With Miva Merchant 9.5 you now have the ability to sell digital download products in your online store. Products such as music or video files, programs or digital photography can now be configured to be sold online in a few easy steps. Before we take a look at setting up a digital download product I want to briefly cover a few global settings for the digital download functionality. Here we are in the Digital Download Settings tab inside of the Store Settings area of the Miva Merchant Admin. Here we have two settings; Max Downloads and Link Expiration. By default these are both set to 0. A value of 0 for this setting means all digital download links created by the Miva Merchant system can be used to download a purchased product as many times as the customer likes. This setting affects all digital download links, though you can configure a product to override this setting on a product basis if you want. As you might have guessed changing this to a value of 5 will limit download links to be usable only 5 times. A value of 0 for this field means the download links will never expire. Changing this to something else like 30 would make it so that links expires 30 days after they are generated. Again, this setting would affect all download links unless you override this setting on a per product level. The other table of interest on the screen is the digital download CDN’s tab. There are two methods for you to serve the download files to your customers. The files can either be stored locally on your Miva Merchant server or they can be stored on a Content Delivery Network (CDN). At this time, the only option for storing your digital files on this CDN is Amazon's simple storage service or Amazon S3 for short. If you plan on using Amazon S3 for your file storage, you'll want to enter in your Amazon S3 information here. This is the product display page where I'm selling a photograph of my Chihuahua. His name is Yody. We're going to make this product a digital download product so that when someone buys it, they'll get a link to download a digital copy of this photograph. To do this, will want to go into the Edit Product screen for the Yodi photo product and then we'll want to click into the tab called Digital Download Settings. If you plan to have the download file served from the Amazon CDN, paste in the pertinent file information here. If you plan on having the file served locally from your server, then you can upload the file here. It's feasible that you can have the file uploaded to both your local server as well as the Amazon S3 server, but it will be this setting here that determines where the product will be downloaded from when a customer purchases this product. appear you'll see to settings that look familiar; Max downloads and Link expiration. By default they use the global settings, but if you want to override global settings you can do so here. Lastly, don't forget to checkmark this box up here or else the customer won't automatically receive a download link when they buy this digital download. Once this is all configured, we can click the Update button to save our work.
Now when a customer purchases this product, their invoice screen will show them a link where they will be able to download this product. An Order Confirmation email will also have this link and a secondary email to the download file will also be sent to the customer with the same link. One last thing to talk about; back in the Edit Product screen there is another tab called Digital Downloads. Here we can see all of the download links for this product that have been generated by the Miva Merchant store. You can see some useful information such as when these links were made, which order the download links were created for and how many times the download link has been used. You can manage an existing download link by double-clicking on it. Here we can set max downloads, we can set it to expire after a certain amount of days, or outright delete the download link from the system. Finally, we can also create new download links on this page by clicking on this “+” sign here. And that's a look at Digital Downloads in Miva Merchant.