Table of Contents
Downloadable products
Just getting started with Foxy?
This article assumes you have an understanding of how product add to carts work with Foxy. If you're not familiar with that yet, then please take a look at the introductory article here.
Downloadable products offer the ability for merchants to sell digital assets to customers as part of their store. While the product is added to the cart in the same way as normal products, through a link or form, downloadable products are a little different because you do actually create a product within the Foxy administration to upload the digital asset.
Foxy supports downloadables up to a maximum of 250MB.
Creating a downloadable product in the admin
To create a new downloadable for your store, you can access the Downloadables section of the Foxy administration. From this section you can create a new downloadable - specifying the name, code, price, downloadable product category and file.
If you haven't already created a downloadable product category, you can do this from the Categories section. You can configure the category as needed, but you will need to select a “Delivery type” of “Downloaded by the customer”. This will reveal some additional options, allowing you to configure how many times a customer can use the download link they'll receive, and how long (in hours) that link will be valid for after purchase.
Creating a downloadable product add to cart
Unique to our downloadable products, because the product information for name and price are defined within the Foxy administration, it is actually possible to create a downloadable add to cart link that just includes the code and category parameters. These need to match the code of the downloadable product, and the code of the downloadable category that the product belongs to - but from that the other details like name, and price will be utilised.
For example, let's say our bakery has a downloadable product for a Party Planning Kit. We created a downloadable product that belongs to our digital category, and we gave it a code of party-kit, so our add to cart could look simply like this:
https://example.foxycart.com/cart?code=party-kit&category=digital
When added to the cart, the name and price will be pulled from the product created within the Foxy administration, so if those values are passed in the add to cart, they will be ignored. It is possible to pass other attributes though, like image or url, or custom options, and those will be shown in the cart with the product.
If you need to be able to specifically set the name and price within the add to cart link or form for a downloadable product - that is possible when the add to cart is signed. In that instance, whatever is specified within the add to cart will be used instead of what is set within the Foxy administration. This can be helpful if you offer different pricing for the same downloadable file due to different currencies for example.
Customer experience
From the customers perspective, when they purchase a downloadable product, they will gain access to a download link for the product(s) that they purchased. The link will be present on both the web and email receipts, allowing them to download the file immediately, or at a later date - limited by the maximum download count and link validity that is configured for the store.