If you sell e-books, patterns, music, software, presets or digital artwork, you’ve probably wrestled with the same problem: how do you actually get the file to your customer once they’ve paid? Manually emailing zip files doesn’t scale, and it’s easy to send the wrong thing to the wrong person.

Digital Downloads are now built into Spiffy Stores. Upload your files to a product, and we deliver them automatically through a secure, expiring download link. No zip files to build by hand, and nothing to change in your theme.

How it works for your customer

When an order is paid, each downloadable file on that order is issued its own download link. The links are grouped per line item, so a customer who buys one item containing several files gets a single link that lists every file.

They can reach their downloads from the order confirmation email, or from a dedicated Digital Downloads email if you’ve enabled it. The link opens a page showing each file, its size, and how many downloads remain.

Every file is tracked separately, so a customer can download one file without eating into the allowance of another file in the same order. By default a file can be downloaded 5 times, and the link expires 120 hours (5 days) after purchase.

Adding files to a product

1. Open the product you want to sell as a download (or create a new one).
2. Scroll to the Digital Downloads section.
3. Click Upload New Digital Files — you can select several at once, up to 5 GB each.
4. Once the upload finishes, the file appears in the product’s file list.

The product is marked with a digital status label as soon as it has a current downloadable file, so you can spot these products at a glance in your product list.

Selling variations of the same download

If your product has options such as size or format, you can decide which files go with which variation. Click the Settings (gear) icon next to a file, choose the variation(s) it applies to in the Variations field, and save. Leave it on All variations to make the file available with every option.

Watermarking your PDFs

For PDF files, you can stamp every copy with the purchaser’s own details. This is a simple and effective discouragement against sharing your work around.

Open the file’s settings, tick Enable watermarking, then choose a position (Header, Footer or Tiled) and a template. You can insert the customer’s name, email address, phone number, the order number and the download date. For example:

Do not distribute — Licensed to {{name}} ({{email}}) on {{date}}

Font size, opacity and colour are all adjustable, and the Preview (eye) icon shows you exactly what your customer will receive, with a sample watermark applied.

Managing orders and supporting customers

Every order containing digital downloads shows a Digital Downloads section on the order page in your Toolbox. For each file you can see its status (Active, Expired or Revoked), downloads remaining, expiry date and file size — plus a full history of every download, including the date and time, the result, and the IP address it came from.

Two things worth remembering when a customer gets in touch:

• Resend Digital Downloads Link — under the Email Customer action, sends a fresh copy of the email with their link. It doesn’t change their download allowance or expiry.
• Reset — restores a file’s full download allowance and extends its expiry by the standard period, as if the order had just been placed. Use this for genuine problems like a badly interrupted connection.

If an order is refunded, its download links are revoked automatically and stop working straight away.

Retiring a file without stranding your customers

Digital downloads are never replaced in place. When you want to stop selling a file, you retire it. A retired file comes off sale and off every variation, but anyone holding a valid download link keeps access until that link expires. Once no valid links remain, the file can be permanently deleted.

The file list shows Sales (how many download links have been issued) and Downloads performed for each file, so you can see what’s actually popular.

Storage and plan limits

Download storage is counted separately from your store’s site storage, so adding large files won’t eat into the space your theme, images and pages use. Your plan includes a download storage allowance, shown on the product page, and additional storage can be purchased as an add-on if you need more.

Digital Downloads are included on all plans at no extra cost.

Ready to try it?

If you already have a product that should be digital, open it up and add a file — it takes a couple of minutes. Full step-by-step instructions, including customising the download email template, are in our knowledge base: Creating Digital Downloads.