DLGuard has gone through a number of upgrades in recent years to flesh out the digital sales functionality it provides. This product review covers the key features it now provides, along with its main constraining factor, based on over 30 months using the software.
DLGuard was recommended to me originally by a webmaster that was writing ebooks and selling them online using DLGuard. The product is an entry level sales tool with scripts that provide shopping cart forms and payment processing (or at least integrating with payment providers such as eBay and Paypal). The tool automatically sends customers an email with a download link for their digital product after payment is confirmed.
Once it is installed the software lets you set up an inventory of digital products (MP3s, PDF ebooks, etc.). The scripts are completely customizable which means you are able to add in your own widgets and redesign the page design of the shopping cart to match your website branding.
The cart is fairly standard in how it looks but notably, it is able to support membership site sales (where no product is exchanged), free product distribution (where payment processing is skipped, but you still get the chance to capture customer information for your mailing lists) and promotional coupons.
Of course, the main concern in online sales is how secure the download hyperlinks are when emailed to customers. DLGuard lets you configure the validity period for the download hyperlink and also set the limit of possible download attempts. This should stop the link being shared by unscrupulous individuals.
The over-riding constraint with the product, which many users comment upon online, is the products 2 domain limit in the product license. Given the target audience are web-entrepreneurs they will invariably have many sites for which they want to use the product. Purchasing more licenses is the main option here. A second approach is to use a single web domain as your shopping cart & checkout system which your other sites would redirect to when a customer hits a buy-now link.
DLGuard will not suit enterprise users. Neither is it useful for website owners with low volumes (they’d be better off putting their products on a hosted service that receives thousands of hits per day). But for independent webmasters with popular blogs/websites this tool would be easy to install, require little upkeep and provide a secure way of making download sales.
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