Now that you have Shopify’s Digital Downloads app installed, and you’ve added some digital
products, it’s time to edit the product settings.
Today, we’ll show you how to customize fulfillment settings for individual products in Digital
Downloads.
If you’re new to the channel, don’t forget to subscribe and ring the bell for new videos
from the Shopify Help Center every week.
When a customer buys a digital product from your store, a download link is emailed to
them when the order is fulfilled.
You can choose to fulfill your digital download products automatically or manually, but by
default, products in the Digital Downloads app are automatically fulfilled.
We’re going to review the difference between automatic and manual fulfillment with Digital
Downloads so you can decide what’s best for your business.
With automatic fulfillments, your customer is emailed a download link automatically after
they make their purchase.
If you’d like to make edits to the Digital Download email template, click the link in
the description to learn more.
It’s important to remember that you should only use automatic fulfillment for products
that are only digital.
If you have a product that is both a physical product and digital download, then you should
fulfill this product manually.
For example, in our AlyAthletics store, we have a yoga ball that comes with a free exercise
ebook.
If this product is fulfilled automatically, then the yoga ball is marked as shipped when
the customers completes check out, even though the yoga ball hasn’t shipped yet.
For this reason, it’s best to use manual fulfillment if your product is a mix of physical
and digital products.
With manual fulfillment, the digital download is emailed to the customer after you ship
the physical product and click Mark as fulfilled on the order page.
You may also want to use manual fulfillment if you have a pre-order or pre-release sale
for a digital product.
This means a customer is able to buy the digital product online, and then you manually fulfill
the order with the digital link on the product release date.
Now, we’re going to walk you through how to edit the Digital Downloads fulfillment
settings.
From your Shopify admin, click Apps and then click Digital Downloads.
On the new page, you see a list of all your Digital Download products.
Right now, we only have one digital product with three variants.
Here you see each variant listed individually because each variant has a digital file attached.
Regardless of which variant title you click, a product’s variants will all be listed
on the same page to edit.
For example, we’re clicking on the Classic Yoga Ball, Gray variant.
On the product page, you see all variants for the Classic Yoga Ball.
If you have multiple variants like in this example, you need to edit the fulfillment
settings for each individual variant.
Click the gear icon by the variant name, and then click Settings.
In the pop-up, select the fulfillment option you want to use.
This example shows a digital ebook that comes with a yoga ball purchase.
Because the product is a mix of digital and physical items, we’re selecting manual fulfillment.
While we’re in the settings area, we’re also going to look at the download limit.
By default, customers can use a link to download your digital products an unlimited number
of times.
If you’d like, you can set a download limit to control the number of times that a customer
can download the digital file.
In the text box next to Total limit, enter the maximum number of times that a customer
can download the digital attachment.
For example, if you enter 2, then the customer can only download the file twice.
For the ebook that comes with the yoga ball, we want the downloads to be unlimited - so
we’re entering the number 0.
To finish making changes, click SUBMIT.
Since each yoga ball color is an individual variant, we’re going to repeat these steps
and select manual fulfillment for each variant.
If you’re making changes to the download limits, you also need to set the download
limit on each variant.
With manual fulfillments, you need to manually mark the order as fulfilled before a download
link is emailed to your customer.
But what if you want to send your customer their digital product before you’re ready
to ship the physical product?
In this case, you can send your customer a manual download link.
To learn how to set up manual download links subscribe now for our next video in the Digital
Download series.
If you still have questions, comment below or contact the Shopify support team at help.shopify.com/questions.