Digital products & downloads

A digital product delivers its content the moment payment clears — no shipping, no manual hand-off. Each variant can serve a file download, a unique license key, or both, and Sellerlane meters every download against the limits and expiry you set. This page covers setting up delivery, managing license-key pools, and watching delivery health from the Digital products dashboard.

Note

Digital delivery is variant-owned: the delivery record lives on the variant, not the product. Every product has at least one variant (even a “simple” one), so a single digital product can serve different files or keys per variant. See Product types for how the types differ.

Create a digital product

1. Go to Catalog → Products → Add product and choose the Digital product type. Digital products are non-shippable, so weight, dimensions, and shipping fields drop away.
2. Set price and any variants as usual. Sellable data — price, identifiers, and delivery — lives on each variant.
3. In the Digital Delivery step (or, for multi-variant products, the per-variant digital fields in the Options & Variants step), pick a Delivery Content Type.
4. Fill in the fields for that type (files, pool, limits — see below) and save.

Tip

When a product has variants, the Digital Delivery step shows a note pointing you to manage delivery per variant in the Options & Variants step, where each variant gets its own files, pool, limit, and expiry through the digital fields modal.

Delivery content types

Set the Delivery Content Type to one of:

• File Download — attach files from your media library or upload new ones. Reorder them by dragging; the buyer can download each.
• License Key — draw a unique code from a named License Key Pool. No file is served — the buyer receives a key.
• Both — deliver a file and a key together from the same purchase.

Caution

A License Key delivery has nothing to download, so it serves no file. If you want buyers to download something and receive a key, choose Both — that’s the only type that does both.

Download limit & expiry

For File Download and Both deliveries you control how long and how many times a buyer can download:

• Download Limit — tick Unlimited downloads per purchase, or set a number. The platform meters each download and refuses once the count is reached.
• Download Expiry — tick Link never expires, or set a number plus a unit: Minutes, Hours, Days, Weeks, Months, or Years “after purchase”. The default unit is Days. Once the window passes, the grant flips to expired and downloads are refused.
• Access Instructions (optional) — free text shown to the customer after purchase, e.g. how to install a file or activate a key.

Both the limit and the expiry are enforced server-side, not just hidden in the storefront — a buyer cannot exceed the cap or re-use an expired link by calling the API directly.

License-key pools

License keys are managed in their own dashboard under Products → License Keys. Keys belong to one or more named pools; a digital variant set to License Key or Both draws from the pool name you assign. When the variant sells, a free key is reserved and assigned to the buyer automatically.

Add keys to a pool

1. Go to Products → License Keys and choose Add License Keys.
2. Paste your keys — one license key per line — into the keys box. Keys are encrypted before storage; only the last four characters are kept in the clear for searching.
3. Type or pick one or more pool names. Leave it empty to use the default pool. A pool is created automatically the first time you reference its name — here or on a product variant.
4. Choose a Duplicate handling mode: Ignore duplicates, Attach existing to pools, or Raise error on duplicates.
5. Submit. The result shows how many keys were created, attached to a pool, and skipped as duplicates, with per-row errors for anything rejected.

Tip

Need a one-off key for testing or a manual order? Use Generate one on the same screen — Sellerlane mints a unique key and adds it to the pools you selected.

Pool inventory and statuses

Every key carries a status: Pending (available to sell), Reserved (held for an in-flight checkout), Assigned (sold to a buyer), Used, or Disabled. The License Keys dashboard shows each pool’s total, used, remaining, reserved, a utilization bar, and which products draw from it. Keep an eye on the remaining count — top a pool up before it runs dry, or new sales of that variant will fail to assign a key. (The Digital delivery dashboard goes a step further and badges a pool Low stock once it reaches 90%+ utilization or drops to five or fewer keys left — see below.)

Caution

You can only delete keys that are Pending. Keys that have been reserved, assigned, or used cannot be bulk-deleted, so an issued key stays on record.

The Digital products dashboard

Open Orders → Digital delivery for a live view of delivery health across your digital catalog. A grant is one buyer’s right to download a specific purchase; the dashboard reads from grants and pools and surfaces:

• KPIs — active grants, expired, revoked, total downloads, and pools low on stock.
• Downloads over time — a daily series of metered downloads.
• Delivery channel — how items reached customers: Account, Email, or Manual.
• Top digital products by revenue, and a License key pools inventory table.
• Triage lists — grants Expiring soon (within 7 days), Near download limit (90%+ of the cap), and Never downloaded (delivery may have failed).

Note

The triage totals are computed from the most recent grants loaded into the page, so for very large catalogs a banner warns that the lists may be incomplete.

How buyers receive their purchase

After payment, the buyer can reach their downloads two ways, both authorized without exposing your files publicly:

• From their account order page, when they checked out logged in.
• From the tokenized delivery page linked in their confirmation — the link itself is the authorization, so there’s no login step.

Each request first re-checks ownership, grant status, expiry, and the download limit without consuming the meter. Sellerlane then issues an opaque single-use redeem link valid for about 90 seconds. Following it atomically consumes the nonce and streams the private file through Sellerlane; no replayable object-store credential reaches the browser. The meter is finalized only after the stream completes, so opening the download menu does not count as a download and the same redeem link cannot fetch the file twice. If the single-use nonce service is unavailable, download fails temporarily instead of falling back to an unsafe replayable URL. License keys are revealed on the same order and delivery pages.

Re-deliver or reset downloads

Buyers can recover access through self-service without contacting you, under rules you control in Settings → Self-service:

• Re-deliver a digital purchase to a (possibly different) email — allowed by default.
• Reset downloads (re-download) so a buyer who hit the limit can download again — off by default; turn it on or require your approval per request.

Both run against the underlying grant, and the seller backend re-enforces your policy before anything happens.

Troubleshooting

• “No downloadable files” on a license-key product — a License Key variant serves no file by design. Switch it to Both if a file should ship too.
• Sales fail to assign a key — the pool is out of Pending keys. Add more under Products → License Keys, watching the Low stock flag on the Digital delivery dashboard.
• Buyer says the grant expired — that’s the Download Expiry doing its job. Re-delivery sends the same grant and does not silently extend its frozen expiry. Use the approved reset/regrant workflow for this order, or raise the window on the variant for future sales.
• A fresh download link says used/expired — redeem links are deliberately single-use and short-lived. Ask the buyer to request a new link; this alone does not consume another download unless the file stream completes.
• Grant shows “Never downloaded” — the buyer may not have received delivery. Check the Delivery channel and re-deliver from self-service.
• License keys won’t save or reveal — the store’s key-encryption secret must be configured; keys are stored encrypted at rest. Contact support if reveals fail.

Next steps

Product types

Compare digital with physical, events, gift cards, and bundles in Product types.

Customer self-service

Configure re-delivery and re-download rules in Customer self-service.

Files & media

Upload and manage the files your digital products serve from Files.

Add products

Walk through creating any product type in Add products.