Going on from my previous post, I realised I had a few things to say about SmartDD that maybe aren’t as obvious as I thought they were from the new videos. Somebody asked me a question the other day that made me wonder and then my memory was jogged while writing that last post.

So here we go.

You’ve always been able to run all your sites from a single installation of SmartDD if you wanted to. But it’s also fine if you want to install it on each site, and that’s what I tended to do myself so I suppose things weren’t quite right for using it on a single site and managing all your other sites through it.

But with v3 we’ve made it so that it’s really to your advantage to do so. Now you can keep all your customer details and all your order details in one big database, and easily export the data into a spreadsheet to do some analysis. (Well, just customers for now, but I’ve made a note to add orders too.)

There’s now not one but FOUR ways to get customers and orders into SmartDD.

#1 – PayPal
#2 – ClickBank
#3 – Free sign up to a mailing list
#4 – Manually

That means you can have one site (or eBay) selling goods by PayPal, another by ClickBank, and another where you can give products away in return for an email address. (You ALWAYS use double opt-in right? Let’s be responsible folks.)

It also means you can easily give your products to your Joint Venture partners *securely* by manually creating an order. It takes about 30 seconds or less to add a customer (depending on how fast you can type or copy and paste), and then a few seconds more to create an order and tell SmartDD to send out an email to them.

You also have a choice of two different affiliate schemes you can run.

#1 – PayPal email address
#2 – ClickBank

Up until the introduction of the PayPal email address method with the release of the 7 Dollar Script, I’d only ever seen something called “split pay” using PayPal. The split pay method is a nightmare and involved your customer making TWO payments, one to your affiliate and one to you before they got your product. There were too many things that could go wrong (refunds – erk!), and needless to say, no-one was happy with that and it wasn’t long before PayPal said no more.

But the 7 Dollar Method was a good ‘un and works on the principle of rotating the full amount of the payment between the site owner and the affiliate. It all averages out over a few sales.

Your affiliates simply create a URL that looks like this:-

http://www.domain.com/?e=PayPalEmailAddress

and then depending on the percentage commission being paid, they get some of the sales paid directly into their PayPal account. If a refund is required and it happens to be the affiliate who received that payment, it’s tough, but they’re the ones who have to refund it – PayPal is quite definite about that. They’re not going to chase someone who hasn’t received any money, they’re going to chase the person who did.

Since then there have been a few scripts that use this method, and we introduced it into SmartDD v3, with a slight modification. Even if the commission payment is set to 100%, the admin gets all of the first payment, and the affiliate gets all the rest. We did that to stop people from getting a product for free by buying from their own business account with their personal account.

Using ClickBank is even easier. First you copy and paste the return code from SmartDD into your ClickBank sellers account(s).

Then all you need do is create the publisher name in SmartDD and add the secret key that ClickBank supply you with. Next, go to the saleable items panel in SmartDD and create or amend an item, select the publisher and enter the number of the product you’re selling via ClickBank – usually number 1.

Lastly, go to the code generator for that item, and generate the code to add to your sales button on your sales page.

Easy.

Your affiliates then use a normal CB hoplink and get paid by ClickBank as usual a couple of weeks after the sale.

At sale time, ClickBank sends SmartDD the transaction details and SmartDD generates an order. On your customers return from ClickBank (via the return code you pasted into your sellers account), SmartDD redirects them to the download page and also sends them an email with the transaction details and a link to the download page for future reference.

Job done.

The download pages in all cases can be on your single site installation of SmartDD, with the payment buttons etc being on all your satellite sites. The download pages themselves are all held within the SmartDD database, and can be created to look just like your original sales page on the satellite site.

All you need to do is create the download page with an HTML editor (I prefer Dreamweaver) using your satellite site template and make sure that all the links to objects such as graphics and CSS files are direct URLs rather than relative one. So you *wouldn’t* use:-

/images/header.jpg

to refer to your header graphic, you’d use:-

http://www.satellite-domain.com/images/header.jpg

That way the main site with SmartDD installed on it would be able to display the graphics correctly from your satellite site. And of course the same applies for the CSS files.

Once that download template is created in SmartDD, it doesn’t matter where the order has come from, the generated download page will work perfectly.

As you can see, we’ve put a lot of thought into making SmartDD as flexible as possible, and we’ve got some more goodies to come.

Let’s not forget the existing eBay functionality too, and of course Kunaki integration.

The next minor release of SmartDD will contain membership abilities and subscriptions support.

Then we’ll be able to truly say that SmartDD is a cross between the Butterfly Marketing script, JV Manager / Fantasos, the 7 Dollar Script, RAPS, Auction Acrobat and Disc Mojo all rolled into one, and all usable from a single site.

Is that good value for money or what?

Is it? Then go promote it as such. 🙂

-Frank Haywood