If you sell products in electronic format, these can be made available for electronic download. When a customer buys one of these products they have to wait for the payment to be processed. When this has cleared the customer is sent an e-mail confirming this and lets them know that they can now log into their account area and download the product.
This facility is not activated by default, please read the following instructions which is an excerpt from our new manual which is will be available shortly.
First, collect all of your electronic products into a single Zip file, as you would for product images. Make sure that if one product has many files these are collated together in a zip file and then added to the products zip file (only one file can be available for download).
Once you've got your products together, edit the Product Details spreadsheet and go to the "Products" sheet. Add two new columns, Filename and File type. The Filename column should contain the name, within that Zip file, of each product's file. So if purchasing product ABC would get you the file "data1.pdf", then put data1.pdf in product ABC's Filename column.
The File type column contains the MIME type of that product's file. You can usually leave this blank and the system will attempt to guess it, but if you know the MIME type, enter it here. For example a Zip file's MIME type is "application/zip". Click here to see a list of MIME types.
Note: Remember to set the Weight of any downloadable product to zero and adjust your "Shipping" sheet so that a zero weight incurs no shipping charge, otherwise the customer will be charged shipping for a product that does not need to be shipped. Also remember that the Variant fields should all be empty for downloadable products, since no matter what variant the customer chooses, they will still download the same file for that product.
You can mix electronic products with normal products but any products that are not downloadable must have an empty Filename value.
Once you have uploaded your modified e-commerce spreadsheet, a new section will appear near the bottom of the E-Commerce menu, called "Electronic products". This is where you upload your Zip file of downloadable products, and works in a similar way to the product image uploading section. Use the "Click here to check that the products and electronic product data match up" link to make sure that all of your products have matching downloadable data. If you have set any product's Filename to a file that you haven't uploaded, or have uploaded a file that no product uses, this link will let you know.
When a customer places an order that includes downloadable products, it will be dealt with as usual, unless all products in their order are downloadable and they are paying via PayPal. In this case, as soon as full payment has been received, the order is automatically marked as processed so the customer can download their products straight away. You will not be sent an order notification in this case, as there will be nothing that you need to do (and you will get a payment receipt email from PayPal as usual anyway).
The customer then clicks on the "Your Account" link within your shop, and enters the email address and password they used at the checkout. They can then edit their profile, view their order history, and download any products that they have purchased. Note that they can only see orders (and downloadable products) that have been marked as processed and which have not expired from the Old Orders listing; once the order has been removed from the system, it will no longer be visible to the customer and they will no longer be able to download products that were in that order. |
