Automatically sending of product keys to customers after purchase

BrokenArrows

Ive been working on a few products that i hope to be able to sell down the line.

Ive been looking into the best/hassle free way of licensing and distribution of licenses.

There seem to be a few websites floating around which handle the sale, download and emailing of licenses to customers. Where i would upload a file containing a list of valid licenses and they would get emailed as their are sold.

Some charge per sale, some charge per month.

Does anyone have any experience with regards to this?

DublinWriter

How hard would it be for you to come up with an algorithm yourself to just generate keys based on customer name + number of licences, and just use PayPal to accept payment?

Trojan

BrokenArrows wrote: »

Ive been looking into the best/hassle free way of licensing and distribution of licenses.

There seem to be a few websites floating around which handle the sale, download and emailing of licenses to customers. Where i would upload a file containing a list of valid licenses and they would get emailed as their are sold.

Some charge per sale, some charge per month.

Does anyone have any experience with regards to this?

Yep. There's a couple ways of going about this - I used the one you mentioned, whereby you upload a stack of keys and the shopping cart pops the next available one off the stack and sends to the customer.

I used a program called Reverse Algorithm ( http://keygen.codeplex.com/ ) to generate ~100,000+ keys in the format I wanted. Warning: make sure you remove duplicate keys after you create them, it doesn't check for this.

The end product was a software application and licence key combination. Each customer gets their own licence key. Anyone can download the application, but it cannot be activated without the unique licence key. I had a list of unique keys. The chosen solution used 1ShoppingCart to email the next licence key off the top of the list to the customer on purchase. 1SC gives us a warning email when we're running low on the number of licences left in the system.

You can do validation a couple different ways - the way I chose is a bit more secure, but also hassle - I had a db on a server with the valid keys, I had the application request a custom script to validate the licence (with some hashing, secure key and time sync'ing to make things harder for pirates). This method is a little bit more secure than doing validation in the app, and has huge pros and cons: the pros are that you can do stuff like customise the application if certain licence key sets are used (e.g. change branding, inject advertising etc), you can also keep track of when licences are validated, how many times (prevent validation after X installs etc). The cons are anti-virus/firewalls don't like the app connecting out, and it's more complex.