ecom Soultion suggestions Digital Download

egan007

Hi

I'm looking for a solution for a client who wants to sell a download.

The obvious solution is to install a cart and sell it that way.
His problem is budget and installing a cart and customising it is labour intensive for selling one digital download plus there is the payments....

All he want s is one single page.

I have suggested paypal.
Can paypal handle digital downloads? Or does it handle payments only.
If so is it capable of sending out out links to digital downloads?

suggestions please.

Thanks

alphasolutions

Have a look at using Joomla with the Virtua Mart component, it supports a download only option and works with paypal.

Kudos

If you want security for the downloads (ie no one posting the link to it online) I suggest contacting a developer to throw something together. I have looked into this before and, without knowing what type of download he is offering, temporary links mailed out to customers seems to be a good bet. allofmp3 do this and more for their downloads.

If you don't care about security you could just put the link in your receipt message on paypal.

egan007

Thanks,alphasolutions but that's teh overhead I was thinking about...i.e. installing and customising.

Kudos Yeah Security is an issue, I suppose I could generate a uique link each time. I'm not sure how I could trigger an email once the payment is processed....I'm not too familiar with paypal interface.

pwd

payloadz.com might be worth looking at. They allow you to sell downloads using paypal

egan007

OK for the record I think im going to do the Following:

Have a page with a buy now click button (paypal)
Use paypal IPN to get back a notification from paypal.
Offer the download if successful.

Now there is one think I'm wondering how to accomplish...

if you offer a link to say a me.zip file - just a click and download, that will work ok. But How can i record the download in a database?

i.e. is there a way I can write to the db then call the save as box? or
wirte to the db once the download has been successful?

nikimere

Once you click the Download button have that bring you to another page which feeds the file and writes to the database.

egan007

Yeah I know the concept it's just how to do it, but i found it here....
http://green-beast.com/blog/?p=78
this is the main line i was looking for...
header('Location: http://green-beast.com/blog/examples/images/targetgif.gif');


Thanks Everyone for the help, now to put it all together!

Kudos

egan007 wrote:

Yeah I know the concept it's just how to do it, but i found it here....
http://green-beast.com/blog/?p=78
this is the main line i was looking for...
header('Location: http://green-beast.com/blog/examples/images/targetgif.gif');


Thanks Everyone for the help, now to put it all together!

Using the redirect leaves you open to being hotlinked without permission

[PHP]<?php
$filename = "theDownloadedFileIsCalledThis.mp3";
$myFile = "/absolute/path/to/my/file.mp3";

$mm_type="application/octet-stream";

header("Cache-Control: public, must-revalidate");
header("Pragma: hack"); // WTF? oh well, it works...
header("Content-Type: " . $mm_type);
header("Content-Length: " .(string)(filesize($myFile)) );
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.$filename.'"');
header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary\n");

readfile($myFile);

?>[/PHP]

Is a better way of doing it, taken from www.php.net/header user notes. This in combination with a bit of your own code will give you complete control over the file.

egan007

Nice one, Cheers ill try it out.