DLGuard Review – Shopping Cart Software That Protects Digital Download Sales
- Posted by admin
- April 16th, 2010
- Under: Software
DLGuard has been a welcome addition to the toolset of many webmasters looking for an easy to use application for selling downloadable products from their website. This review details covers the features and constraints of the product following three years using it to sell ebooks and software.
DLGuard is a set of web scripts that can be installed on most web servers to provide shopping cart, payment handling and product distribution (via download links). The scripts provide all the web pages and controller code for interfacing with Paypal, PayDotCom & several other providers when it gets to the final stage of checkout.
The initial installation is easily done in 20 minutes. Configuration of your products takes a little longer, but it is quite straight forward to have a handful of products in the DLGuard inventory database relatively quickly. My initial venture using DLGuard was writing ebooks to sell online so adding small PDF files to the inventory was a quick enough process.
Plugging the hyper links to the cart is straight forward to do but the customization of the DLGuard web pages (so that they match your site’s design) can take some time if you are not handy with scripting languages. The only other thing is to customize the auto-respond email (sent to the customer after payment is confirmed). From that point on, the product automates the checkout process and tracking/reporting of all sales. Tracking customers is especially useful for building your own mailing lists of loyal customers which you can target with promotional coupons. The coupons are another feature supported during checkout.
The requirement though of any sales tool like this is download link security. If the product fails to protect the hyperlink then there is a real danger of multiple users attempting to download the digital file using a single URL. DLGuard reduces this danger with 2 configurable features. Webmasters can set a validity time limit on the download link and also set an upper limit on the number of download attempts can be made from a single URL.
One complaint many users have relates to the license. It has a 2 domain usage limit so website owners that wish to use it on 3 or more domains will need multiple licenses. Given that the target audience is small business owners/web entrepreneurs it is natural to expect that they will be managing multiple domains.
Summing up three years using DLGuard is never going to be easy. It is a great product, ideally suited to small website owners looking for a low maintenance product that requires little or no intervention during the sales process.
Popularity: 15% [?]
DLGuard has been a welcome addition to the toolset of many webmasters looking for an easy to use application for selling downloadable products from their website. This review details covers the features and constraints of the product following three years using it to sell ebooks and software.
DLGuard is a set of web scripts that can be installed on most web servers to provide shopping cart, payment handling and product distribution (via download links). The scripts provide all the web pages and controller code for interfacing with Paypal, PayDotCom & several other providers when it gets to the final stage of checkout.
The initial installation is easily done in 20 minutes. Configuration of your products takes a little longer, but it is quite straight forward to have a handful of products in the DLGuard inventory database relatively quickly. My initial venture using DLGuard was writing ebooks to sell online so adding small PDF files to the inventory was a quick enough process.
Plugging the hyper links to the cart is straight forward to do but the customization of the DLGuard web pages (so that they match your site’s design) can take some time if you are not handy with scripting languages. The only other thing is to customize the auto-respond email (sent to the customer after payment is confirmed). From that point on, the product automates the checkout process and tracking/reporting of all sales. Tracking customers is especially useful for building your own mailing lists of loyal customers which you can target with promotional coupons. The coupons are another feature supported during checkout.
The requirement though of any sales tool like this is download link security. If the product fails to protect the hyperlink then there is a real danger of multiple users attempting to download the digital file using a single URL. DLGuard reduces this danger with 2 configurable features. Webmasters can set a validity time limit on the download link and also set an upper limit on the number of download attempts can be made from a single URL.
One complaint many users have relates to the license. It has a 2 domain usage limit so website owners that wish to use it on 3 or more domains will need multiple licenses. Given that the target audience is small business owners/web entrepreneurs it is natural to expect that they will be managing multiple domains.
Summing up three years using DLGuard is never going to be easy. It is a great product, ideally suited to small website owners looking for a low maintenance product that requires little or no intervention during the sales process.
Popularity: 15% [?]