Sell downloadable products online with our shopping carts

ProductCart includes sophisticated features to sell digital goods from your ecommerce Web site

ProductCart allows you to flexibly handle the sale of electronically delivered products. We refer to these products as Downloadable Products or Digital Products (DP). What is common among all downloadable products is that a download link must be delivered to the customer once an order has been processed.

The Downloadable Products features in our shopping cart software is perfect for the electronic delivery of digital goods such as downloadable software, electronic documents, eBooks, images, etc...

Publishers of digital products are concerned about delivering the download URL to the customer due to the fact that the link can be easily provided to other, unauthorized users. Companies often protect themselves from the unauthorized download of a digital product by adding barriers to the use of the product after it has been downloaded. For example, many software applications require the user to enter a valid License Key or Serial Number upon installation.

Our ecommerce software now addresses both security concerns (unauthorized download and unauthorized use after the download has taken place), through the following features:

• Hidden URL – ProductCart uses server-side file buffering to hold the file in a virtual, temporary location while it is being downloaded. Because the file is not downloaded from its actual location, the location of the file on the Web server is completely hidden. When the download begins, a pop-up window will be shown, which will allow the customer to save the file to their computer. The file name is also shown, but the physical location of the file on the server is not provided.
• Expiring URL – The download link provided to customers (e.g. thru confirmation emails, pages containing details about previous orders, etc.) never points to a file. Rather, it contains code that allows ProductCart to locate the file that needs to be downloaded, and check whether or not the customer’s eligibility to download the file has expired. In other words, you can set the download URL provided to a customer to expire after N days (each download URL provided to any customer is unique). If a customer clicks on a link that has expired, the file download process is never started. So regardless of whether or not the Hidden URL feature mentioned above is in use on the store, the file location cannot be determined. This security measure attempts to limit the damage that a digital product publisher would suffer in scenarios such us a URL being illegally sent to multiple individuals via e-mail or posted on a Web page without authorization. Even if the URL is posted on a Web page without authorization, it would be rendered useless after the N days have passed.
• License Delivery – A license containing up to 5 pieces of information can be delivered to the customer with the purchase of a Downloadable Product. Many publishers of digital goods protect the unauthorized use of their products by requiring that the customer enter some type of unique license upon installation (e.g. software) or fruition of the product. Since the type of license needed to unlock/use a digital product varies dramatically from product to product, and from publisher to publisher, the Downloadable Products Module (DPM) within ProductCart was engineered to be as flexible as possible with regard to how license information is generated. If more than one Downloadable Product is included in an order, a license is separately generated for each item and included in the order confirmation e-mail (e.g. an order for two different software applications). If more than one unit of the same Downloadable Products is included in an order, a license for each unit of the product is generated and included in the order confirmation e-mail (e.g. three licenses of the same software application). For more information about how a license is generated, please see Appendix I of the ProductCart User Guide.

At Early Impact we strongly believe in being the very first users of most features added to our shopping carts. And support for digital goods is no exception: the digital products features in our shopping carts are used daily on our own, ProductCart-powered software store.

In our case, for example, a 3-part license is dynamically created when customers purchase a copy of our shopping cart software. Our own experience helped us fine-tune this area of ProductCart through the years: the dowloadable products features are flexible, robust, and work great for software companies like Early Impact!