In addition to offering you more profit, CD’s give customers that like to “touch and feel” an otherwise intangible product more peace of mind and confidence that their purchase is actually for something of value to them.

Providing CD’s also helps reduce technical support for people that lose their "download", all the while providing a valuable service to the many customers that would like a backup CD for their purchase.  Offering CD’s does not have to be a labor-intensive job for you, because any good e-commerce provider should offer you an easy way to just complete a few fields in your product details to take advantage of this feature.  The entire process, from capturing the order from the customer, to affixing an attractive color label with your product name on it, to packaging the CD in a heavy mailer, to mailing the CD can -- and should -- be conveniently managed for you.

Also be sure that the process involves your product being dynamically retrieved via FTP from a URL that you indicate to ensure your customers always get the latest version of your software.  With that strategy, you don’t have to worry about keeping the source up to date except to simply keep the download file current at your own web site.

When offering CD’s, you should also have full control over how they are offered to customers and what price is charged.  You should also have the option to control whether they are added to a customer’s cart by default with the option to remove them (opt out), or not initially in the cart and offered as an option during the checkout process (opt in).

If you don't have the ability to easily offer CD's for sale, and then burn and mail them, companies that specialize in e-commerce, for other software businesses such as NorthStar Solutions, can offer a valid strategy for that part of your sales process.