Digital Products and Downloads
Selling files, how delivery works, download limits, and selling a download beside a printed edition.
A digital product is something the customer downloads rather than receives. An ebook, an album, a pattern, a template, a manual.
Setting One Up
Set the product's type to Digital. A Digital tab appears, where you attach the files.
Three things follow automatically. It is not shipped, so it does not appear in shipping quotes and does not ask for a delivery address when the basket holds nothing else. It has no weight. And its stock is usually untracked, because you are not going to run out.
Attaching Files
Files are attached on the Digital tab, and a product can have several: a PDF and an EPUB, or an album and its sleeve notes.
A file can be attached to a variant rather than the product, which is how an ebook edition sits beside printed editions of the same title. The customer who buys the ebook gets the file; the customer who buys the paperback does not.
Attaching a file to the product gives it to every buyer
A file on the product itself is delivered to anybody who buys any edition of it, including the printed one. If only one edition is a download, attach the file to that variant.
How the Customer Gets It
After payment, they get a link, in their confirmation email and in their account. The link is unique to that order and not a public address, so forwarding the email is the only way to share it.
A download becomes available when the order is paid. An order placed with an offline method sits unpaid, so the customer gets nothing until somebody marks it paid, which is correct and worth knowing before you offer cheques on a download.
Limits
Maximum downloads caps how many times a file can be fetched. Expiry days stops the link working after a period.
Both default to something sensible, and both are worth leaving generous. A customer who loses a file after changing computers and finds their link dead writes to you, and the saving was nothing.
Mixed Baskets
A basket holding a download and a physical product is charged shipping on the physical part only, and the customer gets both: the parcel and the link.
That is also why the confirmation email mentions downloads only when there is one, which is a change we made after it offered downloads on orders that had none.
Where the Files Live
Uploaded files count against your plan's storage limit. A catalogue of large PDFs will reach it long before a catalogue of photographs.
If a Customer Says the Link Does Not Work
Check in this order: that the order is actually paid, that the download limit has not been reached, that the link has not expired, and that the file is attached to the thing they bought rather than to a sibling edition.
You can always re-send the delivery email from the order, which issues a fresh link.