You will, from time to time, surely have received requests for handbooks and user manuals that have been misplaced or lost. It is good to be able to offer customers the possibility of downloading any particular handbook, manual or guidelines in the form of a PDF file. This means that he will get instant access to it. And because you then no longer have to send out these handbooks, etc. by post, it will immediately make everything easier and cheaper for your company (saves printing and postage costs). It comes as no surprise then, that many leading companies are now offering handbook downloads online. We have been able to note, however, that this function has plenty of room for improvement, even just with the simple task of finding the right handbook. Without any documents on hand, customers often find it difficult to correctly identify their product. You should therefore provide your customers with ample options to easily and intuitively find the right handbook (search trees, key words, open search, etc.). In addition to the actual name and code of the product in question, a photo of the product will make finding it on the download and selection pages easier.

Tip: It is worthwile to directly link the handbook download option with the page featuring the corresponding product. Many customers will instinctively look here first for their product. Moreover, as mentioned above, you are thereby already automatically communicating your high level of customer service at this level.

Also, with regard to your handbook download, you need to check to what extent your website's search engine is able to read and evaluate PDF files. If a customer inputs his product into the search field, the resulting search results should also be able to find corresponding PDF documents. Handbooks and user manuals are usually offered for download in PDF format. However, PDF is not always PDF! When creating Acrobat files, you can proceed differently depending on your customers' needs. Firstly, you should try to compress files as much as possible in order to reduce the duration of the download as much as possible. Especially, if all your manuals are multilingual, you should attempt to first separate the different language versions for purposes of the download. For example, most English-speaking customers will have no use for the Chinese-language version anyway ;-). In other words, each customer will be happy if he only has to download the language version he actually needs. You may even want to consider offering a pure text version without pictures for download. If you have larger documents, it might be a good idea to consider the possibilities of using the PDF format to prepare documents strictly as hypertext (integrate links, thumbnails, interactive contents page).It is now common practice to offer customers software components for download for all products related to EDP (e.g. telephone systems, cash till systems, and all other electronically controlled devices). These are usually updates, patches, language packs and drivers. In order to reduce download times, the more 'powerful' software should be offered compressed for download (e.g. with WinZip). Please do not forget to mention on your download pages how big these files are.

If your business is on an international level, it may be a good idea to provide software from several servers located around the globe. The customer can then download from another server if the connection to a more distant location is bad or if there is a temporary network overload.
If you want to restrict software updates to registered customers only, you will have to offer the possibility of registering online. If you want the customer to pay for this software, he has to be able to pay for it by credit card, thereby clearing his payment immediately and enabling him to promptly download the desired software. In this way, there will be no delay and he can solve the problem in question as soon as possible.