How To Protect Your eBooks Resale Business From Download Theft
What is download theft and how could it impact your eBooks Resale business?
Download theft occurs when people download digital products that they have not paid for, by somehow obtaining the download link to your product and by-passing the payment!
This can happen in a number of ways.
1.) Other customers share the download link. If they only share the download link with a couple of friends this may not turn into a huge loss, however if the link ends up on a forum or social bookmarking site, then potentially hundreds of people could end up with free access to your product!
2.) The download thief may guess your download link. This could be because you have a unsecured method of numbering your products, e.g. if you sell an eBook about dog training and set the download file as www.yourdomain.com/dogtrainingebook.pdf this would be easily guessable. Especially if a customer buys one eBook from you, and is provided with a simple download link such as this, they may then guess the download location of your other eBook titles.
What can be done to protect your eBooks Resale business against this problem?
There are a number of things that can be done to significantly reduce your risk of download theft:
Create download links that are virtually impossible to guess and change them regularly. For example, instead of simply dogtrainingebook.pdf, you could create a download link such as dog-training-ebook-4671288.pdf. This would eradicate the possibility of anyone being able to guess your download links.
However, it would still not stop the problem of people sharing your download links.
For this reason, it is a good idea to change the location of your files every now and again, especially if you have a product that is high value and is particularly popular.
You could invest in digital delivery software. This type of software will provide customers with a download link that is unique with every purchase, and can be set to expire after a fixed amount of time or number of downloads.
Digital Delivery software can also reduce the admin time needed to run your eBooks resale business, for example, by eliminating the need to manually email eBooks to customers.
There is a number of digital delivery software available on the market, however the two most highly rated by eBook sellers and internet marketers are My Digital Dispatch and DL Guard.
Is download theft really enough of a threat to worry about?
It is extremely difficult to measure the true cost of download theft to an eBooks resale business, as it is impossible to track exactly who is sharing and downloading your links.
However, think of it this way; if you were an offline business, say a shop, you would take basic steps to ensure the security of your premises e.g. by locking the doors at night and investing in an alarm system. You would not wait until someone stole from you before deciding to take these basic security steps!
The same logic should be applied to an online business – why wait to see if someone does steal from you (and you may not even know they are doing it!) before deciding to protect yourself?
After all, you put a lot of time and effort into your ebooks resale business, so taking basic steps to protect it should be an important consideration.