By mixersoft on

I am trying to configure e-commerce to sell file downloads, or even just "links", with the download files generated by script at runtime.

I've looked at e-commerce file product, but that seems to be designed to sell the same file many times - regardless, I have to point it to an existing file. I'm selling downloads to photos that I have previously processed (i.e. enhanced, cropped) for my customers -- there might be from 1 to 100s of files in a purchase, and I don't think the file download or shopping cart can handle 100s of items. I want to integrate with Pando for "package" downloads, and in this case the "file" would just be a pando link to the download - the package file is actually hosted on Pando.

However, I'd still like to use a shopping cart. payment, and the order tracking of e-commerce. Can any experience e-commerce people suggest the best path for getting this done -- should I just try to customize "file product" to be a new "link" product for e-commerce? or is this just a new product CCK? Any other modules to look at?

I'm still a relative newbie to drupal and not exacly clear what you can easily accomplish by writing your own modules vs creating a new CCK, so I'd prefer to avoid going down the wrong path with this.

TIA

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

sstrudeau’s picture

sstrudeau commented

Sounds like this could work. Would you need packages generated on the fly, or would all of the connections be pre-packaged? (The latter is much easier; the former, not so easy).

I'm not very familiar with the e-commerce suite, so I'm not sure about details, but if your files are all pre-packaged with Pando, this sounds do-able. You could store the Pando URL as a text or URL field in a CCK node and make those CCK nodes "products." You'd have to look closely at how and when the link gets displayed so only valid purchasers get access to it -- which is a pretty specific implementation detail.

You could also password protect each Pando package (if you have a premium Pando account, which start at $5/month) as an extra layer of access control and simply send the user the password over email, for example.

Please free to email me at scott AT pando DOT com if you have Pando-specific questions. You may also want to review our current documentation on http://developers.pando.com. I don't know much about e-commerce, so I might not be too much help on that front. If you do decide to implement something using Pando, please keep in touch about your progress.