into action mode to get those things happening for you. So I'm chugging along, hopefully you are too. And here we go, this is another great episode. We have another awesome question today from Sara. But before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is Lynda.com.

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Now let's get to today's question from Sara.

Sara: Hi Pat, and this is Sara. I have a website, InventingClarified.com which helps inventors, and I'm trying to sell an ebook about pattern searching. I used E-Junkie as you recommended on your sites and it works fine and I'm paying $5 a month for that. While building a website on WordPress I noticed that I could download a plugin called EZPayPal which seems to do the same thing as E-Junkie. You can upload an electronic product, whatever it is, an ebook or something like that. You can set a price and people can use it to buy your ebook. It's free, at least the basic version is free so I'm wondering, with your experience, why you would a recommend a paid service like E-Junkie and why shouldn't I quit with E-Junkie and use something free. It would be really helpful if you could let me know and thanks for your podcast. All the best. Bye.

Pat: Sara, thank you so much for this question. I really appreciate it, and I think it's really smart that no matter where we're at in business it's always good to see where we can potentially cut costs, even the little ones because those little ones definitely add up over time.

Now you mentioned E-Junkie.com, and also my book, EbookstheSmartWay.com, and I want people to understand what those are. So EbookstheSmartWay.com is where you can get my free guide on how to create, publish, market, and automate a killer ebook. Again that's EbookstheSmartWay.com. In that book, the payment processor I recommend because it is so cheap is E-Junkie, and they allow you to directly upload your own product, be it a .pdf file, zip file, piece of software, an mp3 file, audio file, whatever—and then collect a button or a script for a button that you put on your site and when people click on that button they go through the payment process and then they get that thing that you uploaded to E-Junkie automatically delivered to them after purchase.

That's the payment processor and shopping cart that I use to sell my first book, at GreenExamAcademy.com. That book was actually a study guide. And then I later used it for audio files as well for an audio version of that study guide.

Now there's a couple differences there. One thing that I like about E-Junkie is that it gives you the opportunity to create a really easy affiliate program, which I don't believe EZPayPal does. If you want anybody to sell your products for you and then split the cost or give them a commission for sending leads over, and customers over, E-Junkie will do that for you quite easily if that person has PayPal. You can do it just through all of your products or just single products that you want to promote with affiliates, and things like that.

So that's one of the benefits of using E-Junkie. But again, $5 a month is the lowest price out there for a shopping cart like this. EZPayPal came out in 2012, a number of years after the book that I published, Ebooks the Smart Way was published, so there wasn't any sort of free options. So it's really cool to hear that you mentioned and heard of good things about EZPayPal. So that's like the letters “EZ” and then PayPal, and you can find that in the WordPress plugin repository. It seems like, one of the first things I always look for when I see plugins that are free is when is the last update. And the last update, as far as from this recording, was one week ago. So that's good. That means that this is updated over time. It seems to, you can look at the history of updates in the navigation menu on the WordPress.org page for that plugin by clicking on “change log.” And there I can see that this plugin’s been updated quite often, even in the past couple of months, which is good.

There are also a number of good reviews for this plugin as well. It’s 4.2/5 stars which is great. So those are all good signs that this is something that could actually work for you if you don't need an affiliate program and you just need something to deliver digital goods. I way say that you do run some risk when you are using a plugin or any tool, a theme even, for WordPress that is free. The reason that it is risky is because that developer, the person who created that product, because it's free, there's a potential that they might not be monetizing in some way and could potentially fall out. Then you would have a plugin that would work for awhile but if they were to quit updating that plugin there wouldn't be any more updates and your plugin might be out of date in the future.

The one thing about these pay plugins like E-Junkie, and that's not necessarily a plugin, it's just a script that you use, but it's a service, a digital goods delivery service. They are getting paid, they have a long history of paying customers and recurring paying customers. It's a good sign that there's a less chance of that company of sort of falling under. Now of course that can happen with any company, we all know Myspace.com was a site that a lot of us used back in the day. I used it in college and nobody would have ever thought that would have gone away, and then it went away. But it's interesting, it's coming back now.

The same thing for Facebook and Twitter. Who knows how long they're going to be around? But they're potentially going to do that because they're free. Yes, they're monetizing in different ways but this a plugin we're talking about here, and there is a premium version as well. You run that risk, and it's just something to pay attention to, and that's why I like, at least for themes especially, it makes more sense to get a premium theme, if you want to update your design on your website, because you're going to get support. That's the big thing. E-Junkie has amazing support, they have a great community, and they answer their questions rather quickly.

Same thing goes with the latest ecommerce solution that I've just fallen in love with, and that is Gumroad.com. They do essentially the same thing as E-Junkie except they seem to be more ahead in terms of the times and what's going on, and what's trending, and what is working in business and conversions and marketing and internet business and that sort of thing. Again, Gumroad.com. I know a lot of the people that work there, they've definitely just been amazing to chat with. They've responded directly to some of my inquiries and requests for features and they seem to be adding new features every single week to help people in ecommerce and digital delivery.

E-Junkie hasn't really updated itself in the last few years. It looks exactly the same, it has the exact same features and I haven't gotten any emails from them in terms of progress or future thinking. So that's something to worry about as well. But Gumroad seems to be in the lead in terms of helping provide an amazing, really buying experience for your customer. You're going to have a higher conversion rate using Gumroad. But you're going to trade that higher conversion rate and some of those profits for using Gumroad because there is a fee per transaction, which E-Junkie does not have.

Also know that you're going to be paying a fee per transaction with PayPal as well, even if you use EZPayPal which is a free plugin or E-Junkie which is $5 a month. So you have to do the math a little bit. See what the trade offs are. I like Gumroad.com specifically because of the buying experience. It's just a couple of clicks, super easy, you can actually see it being used right now on SmartPodcastPlayer.com, and you can also see it being used on FoodTruckr.com. The book that we're selling and we're using Gumroad.com to deliver that and the conversions are decent. They're doing really well. We're just working now on getting more traffic to the site and more views on that page.

So, Sara, I hope that answers your question and gives you some thoughts on why I decided to continue to promote E-Junkie even though I've seen EZPayPal before. There are other free plugins out there. This one seems to be the one that's easiest to use if you're going to go down this route, but again it doesn't have an affiliate program I believe. There are a lot of other things that may go along with it.

Check out each of these: EZPayPal, E-Junkie.com and then Gumroad.com and see if they have the features or requirements that you need to help you best sell whatever it is that you're trying to sell.

So Sara, thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate it. An AskPat t-shirt is going to be headed your way for having your question featured here on the show.

For those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like potentially like featured here on the show, all you have to do is head over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page thanks for the widget from Speakpipe.com. They are who I use to collect these voicemails that you hear from at the beginning of each and every one of these episodes.

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Thank you so much. I really appreciate you listening to the show today. As always, I like to end with a quote, and today's quote is from Karen Lam. And she says, “A year from now you may wish you had started today.”

Cheers, and I'll see you guys in the next episode of AskPat.