Selling digital products with Perch Shop

One important feature of the new Perch Shop is the ability to sell digital products and services. As a business reliant on selling digital products ourselves, we’re all too aware of the need to manage this well, and how it is so often neglected in ecommerce solutions.

So what do we mean by digital products and services? It’s basically anything that is sold and then delivered via your site rather than shipping something physical.

For example, when you buy a Perch license, we deliver a license key via email and a ZIP file of the software from our site. If you buy one of Rachel’s ebooks, it’s delivered via a secure link to a PDF, ePub or Mobi file. Another case is that of a subscription site that might wish to allow access to users for a certain period of time once they have paid.

The Perch Shop has two key mechanisms to help make this easy. The first deals with files. Each product can optionally have one or more files associated with it. These are managed alongside the product, using Assets and secure resource buckets. When a customer completes an order containing products with files, those files are then available to the customer to download.

This simple mechanism covers selling an entire range of digital products like software, fonts, ebooks, video material and even music. It can also be used to enhance the sale of physical goods, too. If selling products that require assembly, you could include a PDF copy of the instruction sheet. When selling a printed book, you could include digital errata, or maybe some accompanying video course material.

The second mechanism deals with pay-for-access. This is handled with the existing Members app in conjunction with the Shop app. User accounts for Shop are handled by Members, so each customer automatically gets an account that is fully integrated with your site.

On completing the purchase of a product, a member tag with an optional expiry can be applied, and your customer will immediately be able to access the parts of your site that they’ve paid to be able to access.

These two mechanisms are very flexible and can be combined in different ways to provide access to all sorts of digital products and services from your Perch Shop.

European VAT

One important aspect of selling digital products is making sure you comply with the new European VAT (value added tax) rules that came into effect at the beginning of 2015. The rules are complex and boring, but boil down to needing to charge EU customers a different amount of tax based on the customer’s location. These rules aren’t entirely dissimilar to those that sellers in the United States will be familiar with when it comes to charging different levels of State tax.

The existing tax system with Moltin is functional but doesn’t yet cover some of the intricacies of these new rules. It is being worked on, however, and it’s something we’re very keen to make sure we cover.

Perch Shop is almost here

The Shop app is currently in private beta with selected customers If you currently have an e-commerce project you would like to use the Shop for, please drop us a line and we’ll get you on the programme. If you’d like to hear more about the Perch Shop and our approach to it, we’ve discussed it on episode 50 of the Perch Podcast.