I've been trying to set up an automatic payment system + affiliate program for my own Minicourse. At the moment it's via PayPal but not automatic - meaning I get email notifications when someone's bought the course, but then I need to manually deliver it by sending an email.

I was looking for a way to handle the auto-delivery and also add an affiliate program at the same time. You'd think a guy like me who has seen over 40 affiliate platforms would know what to do.

I thought I did. I scooted over to PayDotCom where they handle e-product ordering and have an affiliate network. I've made some money by promoting some of their merchants' products - e.g. the Drop Capitals product by Jason Lewis, which is proven to increase your conversions.

PDC lets you create a product and promote it with no signup fee needed. They take a very reasonable commission and it's cheaper than ClickBank, which in my mind is quite archaic. So I setup my product on PDC but after a while realized the PDC site is very slow - which makes it frustrating when you're hopping from page to page to figure out what you need to do.

Then I realized that although they claim "secure download pages" this doesn't mean that someone can't pass around your thankyou page link and steal your e-product without paying. Another strike against PDC - this means I needed to go out and buy a third party product like DLGuard (looks good, installs easily, and so far I have had great support from Sam Stephens the author).

Then I saw some typos in their template for affiliates to sign up. The last straw was when I went into their "customer supported" forum and noticed that they are moderating the posts and no one has approved any postings for over 3 weeks (since March 5 as of today). That's not acceptable for a forum where customers are trying to help each other.

I've asked about this in that past - over a month ago - but didn't get any action from the PDC guys. 

On the surface PayDotCom looks good but it's just too slow and unresponsive for my tastes.

So I have now deleted my product from PDC and my plan is to use PayPal to handle the payment, iDevAffiliate or Post Affiliate Pro to track the affiliates on my own server, and DLGuard to handle the secure download.

Once this is set up I will update the Mini-course:

• add a project guide for selecting affiliate software and
• raise the price of it to $39.
  

GoodBye PainDotCom 

UPDATE - I heard from Ralph Cotton over at PDC that he has been sick for a while and trying to recover through all the backlog issues. The site is still slow but it's good to know they're trying to cut the backlog. Hope you get better Ralph and please get someone to back you up.

UPDATE2 - PayDotCom has finally been reviewed and added to our comparison database here. 

--- (Edited on 9/13/2006 11:00 am [GMT-0500] by Peter) ---