Creating a Downloadable Product

OVERVIEW

A downloadable product is one that can be delivered immediately upon purchase through the web browser.  While the most common example of this is software, it can literally be anything that you would want your customer to download once they have paid for it during checkout.

REQUIREMENTS

The following pre-requisites will be necessary to accomplish the goals of this article:

• Basic understanding of products
• Store administrator access

GETTING STARTED

Adding a downloadable product is done nearly the same way as any other product in your store catalog.  The process is amazingly simple and the differences are outlined in the instructions below.

CREATING A DOWNLOADABLE PRODUCT

In this documentation, we are going to assume that we are selling some kind of software.  First, begin adding and editing your product like you always do to ensure that you have things like a product name, price, images, and a SKU. 

Be sure to change one more thing about the basic details of your product by scrolling down to the shipping section.  Check the checkbox to tell Hotcakes that this is not a product that will be shipped.  This ensures that the customer experience is consistent so that shipping options are not shown to them in the various views.

The only other thing that may appear to be out of the ordinary is that you need to specify a file for the customer to download once they’ve completed their purchase.  Click on the File Downloads link to load that view.

Add the file(s) that you want the customer to have access to once they purchase the product.  They will be saved simply by uploading.  Just be sure to set the amount of times and expiration for the download(s) as appropriate to your product.

This is what a successful file upload looks like.

Now, once the customer completes the checkout process, they will be shown a way to download their product in the order summary.  This is shown to the customer following the checkout being successfully completed.