Hi and happy New Year!

Prior to beginning a new venture, I’d be pleased to hear from anyone with related experience.

I’d like to make stories and music available to subscribers on my website; I’d much rather it was very inexpensive and had lots of members than the other way around. Consequently I need to keep costs down.

Does anyone have experience of receiving payments on their website and then generating passwords for the new members? Automatic generation of passwords would be my favourite!

I took a look at www.jacquielawson.com (following Robert’s post) and using her customers’ email as their username seems wise – limiting the temptation for members to give their password to others. Membership at £4.50 ($8) per year sounds good too!

The most inexpensive music downloads I’ve seen are audio-streaming (pay to listen) which some large companies do for £0.01 ($0.02)! As PayPal seem to charge 20p/$0.30 per transaction, plus the odd few percent for extras, this doesn’t look viable for me. Music downloads could also commit me to providing a huge bandwidth for members (up to 10 megabytes per song for longer recordings).

Replies eagerly awaited …

Hi Fairdoes,

As you can see, your post is getting viewed. It would appear, however, that no one has an answer for you :) I, personally, don't have any experience with the type site you're describing so I can't offer any insights either.

Perhaps someone will come along soon who can give some practical tips.

Karon

...receiving payments on their website and then generating passwords for the new members? Automatic generation of passwords would be my favourite!


PayPal can do this for you as part of "Subscriptions and Recurring Payments" (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/xcl/rec/subscr-intro-outside).

As you mentioned, it wouldn't work on a per-download basis, but it's great for subscriptions.

Also, have a look at 2checkout.com. Here is the page with info on membership sites:

http://www.2checkout.com/memberoverview.htm

Thanks Robert & Copywriter for the speedy replies! PayPal subs do look most promising. :standingw

PayPal seemed tricky to get started, but now it works, it's good! Subscriptions were too complicated, but BuyNow buttons are just the job.

Thanks again for the pointers :D