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Okay, I have both estore and wpaffiliate and need to get it to all play nice with s2member. Should have just bought a bundle with emember from the get go I suppose, but its too late now, so let me explain what I have and what I need to do and hopefully someone will be able to make some recommendations for me
Currently my site offers digital graphics for unlimited access download to members (all handled w/s2member). Being high resolution graphics, I have moved everything over to Amazon s3 because no matter what I tried, Mac users for some reason couldn’t download a lot of the files all at once when they were protected so only members could access them due to the server timing out.
In order to make sure that the amazon s3 link can’t be hotlinked or shared with anyone too easily, I’ve set my bucket properties so that the links for the products only work when the link is on my site. This was an easy and free solution that works like a charm – I can’t even download them from my Amazon account, lol. This to me seems like a much more secure option than using encrypted links, which could be shared within the expiration period. s2member limits how many ip addresses can login to a site in any given time so I think my stuff is pretty safe from the average person sharing files/account info
So, we now want to offer our products as individual files in addition to the membership. I am trying to figure out solutions to these issues:
1. Want to force customer to create a free account before they can check out. One solution I have for this would be to hide the PayPal button from them until they are logged in. To do this, I would need to probably create a custom shortcode for estore for showing the cart based on my s2member levels. Or, is there a better solution to force registration first that integrates naturally with estore?
2. Once member is logged in they will be able to checkout with PayPal…so when they go to PayPal we need to make sure that their order will show up associated to their account. What would be the way to do this? I am guessing we need to communicate something back to my site via IPN url? (I am very confused about how PayPal works, so if this makes no sense I apologize!) I am sure something needs to happen “behind the scenes” though. I am also using wp-affiliate, so wasn’t sure if that would make a difference.
3. Need to make it so customer gets an email that does not show the product links, since the product links will not work in an email since it is not my site. Seems like the best solution for this is just editing the confirmation email that says “Thank you for your purchase! You may now login into your account here and access your order history to access your products”.
4. Which brings up the subject of how do I set up an orders history page? I read this tutorial but it says you need both estore and emember:
Is emember necessary or would I need to create a new shortcode that instead intergrates the necessary info from s2member?
I apologize this is so long, I am going to keep exploring different options available – if anyone has any suggestions or can answer any of these questions I definitely appreciate it! If I make any progress I will update this thread.
So that we are on the same wavelength, are you using the eStore S3 Integration feature?
Damn, I highly recommend using the S3 integration. I keep having downloading issues with my hosting agent and I would have to create a new version of the product. With S3 being the source, all my issues have become a thing of the past!
Frank
I have all of my downloads at Amazon, but I do not understand that post you linked to at all. Can’t I just paste the amazon link in the box for the product url? I have set properties so links only work when referred to from my website. My links look like this:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/BucketName/FolderName/ProductName.zip
Won’t that work by itself as is if I put it as the product url?
It would, ***** BUT *****
1. eStore is still acting as the middleman between the buyer and Amazon.
2. Downloads are at the mercy of your hosting provider’s server restrictions.
3. Your S3 file is still “public” to anyone who knows the bucket/folder name.
By using the native S3 integration feature of eStore 4.8.x or higher…
1. The eStore encrypted link is converted into an expiring Amazon S3 URL request.
2. Control is transferred to the S3 server containing your bucket.
3. Download speeds are not limited by the capacity of your server.
4. No more download failures due to hosting provider server issues!
It wouldn’t matter if they knew the location, they can’t access it unless they click on the link from my site. I’ll look into it though
Onto the more pressing question – how do I make it so the customer can track their order history without using wp-member? I am using s2member, and can make it so they have to login before they can checkout, but I need to know what to do so they can have a record of what they’ve bought. I tried using the shortcode illustrated here, but it doesn’t seem to work without emember:
Thanks for the help!
eStore itself doesn’t have a purchase history option as it doesn’t have the membership concept. I should be able to add something to eStore that lets a customer find out his/her purchase history after they enter their email address. will that help?
That would definitely help
It’s not something that is totally necessary, but I think it would be useful…I know I am one of those people who relies on the place I bought something to keep track of my receipts Thanks for the help!
Hmmm…I am looking more into this and the purchase history seems like it is only history – does it contain the file links?
I am worried that a user will go through PayPal and something goofy will happen where they are not redirected to the thank you page. I thought I could send them a link to the thank you page that would contain their download links, but I cannot seem to figure out how to do that. Since my links only work from my site, I cannot email them the links – they will not work unless clicked on from my domain name.
I set up my thank you page using the shortcode to display their links – how long/many times can they visit that page and still see their links? If I link to that page in the confirmation email, will it show the product links or it will be a blank page? I am just worried that something will happen on the way from PayPal to my site, and they won’t get that page.
If there is a way to make it so they enter an email address and then it will dynamically show the links for everything they ordered, that would be awesome and solve all of my problems instantly. I will keep trying to figure this out, but PayPal really confuses me.
Thanks again!
I thought of another possible way to do this maybe. I did a test purchase through my site and the link looks like this:
So, what we have here is:
thank you page link
transaction ID
completed amount
ap_id is my affiliate ID
but am not sure what the rest means, lol.
If I emailed someone that specific link how long would it work? Indefinitely maybe? Is there a way I could maybe dynamically create this link to send in an email? That way they could just click on that link and go to the page and download if they for some reason didn’t get it when they downloaded it originally.
I am determined to make this work – will keep updating as I go along here on what I figure out
That link won’t Work for long. We we implement that purchase history option we will add in a feature so the customer can get the items that they originally purchased. We can place a button next to each items they purchased. Clicking that button will create encrypted links for that product and send it to their email address.
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