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.

New files are inspected first

Digital-product uploads stay private and show Processing while the configured safety scanner inspects the exact uploaded object. A pending or rejected file cannot be selected for a product or promised at checkout. It becomes selectable only after a clean result marks that exact version Ready.

Replacing a digital-product file creates a new private, versioned object. Future checkout snapshots use the clean replacement; existing purchased entitlements remain pinned to the file version they bought. Updating already-issued purchases would be a separate, explicit customer-update workflow rather than a side effect of editing the product.

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. If the connection breaks, the same browser can continue the exact file for up to 24 hours. Sellerlane reconciles a small bounded rewind behind the saved high-water mark so normal proxy buffering does not make a resume unusable. A clean interruption is paused without consuming the meter while that continuation window remains open; the meter is normally finalized when the logical stream reaches the end. If a started stream is abandoned until its 24-hour window expires, Sellerlane finalizes that attempt once so repeatedly aborting just before the end cannot bypass the download limit. A copied URL cannot start another transfer because continuation is bound to the browser and pinned object version. A rare server crash after streaming begins is also handled fail-closed because the completed-byte outcome is unknowable. If the nonce/session 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.

Access control is not DRM

Sellerlane prevents public object URLs, casual link sharing, replay, and out-of-policy downloads. It cannot stop an authorized buyer from copying or redistributing a file after the bytes are saved. Use customer-specific watermarking, license terms, or a dedicated DRM system when that stronger control is required.

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.

Manage access for one paid order

Open the order’s Digital delivery card and choose Manage access when one buyer needs an exception. You can:

• Set a positive download limit for each file, or make the files unlimited.
• Set an exact expiry date and time, or make access never expire.
• Reset every file’s download counter after accepting the irreversible warning.
• Reactivate expired access after choosing a future expiry or no expiry.
• Restore a grant that was revoked by mistake, with a reason for the audit trail.

These changes affect only that order. They never rewrite the product’s defaults or another buyer’s frozen purchase. Resend rotates prior emailed bearer links that could reveal that item and sends a fresh item-scoped link, but it does not reset counters, extend expiry, or restore revoked access.

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 download will not continue — activation links are deliberately single-use. The same browser may continue the exact interrupted file for up to 24 hours; after that, ask the buyer to return to the order page and request a fresh link. Resuming a clean interrupted attempt within that window does not consume another download; abandoning a started attempt past the window is finalized once to preserve the configured limit.
• 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.