The Book of Scubbly Everything you need to know, all in one place

Hate trees? here's a printable version.

Contents:

Getting started

Scubbly is a remarkable service for anyone selling downloads. It was built from scratch, by an experienced seller who was fed up with the existing services available for selling his own downloads - and so Scubbly began as a solution, not a product. Once its software was mature enough, Scubbly was offered to the public and immediately improved the e-commerce business of some early adopters. It grew. And grew. Now Scubbly has become a marketplace for things downloadable, with many new sellers joining daily, and hundreds of thousands of downloads.

Scubbly was built on, and continues to evolve according to, the following principles:

  1. Buying should be easy

    You buy, and you get the product. Instantly.

  2. Selling should be simple

    You should be able to do it yourself, get set up quickly, and have all the tools you need (and none of the ones you don't) to run a successful and profitable e-commerce business. You should not need any peripheral skills, like coding or HTML or installing plugins. Let Scubbly do that.

  3. Selling should be profitable

    Many competitors are predatory with their fees and costs. Scubbly is not. Scubbly's fees are just a few percentage points over cost - and there are NO hidden fees and NO surprise transaction costs. When you earn $50, you actually get $50. Compare Scubbly to any other selling platform, and you will see this is true.

The first step in Getting Started with Scubbly is to register an account. It's easy, and it's free.

Buying from Scubbly

There are two ways to buy from Scubbly. If you're buying more than one product, you should log in and use the cart. If you're only buying one product, then you can make an Instant Purchase.

Cart Purchase

To use the shopping cart, you have to register and log in. Fill your cart with multiple items, then check out. After you've paid, all your downloads will be available on the Downloadables page.

Instant Download

When you make an Instant purchase, you'll be sent a download token to the email address in your PayPal account. Use that token to get to your download.

Selling at Scubbly

If you already have an online business selling digital products, you're going to love this. It's so much easier than what you're doing now. If you've never sold before, you'll be pleased with how elegant Scubbly is.

How it Works

Scubbly stores all your digital products in our Secure Distribution Cloud. Our cloud is a collection of file servers situated around the world, containing digital files that can only be downloaded through a secure connection - and that connection is only open when a purchase is made.

There are two ways to buy things at Scubbly. They are:

  • Cart Purchase

    If the buyer started a Scubbly account and logged in, they might have purchased using the cart. The authentication means we know who they are, and what they bought, and all their purchases - "downloadables" - are waiting for them on the Downloadables page.

  • Instant Purchase

    The buyer did not log in to Scubbly, so we don't know who they are. Instead, the purchases generates a token which is sent to the email address associated with the buyer's PayPal account. The buyer gets their token, follows a link to the download page, and they get their product from Scubbly's Secure Distribution Cloud. All widgets and InstantLinks are treated as Instant Purchases.

When a buyer purchases one of your products, our service is immediately notified. The details of the transaction are logged, and a 3 day window is opened, allowing the buyer to download the product from our Secure Distribution Cloud. Upon completion of the purchase, an email is sent to:

  • The buyer

    telling them what they bought, and how to get it.

  • The seller

    With details of the sale, including profit earned.

  • Affiliates

    If there is an affiliate commission associated with the sale, the affiliate receives a notification telling them what they earned.

Then, the buyer downloads the product.

That's it! All the staggering complexities of processing e-commerce transactions are hidden. Scubbly takes care of the financial fulfilment, and the product delivery. Once you have a product set up in a Scubbly store, you literally need to do nothing except market your products and send them to Scubbly. We do the rest.

Payouts

Payout of your Available Balance is processed on the first of every month. The minimum payout is $50. All of Scubbly's payouts are sent via PayPal.

When you look in your account, you'll see two balances. They are:

  • Balance

    This is an up-to-the-minute balance showing how much is in your Scubbly account. It's a sum of all your sales, affiliate revenue, and payouts.

  • Available Balance

    This is a sum of the cleared transactions in your account. Due to a policy loophole at PayPal, buyers are able to cancel payments within 60 days of a purchase. To avoid chargeback scams, Scubbly holds funds for 60 days until they've cleared. This is the balance that you will get on your next payout.

When will I be paid?

Money from all sales are held for 60 days until the buyer's payment has cleared PayPal's 60-day cancelation window. Once a payment clears, it is added to your "Available Balance". The Available Balance is paid out to you on the first of every month, when it is over $50.

Example
  1. Tony Smith buys your e-book on June 12, for $6.
  2. The payment for that goes into Scubbly's accounts, and the amount is added to your balance.
  3. Tony's payment is held for 60 days. The payment clears PayPal's cancelation window on August 11.
  4. On August 11, the $6 from Tony's purchase is added to your Available Balance.
  5. The Available Balance including the $6 from Tony's payment will be paid to you on the next payment date, September 1.

Requesting an undersized payout

If you have less than $50 in your Available Balance but you'd like a payout anyways, you may request one. Scubbly accepts the transaction charges for normal payouts over $50; an abnormal or undersized payout will incur PayPal transaction fees which are around 3%.

Note: Scubbly will only pay out your Available balance, which contains transactions that have cleared PayPal's 60-day cancelation window.

Fees

Scubbly charges no up-front fees. Instead, we charge fees at the time of sale. The motto is:

You won't pay a cent until you've earned a dollar.

This tactic is radically different from most other e-commerce platforms. The intent is to make Scubbly an accessible no risk platform. You can't lose.

Scubbly charges:

  • Standard Fee

    5% + $0.30 per sale.

  • Currency Conversion Fee

    For products sold outside the USA. 4% of sale.

  • Oversize product fees

    For storage of extra-large binaries over 60MB. Monthly storage cost: $0.03 per 100MB per month. Data transfer fee: $0.02 per 100MB per sale.

When you're setting a price for a product, all the fees are pre-computed so you can see up-front what they'll be. There are no surprises.

Here's a complete explanation of Scubbly's fees.

Registering an Account

Registration for Scubbly is simple. Go to the registration page, and enter:

First Name, Last Name
Scubbly uses your name in greetings and notifications, and we'll look it up for personal correspondence and customer service. It doesn't have to be your real name. But it's nicer if it is, because in the event you contact customer service, someone will greet you by name. Your name is not shown on any Scubbly pages - that's what your Store Name is for.
Email Address

This is the address you'll use to log in, and the address to which Scubbly will send notification emails. Make sure it's a real address, and that it's spelled correctly. After registration, Scubbly will send a message to this address, containing a link you must click in order to verify your account.

This does not need to be the same as your PayPal address.

Password
You'll need this to log in.

Once you're finished filling in the form, press Submit.

Then, go and check your email. There will be a message waiting for you from Scubbly, containing a link. Click on that link, and your registration will be complete.

Initialize your Store

Congratulations, you've registered at Scubbly and verified your email address. The next step is to set up your store. This should take approximately one minute. Really.

Next, look at the top of the page - there are two tabs: "buy" and "sell". Click on "sell". This begins the next steps of setting up your store.

Step one: Choose a Store Name

After clicking the "sell" tab, the first thing you'll be asked for is your store name. This is an important step, which you must do once, and you may only do once.

A store name must be unique. You can not choose the same name as someone else's store, because of the way store names are used on Scubbly to link to your products, among other things.

Also, your store name is permanent. Once you choose the name for your store, it becomes an identifier for your store, for all eternity. Think of it like choosing a Twitter name - it has to be unique, and permanent. If you decide later that you want a new store name, you have to start all over with a new account.

Also, a store name may not be numeric. It can't be all numbers - it must have at least one other character in it.

So, think about it for a moment. Then type in your store name, and press Next.

Step two: Enter your PayPal address

Step two is to enter your PayPal address. This is the address to which your payments will be sent once you've made some sales. Don't worry too much about this one - you can change it later. But if you do have one handy, enter it here.

Then, press "Save".

Step three: Legal Agreement

Step three is to answer "Yes, I agree" to Scubbly's legal agreement. Of course you will read the entire thing before continuing... check the checkbox, then click "Next".

... And you're done! Your store is ready. If you're impatient to get selling, you can skip the next part and start adding products.

But if you're not in such a hurry, let's take a short tour of Scubbly's interface.

Navigating the Interface

Log in

The Log In page is fairly simple; enter the email address and password you used when you registered. Click "Login" and you're done.

Forgotten password reminder

If you forgot your password, there's a link you can click to retrieve it. You'll be prompted to type in the email address you used to sign up; Scubbly will send you an email with a password reminder in it.

Once you've logged in, you'll see a secondary menu appear in the page header. The secondary menu contains:

All of these submenu items are illustrated in greater detail in the next section: Your Account.

Account

The Account section at Scubbly contains information and configuration tools for your Scubbly account. You can view your sales, change your password, generate reports, and more.

Messages

Scubbly hosts a simple messaging system for communicating with buyers. Messages are grouped into conversations; in each conversation you can engage in discussion with another Scubbly member.

Cart

Scubbly's cart is like every other cart you've seen before. You may add products to it, and when you've assembled all your purchases, click Check Out.

Downloadables

Downloadables is where you'll find products that you have purchased.

Feedback

Once you have purchased a product, you are entitled to leave feedback about it. Honest feedback helps other buyers to choose well-rated products.

Your Account

Access your account management tools by clicking "Account" in the secondary menu.

Account

http://www.scubbly.com/account/

This page shows your account's current balance, and a report tool for viewing transactions. Transactions include all events that change the balance in your account, including:

  • Sales
  • Affiliate Commissions
  • Refunds
  • Payouts

Profile

http://www.scubbly.com/account/profile/

The Profile tab lets you change your email address, password, and other account data.

Changing your Email address

You can change your email address by clicking "Profile" in the third-level navigation menu, under "Account". Please note that when you change your email address, you will need to revalidate it by clicking on a link sent to that address.

Branding

http://www.scubbly.com/account/branding

The Branding tab in the Account section gives you tools to customize your store pages with your brand. There are two branding images you can upload to Scubbly:

Logo

The Logo image appears in the right column. It must be 270x185 pixels.

Logo

Banner

The Banner image extends across the top of store pages. It must be 900x100 pixels.

Banner

Settings

http://www.scubbly.com/account/settings/

The settings tab is where you can control your experience of Scubbly as a whole. There isn't much to configure. In fact, you can pretty much ignore that this page exists.

Reports

http://www.scubbly.com/account/reports/

The reports page is home to exportable reports of your account activity. Scubbly's reporting tools export data as CSV (comma-separated values), a common format that can be imported into any spreadsheet program.

Managing your Products

Viewing your products

To view your products, click the "sell" tab at the top of the screen. This will bring you to a view of all your products. Store Sections are on the left, from which you can navigate to sections of your store. A view of the products in a section are on the right.

The seller's main interface

Store Sections

Store sections allow you to organize your store into a hierarchy of smaller product groupings.

To add a section:
Click "Add a Section", type in the name, then click "Add"
To rename a section:
Click on the section name, to navigate to that section. Along the top of the view pane is a link labeled "rename this section". Click on that, then type the new name into the box. Press Save.
To delete a section:
Click on the section name, to navigate to that section. Along the top of the view pane is a link labeled "delete this section". Click on it.
To move a product into another section:
Drag the product's thumbnail photo over one of the sections, and drop it into a section. You can also assign a section when editing product details.

Products

The product view is a paginated table. Reorder the view by clicking on a column header. Click again to switch between ascending and descending order. Products are shown with a thumbnail, product information columns, and an "edit" and "delete" button for each.

You can drag the thumbnails into Sections on the left.

Adding your products

Uploading your product

From the main "sell" page, Click the large button labeled "Add a product". This brings you to the Upload tool.

http://www.scubbly.com/upload/

This is where you'll upload the file that you will be selling. Scubbly has a few limitations on uploading files:

  • The file must be under 60 MB. If your product is larger than 60MB, see the section on Oversized Products.
  • The product is just one file - not a collection of separate files. It must be downloadable as one binary blob.
  • It can't be a file that you have already uploaded. If the binary is identical to a product in your store, Scubbly will refuse the upload.
  • The product must adhere to Scubbly's Terms of Service.

Uploading a file is a quick 3-step process.

  1. Click "Browse..." and pick the file you'll upload
  2. Check the checkbox indicating that the file complies with Scubbly's Terms of Service.
  3. Click "Start Upload".

When the file has finished uploading, you'll be sent automatically to the next page, where you will edit the product details.

Oversized Files

An Oversized product is any product that is over 60MB. Oversized products can not be uploaded into the web interface - they need to be processed and copied to the secure distribution cloud by our staff. If you have an oversized product to sell, contact us.

Note that oversized products are also subject to a small monthly fee. For full details, read about Scubbly's fees.

Editing product details

To edit one of your products, click the "sell" tab, find your product, and click "edit". You can also navigate directly to the editing page by finding a product's public detail page, like this:

http://www.scubbly.com/item/7226/

... then add edit/ to the end:

http://www.scubbly.com/item/7226/edit/

You'll be brought to a tabbed interface where you can edit all the details about your product. The tab are:

File

This tab shows details about the file you're selling.

Scubbly offers you the ability to replace the file in our storage cloud with a new version. The steps to do this are:

  1. Click the "Browse..." button, and find the new file you want to upload. Agree to the Terms of Service, and click "Start Upload".
  2. When the file is finished uploading to our staging area, it must be processed. Wait until it is finished (could be anywhere from 1 second to several minutes)
  3. When the file is finished processing, click "Replace" to instantly replace the current binary with the new one.

Please beware: When you replace the binary, the change is immediate. The product you were selling before is replaced by the one you just uploaded, as soon as you click "Replace". You do not have to Save anything.

Description

In the Description panel, describe your product. This is the text that will convince potential buyers to buy your product, so be accurate and compelling. The description is limited to 2000 characters.

Warning: Do not paste in unoriginal content.

Whether you are selling your own product or someone else's, DO NOT cut and paste marketing material from another source as the description of your product. Not only may it be plagiarism, but it has seriously detrimental effects for Search Engine Optimization - the duplicate description will demote your product page in search engine results, and will result in less people finding and buying your product. A good product description is custom written, original, and unique. Scubbly reserves the right to add a no-index block on descriptions that are copied verbatim or duplicated on other websites.

Changes to your descriptions are not saved until you click the big SAVE button at the bottom of the edit screen.

Describing products in multiple languages

Scubbly lets you - indeed encourages you - to name and describe your product in multiple languages. The other-language descriptions will appear on the other-language versions of Scubbly, and will be indexable in the search engines in those other languages. Just adding a French translation of your product description will double your product's exposure to search traffic. It's a good idea!

The first tab you see in the interface will be the one that corresponds with which language you're working in. If you're at www.scubbly.com, the tab will be "English", while at fr.scubbly.com, the first tab shown will be "French".

To add another language, go to the "add a translation" form below the description text area. Choose the language you wish to add, and click the "Add" button.

Add tabs to the description panel to describe in multiple languages

Pricing

The Pricing tab is divided into 4 subsections:

  • Price

    Here, you enter the price that the buyer will pay for your product.

  • Scubbly Fees

    Calculated for you, as you type. Here, the right column is split to show fees for Domestic vs International sales.

  • Affiliate Offer

    Your affiliate offer can be a flat amount, a percentage, or both.

  • Discount Coupons

    Here, you can create discount coupons to use as a promotional incentive.

As you change the numbers, the entire form will recalculate and show you a breakdown of all fees and your ultimate profit.

Store Sections

Store Sections help you organize your products into logical groups. In this tab, you can put a product into one of your sections, and create new sections.

Images

You may upload up to 10 pictures to illustrate your product. Click "Upload new Photo", and pick an image off your local drive.

Your image must be:

  • A JPG, PNG, or GIF file
  • Less than 3MB
  • Larger than 80x80 pixels

When a picture is uploaded, Scubbly resizes it to fit inside a 500x500 pixel square, and stores that version. Scubbly does not keep the original high-resolution copy of your image.

Scubbly also creates an 80x80 thumbnail of the image, by grabbing a centered vignette.

Cropping your image

Below each image thumbnail is a "edit" link. Click that, and it opens a cropping tool. The tool lets you redefine the size and position of the thumbnail image by dragging the corners and edges of the highlighted area to resize it, or drag the higlighted area to reposition it.

The cropper tool lets you customize a thumbnail image

To rearrange the order of your images, click and drag them left and right.

When you are all finished editing your images, Press "Save".

Categories

Category

You must choose a Scubbly category for your product. The Category is intended to roughly describe what kind of product it is. The interface for this is a hierarchical chooser designed to emulate an old-school iPod (first generation!). Click the arrows to navigate up and down the category tree, until you find the one that best describes where your product fits.

For example, a Cross-stitch pattern would not go into "books", because there is a category for cross-stitch patterns. In that category, it will be browsable amid other patterns, for people who are looking for precisely that kind of product.

If you just can't figure out what category your product should go in, contact us, we can help. If your product is completely uncategorizable, it may be necessary to create a new category just for you, or alter an existing one so its topic is more inclusive.

A change in category is not saved until you click the big SAVE button at the bottom of the edit screen.

Tags

Tags are intended as text nuggets that are somehow relevant to your product. Their primary use is to be matchable words when someone is doing a search.

To add a tag, type the word (or phrase) into the text box, and press Enter. It will suddenly appear below, in your list of tags. To remove a tag, click the "X" beside it.

Changes to your tags are not saved until you click the big SAVE button at the bottom of the edit screen.

Removing a Product

To remove a product from your store, find it in your seller's interface. Beside the product row, there's a button labeled "Delete". Click that, and your product will be gone.

... or will it?

Actually, your product may stick around for a while. If someone has recently bought your product, they have 3 days in which they're allowed to download it. If there are any pending downloads for your product, it won't be deleted right away - that wouldn't be fair.

So instead, Scubbly marks the product for deletion, and keeps it in the storage cloud until the last buyer has reached the 3 day download expiry. Then, the product is removed.

If have been no sales of a product, it's removed immediately.

Warning: when you remove a product, there's no undo, and Scubbly can not retrieve a product once it's been deleted. The product is completely erased, and the binary is deleted. There's no way to get it back. So always keep a copy of your own products!

Languages

Scubbly is currently available in 3 languages: English, French, and Spanish. Every page and every product on Scubbly is viewable in all languages.

The English version of Scubbly is at www.scubbly.com, the French is at fr.scubbly.com, and the Spanish is at es.scubbly.com .

While the Scubbly interface is translated into multiple languages, product names and descriptions may be available in only one language. Yet sellers have the ability to write separate descriptions for each language, if they choose to.

Tip: Describe your products in multiple languages

Scubbly uses W3C approved valid XHTML to mark up all its content to indicate the language it's in. To avoid the presence of "duplicate content" on the site, Scubbly will only allow product detail pages to be indexed by search engines when the language of the product description matches the language of the site it's being shown in. So, if your product is only described in English, it will only be indexable at www.scubbly.com. But if a product also has descriptions in French and Spanish, then the product detail pages at fr.scubbly.com and es.scubbly.com are also indexable.

See: Describing products in multiple languages

Affiliate Program

Scubbly has the easiest affiliate program you've ever tried.

To join Scubbly's affiliate program, all you have to do is register. If you are already a seller, you are already an affiliate. Once you have a Scubbly account, you are already poised to start earning affiliate revenue.

Linking to Scubbly as an affiliate

To get credit for sales at Scubbly, just append the "affid" variable to the querystring of any URL at Scubbly, with your ID number as the value.

Example:

Original URL:
http://www.scubbly.com/item/13/
Affiliate URL:
http://www.scubbly.com/item/13/?affid=YOUR_AFFILIATE_ID

You can attach an affid to any page on Scubbly. With each sale, you will receive an email notification, and the profit will be added to your account balance.

What is your affiliate ID? Find out and read more about the Affiliate Program

Advanced Tracking

When you're generating traffic for affiliate sales, you'll try numerous creatives, venues, links... and as a campaign progresses you'd like to know which ones are converting the best, wouldn't you? Advanced Tracking for Affiliates is a simple way to track the success of your affiliate campaigns.

As you know, to refer as an affiliate, you add a variable affid to the URL. To add advanced tracking, you add another: affdata.

The value of the affdata variable is a string representation of the values you want to track, expressed as JSON. It looks something like this:

{"creative":"skyscraper2","referer":"example.com","gid":4332}

In that example, creative is a variable name, and skyscraper2 is the value of that variable. The variable name is in double-quotes, then a colon, then the value can be a string (in quotes) or a number (no quotes). name/value pairs are separated by a comma, and the entire expression is enclosed in curly brackets. You can create any variables you want, as many or little as you want, and pass them in as affdata.

So, your entire link would look like this:

http://www.scubbly.com/item/13/?affid=321&affdata={"creative":"skyscraper2","referer":"example.com","gid":4332}

You can paste that into a browser, and it will work. But it's better to urlencode the data, so it actually looks like this:

http://www.scubbly.com/item/13/?affid=321&affdata=%7B%22creative%22%3A%22skyscraper2%22%2C%22referer%22%3A%22example.com%22%2C%22gid%22%3A4332%7D

The following JSON are all acceptable:

{"p":1182773926} {"trackingcode":"alphagamma","group":"foxtrot","q":"plr articles"} {"v":-3.14156} {"streetnumber":"55"}

The affdata JSON can not contain arrays, objects, or other JSON notation. Also, the variable name must be alphanumeric, containing no spaces or punctuation, and the values must be string or number type - don't use any of those other JSON data types like NULL or UNDEFINED or INFINITY. These are not acceptable:

{"tracking-id":1234} (bad: variable name contains a hyphen) {"style":{"height":"12","width":33}} (bad: the JSON may not contain sub-objects) {"type of link":"outbound"} (bad: variable name may not contain spaces) {"ids":[53,44,89]} (bad: the JSON may not contain array notation) {"référent":"example.com"} (bad: the variable name contains accented characters) {} (empty) {"q":1,"q":5,"q":12} (duplicate variable names) {"q"=6344} (bad syntax) {"q":null} (null is not allowed) {"q":skyscraper2} (strings must be in double-quotes. Only a number may be unquoted) {"":"skyscraper2"} (variable name can not be empty)

Don't forget if your data has a quotation mark in it, it must be escaped with a backslash, like this:

{"wrestler":"Tom \"The Terminator\" Hanks"}

What if my JSON is malformed or invalid?

Then it'll be thrown away. Your affiliate commission will still be tracked, but the additional information you passed in will not be saved along with it.

How it works

When your visitor lands at Scubbly with the affid in the URL, we "scrub" that from the address, drop a cookie into the browser, and save it as a session. If there's an affdata there too, it's also saved. The arrival of a potential buyer at Scubbly with your affiliate ID is called an impression. Your affdata is associated with that impression, and so is your affiliate ID.

An impression doesn't necessarily end with a sale. But when it does, the sale is associated with that impression, and hence with the affdata you provided. If you provide affdata that describes the provenance of that sale, you can measure the effectiveness of your affiliate campaigns.

To generate reports of your campaign's effectiveness, you'll use the Affiliate Reporting tool.

Discount Coupons

In the "pricing" tab of the editing interface, you can create Discount Coupons for promotional incentives. Here's how you use them.

Each coupon, when created, is given a unique "code". One, for example, might look like this:

46YWEYT3SX

There are two ways to redeem a coupon. The first is to send your buyer to Scubbly with the coupon code in the querystring, like this:

original URL
http://www.scubbly.com/item/1234/
URL with coupon code
http://www.scubbly.com/item/1234/?coupon=46YWEYT3SX

When your buyer arrives with that coupon in the link, the coupon is "scrubbed" and stored for them during their current browser session. When they check out (cart) or buy (instant), the coupon discount will be subtracted from the price owing.

The second way to redeem a coupon is on the cart checkout page. At the last step before pressing "Purchase", the buyer has a chance to enter any coupon codes that apply to their purchase.

Scubbly will only accept one coupon per product purchased. If the buyer enters multiple coupons that apply to one product, only the highest-valued coupon will be used.

Using coupons in InstantLinks™

Applying coupons to InstantLinks is very effective. One of these will send the user directly to PayPal, with your product already in their cart, with the coupon already applied. To do this, simply add the coupon to an InstantLink, like this:

item detail page URL
http://www.scubbly.com/item/1234/
InstantLink
http://www.scubbly.com/item/1234/instantlink/
InstantLink with coupon
http://www.scubbly.com/item/1234/instantlink/?coupon=46YWEYT3SX

Managing your sales

Customer Service

Scubbly offers its own customer service - when the issue is with Scubbly itself. That means Scubbly will arbitrate difficulties with the e-commerce transaction, downloading the binary, and payment - including refunds.

When the problem is with a product, Scubbly's first response is to ask the buyer to contact the seller.

Issuing a refund

If a problem can't be resolved, then Scubbly will issue a refund to the buyer. The buyer gets back the entire amount of the purchase, and the entire amount of the purchase is deducted from the seller's account. Scubbly fees charged at the time of purchase are non-refundable.

A refund is warranted, when:

  • The product is corrupted, broken, or incomplete.
    For example, a PDF with pages missing, software that doesn't work, an incomplete download, or a corrupted file.
  • The product was misrepresented by its description Like, a product description that says it's one thing, when it's actually something else
  • The buyer bought the wrong thing
    for instance, a Mac user buys Windows software, or a video file that won't play on their system
  • There are irreconcilable technical problems
    such as, a video for which the buyer can't get a working codec, or a software package that requires unavailable hardware

Contacting your buyers

Unless your customers have indicated they wish to be contacted, you generally should not send them unsolicited e-mail. However there are legitimate reasons to contact a buyer: to offer customer support, license extensions, deals on similar products, etc.

Your sales reports contain the email addresses of your customers. You may export this list into a spreadsheet, upload to a mail distribution service, etc.

Troubleshooting

If you think something is wrong with Scubbly, please contact us. When you do:

  1. Include your name, store name, login email or some other way to identify your account
  2. Take note of what you were doing at the time the problem happened
  3. Copy & Paste the exact URL from the browser where the problem is occurring, and any relevant information on the screen
  4. Describe the problem in as much detail as you can bear

If you find that the contact form is not working, you may write to: webmaster@scubbly.com

Integrating Scubbly

Marketing your products means getting your interested buyers an easy way to buy your products. Scubbly has two fantastic tools that make it easier: Widgets, and Instant Links.

Widgets

Widgets are mini-applications that you can embed into your own website, blog, social media venue, MySpace, etc.

To use widgets, you need to be able to:

  • Include HTML on the page
    Easy, if you're hosting your own blog or publishing your own web site, but may not be possible to embed HTML into blog comments, forums, Facebook status, etc.

  • Embed JavaScript in the <head> of the page
    Same as above. To make widgets work, you need to be able to add a <script> to the page, in the <head> of the document.

If the place you're publishing doesn't allow you to do these things, then you're better off using Instant Links.

For complete instructions for creating and embedding Scubbly widgets, go to the Widget Page.

Instant Links

Instant links are an easy way to integrate Scubbly services into your own website. With a simple hyperlink, you can send your buyers directly to PayPal, with your product already in their cart. Instant links convert extraordinarily well into sales.

To construct an Instant link, go to any product detail page on Scubbly. For example:

http://www.scubbly.com/item/7226/

... then, add "instantlink/" to the end

http://www.scubbly.com/item/7226/instantlink/

Take that URL, and link to it from anywhere you want!

Instant links accept an affiliate ID, the same as any other URL at Scubbly:

http://www.scubbly.com/item/7226/instantlink/?affid=1234

... and are available in all of Scubbly's supported languages

http://www.scubbly.com/item/7226/instantlink/?affid=1234 http://fr.scubbly.com/item/7226/instantlink/?affid=1234 http://es.scubbly.com/item/7226/instantlink/?affid=1234

Summary

That's it. Did that all seem too easy? Uncomplicated? Of course! E-commerce doesn't have to be difficult. Scubbly does all the difficult stuff for you.

If you have questions about using Scubbly to sell downloads, use the FAQ, or send us a note.