I thought I would write up a small comparison of the two sites, now that I’ve been using E-Junkie for about a year, and I used Lulu for roughly the same amount of time.

Basically, Lulu.com is a website which allows you to sell pdf ebooks and soft/hard copy books. It’s POD printing; Print On Demand. This means you can print as many books as you want, as compared to the old version of publishing/printing, where you had to order (often large) quotas of books at a time. Lulu.com also acts as the sales point, meaning all you do is upload your file, select some options, and press save. Lulu collects the customer’s info, takes payment, prints and ships the books/sends download info, and sends you the royalties via Paypal in a lump sum at the end of each month. (I’ll note that at the time I was signed up with them, they also offered CD/DVD publishing, but they don’t offer it anymore) Caveat: I have not used Lulu for over a year now. This and the following is based on my memory of how things worked, but not necessarily representative of any changes that have occurred to their service since.

E-Junkie is slightly similar, but only in regards to ebooks - they don’t offer POD printing. E-Junkie is more of a Paypal with features - you upload files to E-Junkie, select a few options, press save, and place a button or shopping cart on your website. When the customer orders, they order using a custom Paypal-like (or whatever online payment system you use, such as the one Google offers) page; the payment is made directly to your Paypal account (as compared to Lulu’s own shopping cart system) and the file link forwarded via email. This means you can also use E-Junkie for actual products (and I should mention, other media files, such as .zips, images, video, etc), and so it’s one up on Paypal because you don’t have to do endless coding in order to create a button or shopping cart - just add your product details and go.

There are a number of differences between the two sites, and mostly I will compare between how each handles sales and ebooks.

Ebooks: E-Junkie does not create the files for you; you have to do that yourself. However with Microsoft Word (or substitute) and a free pdf creator, it’s not all that hard to do. Lulu does create the file if you upload with a Word document; alternatively upload the pdf yourself, and it will be used instead of a Word file. Either way, it’s not much different. Because E-Junkie does not do POD printing, and Lulu does, this is the main reason for Lulu being the only one to ‘create files’… Lulu needs to create a special file in order to send it to the printer.

Fees (aka what you pay to use their site): E-Junkie requires a monthly fee to be paid (on a scale system depending on how much storage space you require for your files); Lulu.com requires no monthly fees, but does take a percentage of your sale price as administrative fees. Initially I was reluctant to pay the money each month to E-Junkie, since it will be paid out whether I make a sale or not - Lulu doesn’t take money when you don’t make a sale - however, as you’ll see from my other comments below, it’s been well worth the price.

Royalties (aka your profits): E-Junkie takes no money and then sends it on to you, instead the money goes direct into your Paypal account, no different than if you have an actual Paypal ‘buy’ button on your website. This means you get all of the sales price, every time. Lulu.com collects all the money from every sale, removes the fee from each, then adds up and sends the monthly amount to your Paypal account. Whilst either option is basically the same in terms of dollars, I find it far more satisfying knowing I don’t have to rely on a third-party to pass on the correct amount every time. (It’s also nice from a customer perspective as many people don’t realise the difference between a person selling through a third-party website, and a person selling through their own. Many customers when I was using Lulu kind of assumed I was in charge of it)

Reports: E-Junkie sends an email notification every time I make a sale. This includes relevant info, such as the customer’s name, email address, and IP address (useful for tracking down sales in your webstats, which are not often linked to E-Junkie itself). There is also a transaction ID - which actually matches up with the Paypal payment ID, which I’ll get to in a second - info about what they bought, and so on. Because E-Junkie processes the payment directly through my Paypal account, I also receive a normal Paypal notification of payment. Additionally, as a seller, I can set it so that I receive the email notification that gets sent to the customer, which has info about how to download the ebook and other instructions which I can manually set in E-Junkie’s account. Lulu sends a ‘daily sales notification’, which is basically an email that tells you what products were sold and how many. No customer info is retained or forwarded; this will be important for further discussion of Lulu’s service. I often had daily sales notifications disappear for no apparent reason, even though my Lulu account settings were checked to receive them. Making a complaint to Lulu customer service never resolved this; luckily for me I have the Paypal payment records from Lulu. (Again, this impacts on my comments below) I will also add that all emails to the customer via E-Junkie use my email address, so it appears as though I’m the one sending them; whereas Lulu uses their own email addresses and so customers might get confused as to who they’re dealing with.

Stats: E-Junkie provides all the info available from the email notifications in a list in the seller’s login area, plus the ability to see when/if the ebook has been downloaded, and with how many attempts (it expires after a number of attempts). The list can be downloaded, and I have done so in an Excel file. The list can be downloaded for all sales from the beginning of your use of the site, or it can be done for any and every time in between. Lulu provides limited statistics, such as how many products are sold over a year, which ones, and the total $ of each. No customer info is retained, no stats available to compare with sales strategies or referral links.

Process of downloads: E-Junkie provides a thank you page after a sale is made, where you can manually write your own text, as well as advertise other products and give further instructions. An email is sent to the customer, which explains they need to follow a link in order to download the file. Upon clicking the link, the customer is taken to a page which provides a ‘click here’ to download instruction; along with any other info you’ve manually added. (So all three steps you have custom text if you want) Lulu provides a thank you page after a sale is made, no custom text. The customer is provided a receipt/email, however, they must be smart enough to relogin to Lulu in order to find what the customer service reps tell me is a very obvious button to download the file (more on that below). At no time can you edit the info provided to the customer, nor can you change the process by which the download is offered.

Service options, additional: E-Junkie allows you to manually reset download links once they transpire, as well as send free downloads - basically an email with a download link, but avoiding the payment system as usually required in order to access the files. Lulu doesn’t allow resetting, but does allow a ‘private’ download which can be accessed only if someone already knows the correct URL. It’s not protected the same way a download link is (the link/file does not expire), but it does the same basic thing.

Customer service: E-Junkie, in my year using it, has only had a couple of problems. One was uploader-related, and was likely due to a browser issue (upgrading Firefox did the trick); the other was a problem from a customer who couldn’t download the file. Likewise it was browser related. I have used both the forums and private customer service with E-Junkie and have received pleasant, helpful advice within 48-72 hours. Lulu also provides forums (mostly user-to-user help, although that may be true of E-Junkie as well, but I’ve had limited experience browsing in the latter) along with private customer service. The forums were a nightmare to browse, and still are, and I found little if any response from other users. Customer service was on average 3 weeks to make an initial response, and several weeks more if there were follow-up emails; additionally curt and unhelpful and often required re-explaining to multiple service reps. Lulu’s website itself was often frustrating to work with in terms of uploading and selecting options, but mostly they were aesthetic issues which seller-wise don’t fuss me enough to mention. More info below on customer service for Lulu.

Customer satisfaction: This is in reference to the people buying my stuff, not my own satisfaction with the services. Whilst using E-Junkie I may have had all of 3 or 4 people emailing me wondering where their download is. (Let’s say I have had 200-300 customers per site, most of whom never contact me) In all cases - so far - this is a ‘user’ problem, whereby they either are too impatient to read the instructions in emails; needed to upgrade their browser or pdf program; or thought it was a snail mail pattern. In all cases I have endeavoured to clarify my instructions on the sales page/thank you page/email receipt, and a polite yet clearly-worded reply with instructions usually solved the confusion. Additionally, E-Junkie’s stats mean that I can login to my seller’s account and double-check whether or not there have been downloads from a customer, if I need to reset their download link, etc.

Whilst using Lulu 3/5 customers would email me wondering where their download was. 3/5 customers couldn’t follow the instructions given by Lulu, even when I directed them to Lulu’s FAQ which had screenshots of each step of the process. 2/5 customers would give up after trying several times, and I have had to resort to snail mailing them a CD copy at no extra charge. (These too were Lulu products, but I ordered a batch of them to keep at home in case of problems like these) As Lulu doesn’t send actual customer information to the seller, ie. me, I had no way of verifying that the person even bought the item, let alone having transaction IDs that I could follow up on. On the occasions where I suggested the customer directly contact Lulu (because of my lack of info/ability to track problems), I have either had to contact Lulu myself because the customer never received a reply, or the customer simply gave up and requested a replacement CD. When I complained - and I did several times in their forums, via customer service, and even here on my blog - about the download button issue as a design problem, Lulu acted as if the majority of my customers were just plain internet-newbies. Instead of taking proper feedback on board, they made me feel like I was just not giving my customers enough information; even though I have no control over how customers use another company’s service or how that service is designed and run. If the product itself - Lulu’s print and delivery system - wasn’t enough to put me off, and it was, then their customer service sure did.

Overall: I currently pay $15 USD for E-Junkie per month. And it’s worth every cent, even if it is on top of my other website bills. Over time of using Lulu I paid out that and more just sending replacement CDs of ebooks I was selling; often overseas. Lulu wasted my time and money, and in addition to that, provided less services and badly too. With E-Junkie, I have more control over how I deal with customers and how they deal with me, and have only twice (out of hundreds of sales) gotten an irate email from a customer; as compared to the tens of irate ones I received before using Lulu, including several that call me a ‘thief’ and threatening to report me to the Better Business Bureau (yes, customers don’t read my contact info before purchasing, and apparently most people on the net think that you live in America if you sell online). I make more sales now than I did before, although that’s probably not from the change of third-party service but moving the patterns over to School of Puppetry. When I make a sale now, I know it will work 9/10, instead of the 3/10 from before. I don’t get stressed out wondering if every few sales I will have problems. And there were problems with Lulu from day one. E-Junkie however, has been easy to use, I’ve never woken up wondering if I’m going to get irate emails, I’ve been happy with the customer service and their product, and as far as I’m concerned, $15 is cheap for peace of mind.

If you have any questions about my experience with either site that I haven’t (clearly) covered above, let me know and I’ll try to answer them.