Digital Goods Storage from Other Site

This is a pre-sales question. We are looking at HikaShop as an alternative to xCart.

Files that are served up as digital goods can be stored on a separate server. I see that digital goods in Hikashop have a URL associated with them, but I cannot find documentation that says this URL can be from anywhere. Is this possible?

Hi,

When you add a file to a product in HikaShop you can specify a location.
This location could be an url (starting by "http://") and at this moment, when the customer would want to download, he would be redirected to the url.

Regards,

Jerome wrote: Hi,
When you add a file to a product in HikaShop you can specify a location.
This location could be an url (starting by "http://") and at this moment, when the customer would want to download, he would be redirected to the url.
Regards,

Is this a Hikashop, generated URL that protects the location of the file?

It is important that the URL is not something that is clearly permanent URL. Otherwise, someone could simply share that URL with anyone and gain access to the digital product.

Hi,

HikaShop provide secured links which would check if the customer is logged and if he as bought the right product.
After all these checks done, if the "file name" is a url, it would redirect the customer to this url. So the customer would be able to see the final URL.

Regards,

Jerome wrote: Hi,

HikaShop provide secured links which would check if the customer is logged and if he as bought the right product.
After all these checks done, if the "file name" is a url, it would redirect the customer to this url. So the customer would be able to see the final URL.

So they see the actual URL where the file is stored? If that's true, there's nothing to stop them from copy-pasting that URL anyplace, and anyone who is not logged in can download or link to that file. That would be very harmful for digital product commerce if there is no way to hide the actual location of the file. I hope this is not so with Hikashop, and maybe its a misunderstanding.

Other shops like xCart (which is lousy in many ways and why we are looking at Hikashop) generate a long, unique URL for the user and does not reveal the actual file location on the other server. A customer cannot simply copy-paste the URL and share it with the world. Does it work this way with Hikashop?

Hi,

HikaShop is design to send files which are stored in his local server.
When you enter a url, HikaShop would redirect the user to this url, because it's possible that you don't want to send a hidden file. The file could be a "free file" so you don't want to hide the file path.
If you really want to hide the file which is stored in another place, on another server, you have to implement a custom plugin in order to download and upload the remove file in the same time.

Local files, where you do not enter an external url, are quite secured and file path would never display to the customers.

Regards,

Jerome wrote: Hi,

HikaShop is design to send files which are stored in his local server.
When you enter a url, HikaShop would redirect the user to this url, because it's possible that you don't want to send a hidden file. The file could be a "free file" so you don't want to hide the file path.
If you really want to hide the file which is stored in another place, on another server, you have to implement a custom plugin in order to download and upload the remove file in the same time.

Local files, where you do not enter an external url, are quite secured and file path would never display to the customers.

Regards,

Thank you for your answer. That is not ideal for many kinds of digital goods. With xCart for example, you can store your goods on the server itself, or you can store them at any location - it makes no difference. The URL of the actual product just needs to be input into the system.

Often times files are stored on separate servers because of performance and costs. There can be a significant savings.

In our case, thousands of items are stored that way. With xCart, the system already knows the real URL, then generates automatically a temporary URL when the customer requests it (based on a timer).

You can do that with HikaShop too. If you give the URL of the external file, that will work. And the user won't get the direct URL but will be redirected to it by HikaShop. That must be the same with xcart, because otherwise, if it has to download each time the file to the server before sending it, there is absolutely no performance gain and no cost gain at all. That temporary URL of xcart will redirect to the file on the external server.
So the solution is the same as far as I can see.