How To Use Zen Cart For Your Downloadble Productts

Easy How to use Zen Cart to sell your downloadable products

Zen cart is a popular free open source eCommerce solution used by many people on the Internet now. One of the more difficult things to do is to set it up for ‘virtual’ or downloadable products.

The first thing you must do is upload all your downloadable products to the ‘download’ directory of Zen Cart. You do this via an FTP program copying the products from your PC to the directory called ‘download’ under ‘admin’

Log in to Zen Cart as admin as usual select Option Name Manager under catalog. Create a new product option.

Option Name – The name of the option you want.

Order – Only matters if the product has different types

Order Type – Pick radio or dropdown for how the order is displayed.

Click insert to add to the store

Next go to the Option Value Manager and create a new Option Value
Option Name – The name of option you want the value to come under – Choose Downloadable or whatever Option Name you just made from this dropdown

Order – If it has multiple values is this the 1st,2nd,3rd, xxxx. In this case leave it as zero. Click insert.

Go to Attributes Controller under Catalog, chose the product you want to be downloadable. Scroll down and select the Option Name and Option Value you just created. Now scroll down and set the download settings.
Filename: The file to be downloaded

Expiry days: How many days the file is available to the customer

Maximum download count: How many times the product can be downloaded before disappearing from the download page.

Also set 'Default Attribute to be Marked Selected to 'Yes'
Now check the product in the store. Make a test purchase of the item. Set the product item to anything but pending as it cannot be downloaded.
From the customers point of view once they have purchased it and click on my account the product can be downloaded.