You'd be surprised how often nuts&bolts issues stop people from starting. I was mildly mystified by "Set up website, collect money, deliver software" prior to starting, too. Turns out it is trivial, but that was not obvious prior to doing it. (Relatedly: taxes, bookkeeping, accounting, and government regulation were all walks in the park. Marketing is hard. Who knew?)
Yeah, the nuts and bolts of selling the product is the easy part. There are loads of services out there to sell digital goods including the one that the submitter used and my own service (shameless plug: link in my profile anyone is interested).
PayPal is still the cheapest and easiest way to collect the money, even considering fraud. (PayPal almost always sides with the buyer and with digital goods you have little recourse.)
It's the marketing that makes all the difference. We have customers that have made $50-60k in less than a week due to awesome marketing. And we have customers that pull in well over $100k/yr due to good marketing and good affiliates. We also have many that will never sell anywhere near that much in the product's lifetime, also due to marketing.
This has always been my impression. But when I've actually looked for resources on how to get those nuts & bolts set up, for someone who knows nothing about them, it's been non-obvious.
You wouldn't by any chance know of some resources related to getting over the initial hump of getting paid for software/services, would you?
I am more surprised by how much people are trying to reinvent the wheel every day. I think there are enough tools and APIs out there to build small useful products in less than a week.
