Software downloads

[CounterPath]

I am in the process of evaluating Shopsite Pro to use as my shopping cart provider. My business primarily focuses on providing software downloads to my customers. I have a couple of questions:

Is there a size limitation for downloads: eg. cannot be greater than 7mb?

What is average license key distribution time from payment verification to order fulfillment?

[loren_d_c]

1) There is no hard limit imposed by ShopSite on the size of the download files. However, there may be a practical limit imposed by your webserver if your webserver has a timeout limit for cgi's. The Digital Download files are served to the shopper who has purchased them via a cgi, so if your webserver kills any cgi after it has been running for, lets say, 3 minutes, then the max size of Digital Download file should be whatever size file that your shopper could download in that time (which would be related to their download speed as well). Note that hard limits on cgi timeouts are generally only on Windows webservers, most UNIX/Linux-based webservers only timeout a cgi after a certain period of inactivity (i.e. it is running but not sending any data). However, some UNIX/Linux-based hosting providers with cheaper shared-hosting type accounts have imposed additional hard limit cgi timeouts as well. So make sure you check with your host as to what kind of server your site is on and whether they impose hard timeout limits on the cgi's run on your site.

2a) ShopSite's Digital Download feature does not generate license keys, only download keys so that the shopper can download the file. So if your software requires a unique license key in order to install or work properly, then you would need to provide that to the shopper separately.

2b) ShopSite's Digital Download feature can be configured to show the shopper the download link for the Digital Download product on the Thankyou receipt screen they see immediately after completing their order and/or on the email receipt they receive immediately after completing their order, or neither, in which case you would manually initiate an email containing the download link from the Send Keys function that will appear on the View Order screen in your ShopSite backoffice on each order that has Digital Download items in it. If you are not using a realtime payment gateway for credit card purchases or are accepting any type of delayed payment methods (e.g. purchase order, check, COD, etc), then you should not configure the download link to be on the thankyou screen or email receipts, instead you should wait until you have received/processed the payment successfully and then use the Send Keys function to email the shopper the download link.

-Loren