Digital Product Pre-Order

[mandybear610]

I am trying to set up a store that you can pre-order a digital product, ie. buy it and pay for it today, but get it emailed to you on a future date. Is it possible to delay the plugin in from sending it after payment until later?

Thanks.

[wzp]

I think that most payment processors (like PayPal) would have problems with this kind of setup. In fact, they might decide to hold payments in escrow, until you deliver the product. Why do you need to delay delivery of a digital product?

[mandybear610]

It is for an album that will be released on October 25th, but I want people to be able to buy it now and get it sent to them then. I have seen people having pre-orders through PayPal before for physical products, at least.

E.g. – [http://www.toywiz.com/ourpreorpol.html]

[admin]

There is nothing special that they are doing in the above mentioned site. They are simply taking the money from the customer (PayPal doesn’t care if someone is paying for pre-order or not). In the event of a physical order the admin is responsible for shipping the item. You already told your customers that this is a pre-order and the items will be shipped at a certain date in the future so the customers are already prepared for that.

In eStore, digital items are delivered immediately after a payment. However, you can do the following to simulate a pre-order and delivery sequence:

Pre Order Phase 1 – Accept Money

Simply, make a product (not a digital product) and start accepting pre-orders from your customers. At this stage you are just collecting money from them. The customers already know that this is a pre-order so they are not expecting the item after the purchase anyway.

Pre Order Phase 2 – Deliver the digital item(s)

When you are ready to send the digital item(s) to your customers who pre-ordered do the following:

– Create a digital product in eStore (with the correct URL of the digital item that you want to send to your customers)

– Go to the admin functions menu of eStore and generate an encrypted link for that product

– Go to the manage customers menu and get a list of email address (the customers who bought your pre-order)

– Use your favorite email client to send the email to your customers with the download link.

[wzp]

I wonder, if for Phase 2, the following could be done instead…

— Convert the preorder product into a digital product, by editing it and setting the correct URL.

— Advise the buyers that the can go to a special page, where they can use a [wp_eStore_download_link_sender] form to email them a “live” link.

This would have to be tested, as I’m not sure if the download link sender would recognize the fact that the physical product was changed into a digital one.

[VancouverVideographer]

Related to the OP – I’m trying to set-up my store for video downloads. I need to do pre-sales and then want to send out unique download links with the videos hosted on Amazon S3.

The Phase 1 and 2 above would get me close but when I email out the unique URL link, I have to generate a new one for each email address. If I send it to multiple email addresses, they all get the same download link and there is no point in sending out a generated URL with controls on download numbers – because they all share the same quota.

Is there a way to automate the sending of unique generated emails to pre-sales customers? I simply have to many and too many variations of orders to do it all manually (40-50 per show that I film and 15 shows)?

[admin]

You cannot send 50 emails with different links manually but you can create a self serving platform where the valid customers can generate links for the product and download it.

1. Create a WordPress page and place the following shortcode on it:

[wp_eStore_download_link_sender]

You get this shortcode from the extra eStore shortcodes plugin which can be found here:

http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/ecommerce/wp-estore-shortcodes-and-functions-reference-460

2. Now when that product is ready, all you need to do is send an email to your customers and tell them to go to the page created in step 1 and collect their item.

Alternatively, you can just use the time limited encrypted links (do not limit by counts) when you send this mass email to your customers.

[Author]

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