What is the MOD Machine Catalog?
The MOD Machine catalog is the main screen of the downloadable MOD Machine software program designed for the browsing, purchase, and download of digital products. Think of it as a “digital product vending machine.”
The catalog is downloaded from a link on your website, and has your logo and branding. Your customer never leaves your website.
The catalog provides the user with a focused, integrated, superior quality shopping and viewing experience free from the clutter, delays, complications, inconsistencies and security problems of web browsers.
Below is an example of MOD Machine catalog, as used by DVcreators.net, a publisher of digital video training courses.
MOD Machine Catalog features
- Displays each product with icon, title, author, description and price
- Each product has “more info” button that displays in depth information about the product, or takes the user to your product web page
- Full shopping cart functionality- add to cart, remove from cart, total
- Sign in button, so if customers are on a different computer so they have access to their purchased products
Customer Details Screen
- Checkbox allowing customer to save their information for streamlined checkout for future purchases
- State-of-the-art encryption when transmitting payment details to Authorize.net- safer than any browser or phone call
Think outside the browser.
Two years after we began designing the MOD Machine platform, Apple launched the iTunes Store, a downloadable catalog for music browsing and purchase that has been downloaded over half a billion times and has propelled Apple to be the #1 music retailer in the world, going from 0% to 70% market share in just five years.
Web-based retailers, with world-class brands like Amazon, Napster and Real, have been left in the dust- along with companies who ship CDs, and retailers who sell CDs, who have mostly gone out of business.
Why did Steve Jobs insist on a separate, downloadable software catalog to sell music rather than just selling products from Apple’s website?
Because Steve knew the only way to gain traction selling music legally was to provide a premium customer experience with superior perceived value. Apple knows all about building value- their profit margins are many times larger than their competition.
Apple proved beyond any doubt that downloading a software catalog for browsing, purchasing and enjoying content is much more compelling and successful than a browser-based option.
When you examine the success of Apple’s iTunes, with 70% market share of downloaded music, compared to 7% for the giant Amazon, you have to ask if there’s something else going on than the iPod connection. Amazon offers unprotected MP3 downloads that go right into iTunes and onto any iPod. Apple downloads have always been protected, giving Amazon the seeming advantage. So why does Apple have ten times the market share?
The answer is that with Apple, you’re buying something of real value, from iTunes, a software program. With Amazon, you’re clicking on a web page, and downloading a file, and the perceived value is much lower.
With MOD Machine, your company can have your own branded downloadable catalog featuring your products, and provide your customers with a superior user experience.
If you want to syndicate your products through a network of Affiliates, you need MOD Machine.
Why won’t a web solution work?
Because there are only three ways to have affiliates with a web-based system, and all three are bad.
- You can offer dealers a subset of the functionality of your site, perhaps in an i-frame, Flash widget or java applet or other complex, unreliable, inconsistent technology. Not a good idea. Making your affiliates second rate citizens is not nice. Also, these things often break. New browsers, like Google Chrome and IE 8, pose new challenges, possibly making you go back and redesign your widget and having to ask your affiliates to redeploy. And, they will work sometimes and not others. And once customers find the full functionality of the main site, they will ditch your affiliate, and your affilaites will ditch you.
- You can tell your affiliates to send their traffic to your website to buy.Oops? Your affiliate toils day and night to build traffic. The last thing they want to do is send their people to you. It doesn’t even work that well for Amazon any more, it’s probably not going to work for you.
- You can ask your affiliates to spend tens of thousands of dollars and several weeks redesigning their website to accomodate your system. Sorry, this won’t work either. All your affiliates websites are built differently. Some are Dreamweaver HTML, others are CMS-based, asp or blog software based. Most will not bother doing the work. And if you are using a different system than others, they certainly will not want to accommodate multiple systems.
The only perfect way to launch affiliates with digital goods is the MOD Machine. Affiliates can be up and running in just minutes with a simple HTML link and some text. And it will always work with any website, any browser, and never have to be changed.
