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Digital Purchases

The preferred method to provide digital purchases to customers is via galleries renditions produced by Publisher. For this approach the following conditions must be met:

  • The Digital Downloads product is enabled for the given pricing scheme.
  • Generate Photos for Purchase is enabled via the Album Template in Designer. This can be found under Add-ons > Cart Features.

Digital purchases are can be made using either the PayPal or invoiced checkouts. To enable digital purchases for invoiced checkouts, set Enable invoiced checkouts for digital downloads to 'yes' in the Checking Out section of the Cart Settings.

Digital purchases made via the invoiced checkout are not immediately available for download, unless the item total is $0. To enable downloads for an invoiced order, login as admin, find the order in the Orders section, and mark the order as paid. The customer will then receive a notification email that downloads are available.

Note, that if you intend to use the cart for free downloads, it is recommended to change the minimum order amount for carts to $0.

Manual Uploads​

Digital purchases can also be uploaded manually, for renditions that are not produced by Publisher. The following conditions must be met for manually uploaded digital purchases:

  • The Digital Downloads product is enabled for the given pricing scheme.
  • PayPal be configured correctly, either with sandbox or live credentials.
  • Create a directory titled photos-for-purchase on the same level as photos within the given gallery
  • Copy the blank index.html and .htaccess files from cart/application/skeleton into photos-for-purchase. You may need to enable display of hidden files in your FTP software in order to see .htaccess listed in the skeleton directory.

Note: these files protect the photos from unauthorised downloads in sites hosted on Apache web servers. This is standard for Linux hosts.

  • Export a set of photos with names that exactly match those within photos. Upload these to photos-for-purchase

Offline Digital Purchases​

Backlight Cart lets you sell digital downloads before having the files available on the server. To enable this feature set Enable Offline Digital Purchases to 'yes' in the Checking Out section of the Cart Settings. Purchases can be fulfilled via the View Orders page. Items requiring uploads are noted in the Digital Purchases column. Click Manage, followed by Edit to upload files.