Serious question about selling games

[m0ds]

Hello one and all. I know specific people have real dealings with this issue and I will also be asking them about it (namely Dave and Mike) but I need a little input as for the best way to go about dealing with paying for games online which leads to an online download. In the last couple of months my inbox has been growing with requests from people, developers & companies that wish for Screen 7 to publish their games. They're not all adventure games, lately I've been offered the chance to sell some 3D racing games and stuff. They've all been interesting offers and I'd really like to take them up.

From what I can tell, the idea is to sell them as online downloads. At this point in time I'm only familiar with PayPal, and I'm pretty sure you can't arrange paypal to somehow offer a download link once the payment has been received. I may be wrong. Are there any particular sites or companies that DO offer a service like that? Or will I have to fork out $80 for some kind of sql/php system similar to the one Dave Gilbert uses? OR; is there anyone here with experience of setting up a system like this, who might be interested in helping me out? I'm looking for the most cost efficient (preferably free) way of setting this up, but if some kind of payment is going to be needed in the short-run then that's fine, but how much will I need to spend?

Well, at this stage - any advice is welcome.

Many thanks

[woodz]

Theres http://www.oscommerce.com/ which is a very good shopping cart solution.. and is free, handles paypal and credit cards
it can be a bit hard to figure out at first but well worth the effort

[Nikolas]

Woods,

This is AMAZING!

Thank you!

[m0ds]

Looks good woodz, but there is no sign of it handling pay for downloads. Unless there are other "solutions" for that...? Or, does anyone have any sneaky solutions for that? When I say sneaky, I mean secured ways of sending people a download link or something... ?

[woodz]

i think its part of the shipping method if i remember right

theres also
http://www.cubecart.com
http://www.zen-cart.com/

a guy i know who did 3D models used Zen cart and that did download link feature

if you have fantastico on your website it has all three or if you want to have a look about i can sharp install one for you on my server to play with

[Dave Gilbert]

Bleh. Don't use osCommerce.  I used it for five months and it was nothing but trouble.  It's primarily used for shipping physical products, not for online downloads.  The online download portion of it was buggy.  A good 1/3 of the purchases never went through properly, and I had to go in manually and give the customers the game for free.

Cubecart is free to use, although you get some nice extra features if you pay for it.

I've been tempted to try out something called Plimus, which would be good in your situation.  If you're acting as a 3rd party publisher (or an affiliate) Plimus will automatically calculate all the commissions and such and pay everyone accordingly.  It's something I'm looking into, because it will mean a lot less work for me.  It does cost money though, but I don't think it's huge.

[m0ds]

Thanks for the information, Dave & Woodz! I'll look into Cubecart for now but you're right, Plimus sounds interesting I don't have fantastico either, not sure what it is. Sounds fantastic though! I was a little worried about using osCommerce. But thats mostly because I never quite understand how to get open source things working :p Cheers guys!

[Dave Gilbert]

Actually, Klaus was the guy who set up the whole eCommerce section of the Wadjet Eye site, so your best bet is to get in touch with him.  He did an awesome job with it.

[m0ds]

Ahh, cool! Klaus is a web wizard!

[woodz]

Thanks for the information, Dave & Woodz! I'll look into Cubecart for now but you're right, Plimus sounds interesting I don't have fantastico either, not sure what it is. Sounds fantastic though! I was a little worried about using osCommerce. But thats mostly because I never quite understand how to get open source things working :p Cheers guys!

a lot of web hosting packages that have mysql, perl and php have various free script tools,  fantastico is one of those, in seconds you can install websites, forums, blogs etc, if you don't like them you can uninstall just as quickly
the big downside is the scripts can be out of date, and its sometimes harder to update the bloody things than it is to install from scratch :