Setting up the first downloadable product in Zencart is slightly confusing. Going through the immense help pages, wiki, FAQs, forum becomes pretty frustrating and takes ages to figure out. I went through all that too. So I decided to write this tutorial for all the newbie zencart store owners.

And great news is that I created a screen cast or a video tutorial on “setting up downloadable product in zencart”. Download the video from the link at the bottom of the post. The video will show you how easy it is to add downloadable products in zencart.

Let’s get started.

1. Step 1: Uploading your download product files

1.1. Once your file is ready, use an FTP client to upload the file to the server.

1.2. You will need to upload it to the folder named “downloads” in your zencart store folder.

1.3. If you have many categories and many products, I recommend you to create sub-folders with appropriate category names under the download folders.

1.4. For ex: I have premium web templates, budget web templates, logo templates etc categories.

1.5. I clicked on ‘downloads’ folder, right click and choose “create directory”.

1.6. Rename the directory to a name which you can identify with a category. In my case, folders would be “logo”, “premium”, “budget” etc.

1.7. Double click on the folder to which your present product belongs and upload the file.

2. Step 2: Setting the Attributes, Option Names, Option Values

2.1. Login to Admin Panel

2.2. By default Zencart has ‘download’ as option name & “zip file” as the option value. If this meets your requirements, skip 2.3 & 2.4 below and jump to step 3.

2.3. If you want to add more option names & values, then select catalog > Option Name Manager.

2.4. Type the option name of your choice. Give each option name a different sort order. Ex: dreamweaver is 10, expressionweb is 20, otherhtml is 30 etc. Choose option type as either “dropdown” or “radio button”. Click “Insert” Button.

2.5. If you require more option values other than the existing “zip file”, go to catalog > Option Value Manager. Choose the ‘Option Name’ from the dropdown menu and type your ‘option value name’ in the box provided. You can add new option values like ‘pdf file’ or ‘mp3 file’ or whatever you like.

3. Step 3: Adding New Downloadable Products

3.1. Go to catalog > categories/products

3.2. Create a category (if you haven’t done yet) by clicking “new category” button

3.3. Click on the category in which you want to include your product

3.4. Click on “new product” button

3.5. Enter the details of your new product like name, price, image, max number of downloads etc

3.6. Once you are satisfied with the preview, click “insert” button

3.7. List of products available will be displayed.

3.8. Find the product you just added and click on the symbol “A” (which stands for ‘attribute’).

3.9. Now select “download” as option name & “zip file” as option value

3.10. Type the location of the file on the server. For ex: If I’m adding a premium template and the download file is located under the subfolder named “premium” and the file is “webtemp101.zip” then this will be the location I need to type in the box.

premium/webtemplate101.zip

(Note: If you haven’t made subfolders in the “downloads” folders, then you’d simply type the filename. “webtemplate101.zip”)

If your file name is correct, you will see a green bar on the top of the admin panel saying download file successful and a green dot beside the file name.

Phew! That’s it

Congratulations on successfully uploading your 1st product to your zencart e-store.

Tips:

You can enter meta tags for each of the products by clicking on icon. Meta tags include information like “title”, “description” and “keywords” for each product. Meta elements provide information about a given webpage, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly.

Like this tutorial? You can grab the PDF version of this tut from this link. PDF tutorial to setup download products in zencart. You have all the rights to give away this pdf tut for free, unaltered.

Did you watch the video tutorial yet? It is a screencast where I’ll show you how to add downloadable product in zencart. You can grab the video at this link.
Setup-download-products-zencart.swf 21.3MB. You can embed this video tut in your site in return for a credit link to http://smartadvise.info or give it away for free, unaltered.