Shopping Cart - Digital Downloads

[jujubee]

Question for you guys.

I was thinking of setting up a shopping cart with digital downloads (for selling images), preferably hosted within a blog such as Wordpress (simply due to ease of maintenance.)

I was hoping someone here has experience with this.

So someone sees something the want and they add to cart then purchase. Maybe it takes them to a Paypal page for checkout.

But my question is, something needs to automatically trigger either:

1) Take them to a secure page (maybe password protected/encrypted) where they can download the product. It has to be secure because you don't want them sending links to their friends.

Or

2) Send them details with a link to the download, an automatically generated user-specific password protection system/code.

3) The files could be hosted remotely, but I'm cheap and I would prefer to host them locally as they may be big files and don't feel like adding extra transfer rate costs.

Do any of you have any system/setup recommendations? Thanks.

[glorybound]

on-line

Joomla! and VirtueMart

[jujubee]

I hate Joomla.

[JeffG2]

e-junkie.com

[Da_elf]

just get a php to generate a random string of letters and numbers then hash it for the password. if you want something prebuilt for a shopping cart ive used oscommerce

[jujubee]

e-junkie will become too expensive.

And no, I don't trust my own coding nor do I have the time. Looking for something dummy-proof, easy to use, and visually customizable while providing some basic level of security.

From my experience with Joomla in the past, it was too complicated to use and plus all sites built on Joomla have the same generic, boxy look and feel.

[HAWF]

From my experience with Joomla in the past, it was too complicated to use and plus all sites built on Joomla have the same generic, boxy look and feel.

I didn't have an easy experience with websites before using joomla and there's a tons of templates you can buy (for cheap prices), change visual and layout. In a few hours you'll get a cool dynamic website without coding anything. Take a litle time and try again.

[Da_elf]

oscommerce is free. comes with that bundle called fantastico or you can install it manually

[dbuchhofer]

take a look at a few of the photography styled sites also if you're leaning more towards not having to build everything yourself, zenfolio and smugmug are two of the main ones that come to mind offhand. they'll also handle ordering of prints too.

[HAWF]

oscommerce is free. comes with that bundle called fantastico or you can install it manually

Fantastico always install an older version of supported packages.
The best way is install manually.

[jujubee]

I may give Joomla a try again as it has been a few years since I last used it. In fact, I had blogged about how terrible of a confusing experience it had been back then.

One thing that bugs me about Joomla is that no matter which template you look at, they always have the same Joomla look and feel. And when I tried to customize it, it was never a simple task.

As for the other ones, they're generally even lesser known and I get concerned over things and support for stuff such as search engine optimizations and customizing.

I do use Cpanel as well - superb tool. Then after installation, I usually upgrade through the interface.

Every day that passes it seems that I have less and less time - and I'm all about keeping things simple and clean these days.

[plastic_]

I'm a wordpress fan. It's made for blogs, but can also be used as a CMS. It has a very powerful plugin system and it's easy to customize _everything_ with php, not stupid template pseudo code, as most other CMS systems.

I also hate joomla.

[jujubee]

Wow I just wasted a day of my life trying Joomla! again.

It still sucks. It's just not very user friendly.

Something like Wordpress starts out simple and lets you extend.

Joomla starts out complicated with useless template modules and you have to remove - then their navigation system is overly complicated.

[jujubee]

Re-post from my Facebook Page - was asking around there...:

So after messing around with Joomla!, WP E-Commerce, and WP Shopp - I found/settled on the simplest solution of them all:

http://tinyurl.com/dmmpxr... Read More

A simple Wordpress plugin called eShop for digital downloads that connects to Paypal. Basically a person clicks "Buy Now", takes them to Paypal, they fill out their info, and it tosses them an email with an encrypted/hashed location to your downloadable files. The hash goes dead after an allotted time. Similar to what Elf had in mind.

Quite simple really. And it should interface quite well with just about any WP Theme you throw at it.

[stevesideas]

Re-post from my Facebook Page - was asking around there...:

So after messing around with Joomla!, WP E-Commerce, and WP Shopp - I found/settled on the simplest solution of them all:

http://tinyurl.com/dmmpxr... Read More

A simple Wordpress plugin called eShop for digital downloads that connects to Paypal. Basically a person clicks "Buy Now", takes them to Paypal, they fill out their info, and it tosses them an email with an encrypted/hashed location to your downloadable files. The hash goes dead after an allotted time. Similar to what Elf had in mind.

Quite simple really. And it should interface quite well with just about any WP Theme you throw at it.

This is very interesting. Thanks for the link