Re:Ask HN: How do I bootstrap selling an E-book
by mootothemax on Wednesday December 22, 2010 @12:08PM
(#2031732)
Surely the cheapest way would be to create a sales button in PayPal (Log in, click "Profile", click "My saved buttons") and then email the book to anyone who pays. If your book (I hope!) turns out to be a seller you can invest the money, otherwise do it by hand :-)
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Re:Ask HN: How do I bootstrap selling an E-book
by jmeyers on Wednesday December 22, 2010 @02:28PM
(#2032179)
Would there be a way to set up Paypal to auto email the book to the customer? If I were a paying customer, I'm not sure I would want to wait to get my book. I think the expectation of buying an e-book is to get it instantly...
Re:Ask HN: How do I bootstrap selling an E-book
by mootothemax on Wednesday December 22, 2010 @05:09PM
(#2032650)
Yeah totally possible. PayPal supplies an HTML form as part of the code they give you. All you need to do is add a hidden element with a name of notify_url and set the value to a PHP script on your site. PayPal will do an http post to that script and one of the fields they post is payer_email, so you could set up a PHP script to email the ebook to that email address.
Now, this is all horribly insecure - if someone discovered the name of their script you can see how easy it'd be to get it to email the ebook to whoever - but for no-cost boot strap solution, it'd do the job initially.
I'd happily lend you a hand getting started with this stuff, my email address is in my profile.