successORnot.com

When you set something up like the dual order pages that I have, it’s necessary (most of the time) to have dual thank you pages. I suppose you could get away with just one (maybe), but I prefer to set things up individually.  That way there is no confusion for the customer as to exactly what they are getting.

Depending on how many products you are selling, or, actually, how many different zip files you have for those products, will depend on how long it takes you set up your thank you page / download page.

For my small product offering thank you page (which is the download page), it took about 20 minutes, including the time to set up the scripts for the downloads.  Thats for both pages too, as I used the first page as a template for the second!

Even if you are using an IPN system to protect your digital products, you should also employ other safeguards as well.  Protecting your download & thank you page folders is as easy as password protecting them through your cpanel at your webhost.

If thats too difficult, or to inconvenient because of having to access it for the items inside (like when others order your products & have to download them & you can’t figure out how to write the proper codes inside of a script for them to be able to access it), or any one of a number of other reasons that make it unrealistic to actually password protect them, at a minimum, here’s an easy solution:  just place a blank index.html file inside those folders.  You don’t even need any words at all within it.  What this will do, is if someone types in via their browser bar the url to the folders where you don’t really want people snooping in, it simply displays a blank page.  They can’t see anything that is inside these folders.  Perhaps they will think its an error of some kind & just leave.

You’ve got time and money spent into making your website and all the contents within, so be sure to take the time to protect everything as well.  It’s not real hard protecting your download & thank you page folders, but it is a necessary step to insure your work is not for nothing.