Should I list all my digital products separately?
One common question we've heard from users is whether to list each digital download separately in their audit.
As a quick note, in the Paid Offers section, you should only add your paid products, not free downloads. With this in mind, you certainly should not include free lead magnets in this list. The only question is whether to list paid digital downloads separately or to group them into one or more categories.
Unfortunately, there is no one right answer here.
How you should approach this will depend on your particular circumstances. To help you make the decision, let's take a quick look at what happens for each product you list.
How the Plainly Legal™ Task Manager Operates
Our system will create a series of tasks for each digital download you include as a separate offer in your Legal Audit. Those tasks will fall into three categories:
- Digital Download Terms - You'll be prompted to create terms and set up a click-to-accept process during checkout for each offer you add to your audit.
- Marketing Issues - You'll be prompted to review sales pages to check for illegal marketing claims for each offer you add to your audit.
- Trademark Tasks - You'll be prompted to run a trademark search and consider registering a trademark for each offer you add to your audit.
As you can imagine, your task list could get very long if you list digital downloads separately.
Group Products That Are Sold Under Similar Terms & Don't Raise Trademark Issues
If you offer multiple similar digital downloads that you'll sell under the same terms of sale, there's a good chance they can be grouped together. To group these products together, two things need to be true:
- They Are Offered Under The Same Terms For Sale - This includes things like your refund policy, whether you offer payment plans, and similar key elements of your terms for sale. As long as the only thing that might vary from product to product is the price, this condition is met.
- They Have Largely Descriptive Names - When a product's name merely describes what it is (e.g., a legal template that's called an "Online Course Terms & Conditions"), it will not raise any independent trademark issues. When a product has a name that is not descriptive (e.g., a legal template that's called "The Legit Biz Online Course Terms & Conditions"), it will raise trademark issues. If your products have descriptive names, you can group them together.
A Note About Descriptive Names: If your digital downloads all have the same non-descriptive element along with different descriptive elements, you can also group them together. For example, if we sold legal templates that all started "The Legit Biz" and then included a descriptive title for the particular product, we could group these products because the important trademark tasks would be to search for the use of "The Legit Biz" coupled with legal products.
If these two elements are met, you can and should group your products together. For example, in a prior iteration of our business, we sold legal templates with purely descriptive names. We used the same product terms for these sales, so we would have simply included a single product in our Legal Audit titled "Individual Legal Templates."
You Should Generally Create A Separate Product For Bundles
Most online businesses that sell digital downloads offer various pre-set bundles. While this is not always the case, it will often make sense to separate these bundles from your individual products. This isn't true merely because they are bundles but based on the conditions set out in the section above.
Bundles are often sold under different terms and are more likely to use non-descriptive names. Assuming either of those is true, you should list them separately from your individual products.
That being said, you may well be able to group certain bundles together into a single line, just ensure the rules above are met.
An Example To Bring The Lesson Home
We love examples, so we will use the prior iteration of our business to help you understand how to handle this in your own audit answers. Prior to launching Plainly Legal™, we sold legal templates, we sold them individually, in bundles targeted to certain users (e.g., Course Creator's Bundle), and an all-access pass.
We would have had three entries in our Legal Audit for digital downloads:
- Individual Legal Templates
- Use-Case Bundles
- The Online Genius Template Library
We would have listed things this way because we sold our products under three different Terms & Conditions for sales, and the Online Genius Template Library (our all-access pass) had a non-descriptive element to the name.