Online payment and downloading of documents

I am trying to help a friend who is having a site developed to sell online downloadable products. Just a few products for now, no more than 5. The problem: what is the best way to have the customer pay online for the product, then be able to download the product instantly. Are there specific shopping carts that do this? Or are there sites that do this? Looking for the best (and cheapest, of course) way to accomplish this. The thing is to let the customer download the product but then make the link non-functional. I am not sure how to do this for sure. Any suggestions or help would be appreciated. Thank in advance for the help.

Hi

you can check out this site, I think they offer what youre looking for. dont know the cost though.

http://www.tradebit.com/layouts/sellfiles.php

I think that site is actually letting you sell them on that site.. Is that what you are looking for cbruce? Package prices

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One way is for you not to give them a link to the product itself, but to a script whose job it is to deliver the product. Assuming that there is a concept of "customer" that is maintained through a session and cookie, and that the site knows about customers and what has been purchased, the script, e.g. a PHP script, can then validate that the person requesting the download is authorised to do so. When the customer accesses the script link to download, the script will then either deliver the download so that a browser download dialog pops up, or it might display a page that says the download is unavailable.

We use this idea with our online PHP encoding service, where once a customer has encoded their files, the first download of their protected files will consume credits but downloads thereafter of the same job are free as they've already paid. When they click to download, the download script first checks to see whether they have already paid, or if not whether they have sufficient credits, and if so then the download is returned by sending the relevant HTTP headers followed by the download content. If they have insufficient credits, they are taken into the payment system so that they can topup the credits. After doing that, they are taken back to the download which happens automatically.

The site developer should be familiar with this idea and be able to implement it easily. Alternatively, you could use a download service that does the same and handles the payment processing too. Plimus may be one such service. We don't use Plimus directly ourselves, but a partner does and it seems to work, although they do have off by one errors in their math and we get paid 1 cent less than we should on payments from them!

Good luck!

Thanks to all for your valuable input and information. I have done some research and have found several shopping cart programs that handle digital downloads. Now I just have to go through them to determine which one is best for my client (that is, "cheapest"). These are all carts that work with out payment gateway, CyberSource. If anyone has any idea of a good shopping cart program that works with this payment gateway, I would be glad to hear about it.

It was easy to find a list of shopping carts here:

http://www.cybersource.com/partners/...rts/solutions/

I'd never heard of them before though, and I would recommend that your client also accepts PayPal at the very least. Whatever cart they choose will support PP as it's one of the first ones that any developer would implement, and some people will want to use PayPal to the exclusion of any other option. Depending on the countries where their customers are located, supporting other forms of payment may be beneficial too.

In addition to searching here, forums such as WHT (webhostingtalk.com) are very good places to find information about payment providers and technologies such as shopping carts. Sitepoint may also be useful.