How to set up a thread in the Digital Market

We're keen on getting more folks to add their products to the digital market! If you have a video, ebook, or super plans for building something, please feel free to post your wares in the digital market. We only ask that the products you post in the market are legal, good quality, and pertain to pertain to permaculture, homesteading, or other interests here on Permies.

If you have questions, ask them here and I'll help you through the process.

Here is an image that can be used on Facebook to promote the digital market. If you want to promote a particular product, use the affiliate link from that product in the post, a bit of a description, along with this image, and you've just created an affiliate link. It's also a great way to help promote the digital market, and help spread the word about Permies and permaculture.

To use the image, first click on it so it opens in a new window. Then right click on the image to download.

Great tutorial, thank you.

I noticed I can sell physical goods through this system.

I like the idea of accepting PIE for goods.  People can buy PIE as well as earn it by posting awesome content on permies.  Is it possible to accept PIE for physical goods?  The option seems to be shaded out.

If you sell something on permies, are there listing fees like on etsy? What percentage does permies take when an item sells?

Thanks!!!

Ah-HA! I found the info! Permies take 1% and paypall 2.5%.



More details here

So, of what you sell, 3.5% goes to someone else.

On etsy, that percentage is 3.5%, not counting what paypall takes, and not counting the $0.20 listing fee for each and item listed (which you have to pay again and again everytime someone buys something. If no one buys anything, you have to pay 20 cents again in 4 months just to keep it listed.)

Well, hot-diggity-dog, permies sounds a lot more affordable to sell on!

Question: For physical sales, how does it work for delivery?  
Specifically, when the person clicks on it, are they prompted to give an address?  Allowed to make notes such as "UPS address / USPS address" or "UPS back porch please"?
How does that address / order information reach the seller?

Any chance there might be a magical "Permies Store" where you can send a case of physical items (books, DVDs, etc) and pay a fee per sale so that Permies elves magically ship those items as soon as they are ordered?

Erica Wisner wrote:Question: For physical sales, how does it work for delivery?  
Specifically, when the person clicks on it, are they prompted to give an address?  Allowed to make notes such as "UPS address / USPS address" or "UPS back porch please"?
How does that address / order information reach the seller?

Here's the email I got when Jocelyn ordered from me (it had the address, but I edited it out):

Congratulations Nicole, you've made a sale!

Jocelyn Campbell has purchased your item, "The Official Permies.Com Jocelyn Campbell Action Figure!" for $40.00.

permies fees:  $0.40
Paypal fees:  $1.46
Your profit:  $38.14

$38.14 has been added to your permies account:
https://permies.com/forums/premium/list

Please ship this item to:

JOCELYN CAMPBELL

address
city, state, zipcode
country

If you want to contact Jocelyn Campbell, you can send a purple mooseage:
https://permies.com/forums/pm/sendTo/11936

I can't remember if there's a place to write notes. Maybe Jocelyn knows, as she ordered from me?

Any chance there might be a magical "Permies Store" where you can send a case of physical items (books, DVDs, etc) and pay a fee per sale so that Permies elves magically ship those items as soon as they are ordered?

That's a neat idea! I think it'd be neat to also have a "cart" and people can "check out," that way, if people are ordering multiple things from one person, the shipping is combined...kind of like if someone orders off of ebay or etsy: the cart shows the items by seller, so you can do one check out, but have multiple shipping costs.

Right now, too, you have to choose a US shipping and an international shipping...which is kind of hard to ballpark, because now it costs more to ship the same item to Maine, than it does to somewhere in my state. It used to be the shipping was the same no matter where they were delivering in the US.

As Paul has said, the digital market is optimized for digital purchases, rather than physical ones. But, maybe if enough physical objects are sold, we can get fancier programming to make the buying experience more lovely for physical-item purchasers and sellers!

Hi!
I just made my first digital market thingy ("My PEP Badge Tracker")

Do I correctly understand that I don't need to add my f-code to my own post? (I'm a tad anxious I didn't hook up the thing correctly, and I can't seem to get my head around it any better than I have).

Thank you for your help!
Ash

I am not that versed on F-codes. I THINK that they're for if someone else directs someone to your thread and that person buys it.

So, say you've got your thread made, and Georgia clicks get an affiliate code by scrolling to the bottom. They share the link around with their code, and Bobby then buys your tracker. Then Georgia gets a 10% cut of $22 (I don't know if the 10% cut comes before or after permies/paypal take their cut...). But, if no one sets up an affiliate link, you get all of the $22 (apart from the permies/paypal cut).

You can go and edit your digital market thread to have a higher or lower "affiliate percentage." The default is 10%, but you can change it to 0% or or all the way up to 100%.

I think Paul has a lot of his stuff set at 30% affiliate percentage, to try to encourage more people to spread the word. I have most of mine much lower (something like 0-3% because I price my fairies/dragons really low to be affordable for people, but I'm pretty sure I have a 10% affiliate on the Paul and Jocelyn figures, since they're made possible only by permies and I want to give back to Paul and Jocelyn for being so awesome!)

So, anyway, if you don't use your F-code on it, I'm pretty sure you get everything unless someone ELSE makes and uses a F-code on your thread, which they can currently do.

Ok, I think I got it right, then. Thank you Nicole for holding my hand here with the digital marketplace stuff.

I needed a lot of hand-holding, too, when I first tried to set up my own digital market threads.

Oooh! I figured out how to verify that I have it hooked up right;

My Stuff >> DM threads - I am the seller

The items are there, it's definitively set up correctly.

One question re: YouTube content. If someone didn't want to pay, is it possible they could just search YouTube until they found it anyway? If so, is there a way to prevent that? I have never uploaded anything to YouTube, only viewed content, so I have no idea.

I believe for youtube content, the videos are probably uploaded as "unlisted." So, the only way to see them is to have the direct URL. They are not searchable via youtube or google.

I'm going to make something that's a downloadable attachment.  Along with it will be a word document with directions and FAQs.  If someone has a question I didn't think of and I want to update the FAQ document, can people who previously purchased it go back in and download it again?

They should be able to. They should continue to have access to the page, and all the downloads on it.

Hi there,
I have a new podcast where I've been interviewing owners of permaculture farms and communities in Costa Rica, called Sharing Insights Podcast, and I'm unclear as to what the best way is for me to share it with the community.  It's essentially a free product.  

If I create a thread for it on the digital market, is it appropriate to create a new thread every time an episode is released, or is it preferred to just create a single thread inviting people to check it out?  Any guidance for appropriate etiquette and best practices around promoting a podcast would be greatly appreciated.  
Thank you

The digital market would not be appropriate.

Would a regional forum be a good fit?

Maybe something in education?  https://permies.com/c/18

The digital market is for selling things, and isn't really set up for things that are free.

But, you can pick a different forum to post your podcasts to! Or post each podcast in the forum that's relevant to the topic discussed. So if you had a podcast about forest gardening, you could post about it in the Forest Gardening forum. And if the next was about earthships, you could post about it in the earthship forum.

is it appropriate to create a new thread every time an episode is released, or is it preferred to just create a single thread inviting people to check it out

You can do either! One thing you could do is have a thread that is a "wiki" which you can edit at any time. That thread could be a giant list of all of your podcasts, linking to the permies thread about those podcasts. And each podcast would get it's own thread.

Daron Williams did something like that with this thread: https://permies.com/t/96779/Wild-Homesteading-Work-nature-grow, where he described his blog and put links to various blog posts.

I did something like that with Bryant RedHawk's articles, too: https://permies.com/wiki/redhawk-soil. Each of his articles is it's own thread, and all are indexed on that main thread.

I hope that helps!

I'm getting ready to do something about selling physical objects. I'm trying to wrap my head around the system and want to make sure I get it correct. The object in question is one where I have 3 variations and 4 sale options. Individual versions of the item or a set of all 3 versions as a single shipping package. Looking at this, it seems that I would need to create a new thread for each individual version, but before I go flooding a number of nearly identical posts, I thought it would be wise to check if there's some variation where different purchase options would all list on the same single page.

IE: Purchaser can select from option A, B, C, or D and then once they select the option, they then select the shipping for foreign or domestic.

I'm pretty sure that you do, indeed, need to make separate threads for each option. I'm thinking that if we get enough people selling physical stuff on permies, we might be able to fund programming developments that would make buying multiple items a lot easier.

One thing I recently figured out, is that you can copy the url of the purchase button on any digital market thread.

For example, here's the thread made to sell the Building a Better World in Your Backyard audiobook: https://permies.com/wiki/125468/Building-World-Backyard-audiobook-format

Paul copied the purchase URL and used that url to make purchase links in the Better World book thread: https://permies.com/w/better-world

The little buttons on the Better World thread are actually just bb code.

You put the url tags around the image tags, like this

[ url=https://permies.com/jforum?module=paidTopic&action=buyWithPaypal&topic_id=125468][ img]https://permies.com/t/68930/a/124832/thumb-100_Building-a-better-world-buy-button-1-audiobook.png[/img][/url]

Which turns into



(Here's a thread all about using BB/formatting code to do spiffy things with your posts: https://permies.com/wiki/52623/formatting-tags-permies-posts-awesome#426719)

HALP! How do I create multiple 'buy' fields?

For example, in this Digital Market item: Building a Better World in Your Backyard - instead of being angry at bad guys eBook there are multiple things for sale and so there are multiple buttons with which people can click on to buy whatever they are interested in.

So, I do I get that, from this:
which only shows an option to buy one item? (Ok, two, one domestic and another international. But it's the same item.)

---

So, the trick with making multiple buy fields is to actually make multiple threads to make buying links, upgrade options, and make use of "gift bundles."

The thread you mentioned uses all of these options.  

It has both links, and upgrade options, that are actually direct links to purchase something from a different digital market thread.

In-Thread Buying Links

In the thread you mentioned, it has this code to make all the links in the thread be purchase links:

Buy the eBook: 1 eBook ($6.99)

   12 gift codes ($30.00)  100 gift codes ($150.00)


Buy the physical book

   With US Shipping:    1 book($19.50)

        12 books ($60)  64 books ($280)


   With non-US Shipping:  1 book ($38.00)

        12 books ($175)  64 books ($535)


Buy the audiobook ($12.50)  

        12 audiobooks ($50)  100 audiobooks ($250)

The code itself looks like this:

[size=28][b]Buy the eBook: [url=https://permies.com/jforum?module=paidTopic&action=buyWithPaypal&topic_id=112519]1 eBook ($6.99)[/url][/b][/size]    12 gift codes [url=https://permies.com/jforum?module=paidTopic&action=buyGiftBundle&bundle_id=4]($30.00)[/url]  100 gift codes [url=https://permies.com/jforum?module=paidTopic&action=buyGiftBundle&bundle_id=5]($150.00)[/url] [size=28][b]Buy the physical book[/b][/size]    [size=24][b]With US Shipping:    [url=https://permies.com/jforum?module=paidTopic&action=buyWithPaypal&topic_id=122611]1 book($19.50)[/url][/b][/size]         [url=https://permies.com/jforum?module=paidTopic&action=buyWithPaypal&topic_id=122694]12 books ($60)[/url]  [url=https://permies.com/jforum?module=paidTopic&action=buyWithPaypal&topic_id=122695]64 books ($280)[/url]    [size=18][b]With non-US Shipping:  [url=https://permies.com/jforum?module=paidTopic&action=buyWithPaypal&shipping=intl&topic_id=122611]1 book ($38.00)[/url][/b][/size]         [url=https://permies.com/jforum?module=paidTopic&action=buyWithPaypal&shipping=intl&topic_id=122694]12 books ($175)[/url]  [url=https://permies.com/jforum?module=paidTopic&action=buyWithPaypal&shipping=intl&topic_id=122695]64 books ($535)[/url] [size=28][b][url=https://permies.com/jforum?module=paidTopic&action=buyWithPaypal&topic_id=125468]Buy the audiobook ($12.50)[/url][/b][/size]           [url=https://permies.com/jforum?module=paidTopic&action=buyGiftBundle&bundle_id=6]12 audiobooks ($50)[/url]  [url=https://permies.com/jforum?module=paidTopic&action=buyGiftBundle&bundle_id=8]100 audiobooks ($250)[/url]

That's a lot of code, but it's not actually that scary. The main thing to spot is stuff like this:

https://permies.com/jforum?module=paidTopic&action=buyWithPaypal&topic_id=122694

See that "topic ID"? That's what thread it got snagged from.  So if I throw 122694 into the URL like this: https://permies.com/t/122694/, it'll take you straight to the thread that link came from.  (The T in the URL stands for "topic." In other words, that was the 122,694th topic on permies. And, If you need the TOPIC ID for that thread, it is 122694.)

ANYWAY, when we go to https://permies.com/t/122694/, we can scroll down and to the little "purchase" button. We can right-click on the payment link and copy URL. Now we can use that to make hyperlinks for any payment links or buttons we want in any thread. Spiffy!


Upgrade Options!

These "Upgrade Options" usually show up after someone buys--or has access to--that digital market content.

This is where we just need that thread ID of a thread with a different payment option. So, if you make a new thread with a different payment option, or are drawing from a digital market thread someone else made, you just go there and look at the URL to find the thread ID.

So, with the thread you mentioned, you had the url of https://permies.com/wiki/112519/Building-World-Backyard-angry-bad. Look for the number in there. It's 112519. That's the Thread ID. If that was the Thread ID you needed, you'd copy that sucker and paste it into the Upgrade Option section and fill out the other information. You can put a LOT of upgrade option stuff on a thread.

Now, when I was learning how to do this stuff, I had the advantage of being able to view other digital market threads code, etc. You can't do that. So, I've I've pasted that threads upgrade options so you can take a peek at them!



Gift Bundles

These are visible when someone HASN'T paid for the thread (or been given access to it). In the image above, you can take a peak at how the gift bundles were made for the thread you linked to. (NOTE: If you already have access to a thread, you can't really see this well. So if you log-out, or use a different browser where you're not logged in, you can take a peek at what someone else sees who hasn't purchased it).

Anyway, the Gift Bundles are JUST for gift codes to that product, and not to other things.

---

Now, somehow Mathew Trotter made this epic thread that has links to lots of his other threads in the payment section. I'm not quite sure how he did that, but I'm going to try to figure out.  https://permies.com/wiki/153291/Annual-Staple-Crop-Calculator-Pay

Ah-ha! Big thanks to Matthew Trotter's The Annual Staple Crop Calculator - Pay What You Want/FREE thread! (I need to go give him a piece of pie for it!). Here's how to add different buying options on one thread. You'll need to make multiple threads, just like he did  (examples: this, this, and this), and then snag the Thread ID from the URL and paste it into that section. Wee!

Ok. Um. Hmmm. Let me see if I got this correctly (I just read your posts once.) The thread that I mentioned as an example, actually is like one megapost that draws links from other individual selling threads? So, if I have, oh, say 4 threads in the Digital Market, one sells a widget, another sells a doodad, the third sells a thingamajig, while the fourth one sells a doohickey, I could create one megapost that pulls links, using the thread id stuff and what not to sell the widget, doodad, thingamajig, and doohickey in that one post? I understand there's more to it, with the upgrading and bundling and so forth. But, that's kind like it?

I could create one megapost that pulls links, using the thread id stuff and what not to sell the widget, doodad, thingamajig, and doohickey in that one post?

Yep, you got that right!!!

Nicole Alderman wrote:

I could create one megapost that pulls links, using the thread id stuff and what not to sell the widget, doodad, thingamajig, and doohickey in that one post?

Yep, you got that right!!!

Groovy! Now, if I can only figure out why one badge is orange, and a duplicate of another that is green. The orange is the topic title of the megapost, the green is the name of the actual product.

in thread buying links, with spiffy buttons!

If someone really wants to get fancy, they can also do in thread buying links, like I mentioned in my earlier post, but instead of just having a hyperlink that takes someone to pay for it, that hyperlink can be a button image.

A good example of that is what I did on the Two Decks of Permaculture Cards

6 decks - US shipping - $60.00
6 decks - International shipping - $90.00
12 decks  - US shipping - $85.00
12 decks  - International shipping - $160.00
24 decks - US shipping - $150.00
24 decks  - International shipping - $210.00

Those buttons are really just images nestled inside URL code.  Instead of putting a word after the...
[url=https://permies.com/jforum?module=paidTopic&action=buyWithPaypal&topic_id=113901], ...
... you put an image icon, like this image:
[img]https://permies.com/t/68930/a/158183/thumb-100_Purchase-button.png width=100[/img]

All together, it looks like this:

[url=https://permies.com/jforum?module=paidTopic&action=buyWithPaypal&topic_id=113901][img]https://permies.com/t/68930/a/158183/thumb-100_Purchase-button.png width=100[/img][/url]

This is a pretty advanced technique, especially for someone new to BBcode, but I thought I'd put it here in case someone was wondering how to make the little payment buttons. If someone wants to learn more spiffy code, you can find out how in this thread: Using formatting tags at permies.com to make your posts more awesome

Just gotta say, your tutorials are great.  Thank you.

Hi there -- I'm just setting up my first item for sale and I really appreciate your making this possible.

I have not noticed information on two topics in my reading so far:

1. What is the schedule for payouts to the sellers? In other words, are we paid with every order, or on a schedule, etc?
2. Is there a mechanism for me to issue a refund?

1. I believe the payout is once a month.

2. Researching some more on this one.

For question #2: at this time, Paul is processing the refunds manually.

Liv Smith wrote:For question #2: at this time, Paul is processing the refunds manually.

Thanks, I appreciate the help!

Am I missing an option to not ship internationally? I have physical shippable items. (Seeds) I'm afraid of the legalities of shipping internationally.

Unfortunately, at this time, there is no option to not ship internationally.

I bet if you set the international price to $9,999 it would either totally discourage international sales or make it really worth your while to figure it out...