The complete guide to Magento 2 downloadable products, and how to import them
Downloadable products speak for themselves. These are the products your customers can download directly from your store.
In this guide we will run through composing downloadable products and how to import them to your Magento 2.
Table of contents
Guide list
The complete guide to downloadable products, and how to import them is a part of the blog posts that FireBear team composed for you. From these guides you will learn peculiarities of the Magento 2 product and understand the basics and advanced methods of product import and export.
The index post containing all guides can be found by the link below:
What is Magento 2 downloadable product
Downloadable products are just like simple products with the only difference being that customers download such products directly from your store. All other settings and features are pretty similar.
Just like with Magento 2 simple products you can add custom options, manage the product availability, etc. Downloadable products do not have complex architecture like configurable products, or require adding options as bundles.
If you are reading this guide, you are probably familiar with simple products and how they operate in Magento 2. That’s why, not to waste your time we will focus on the differences of the downloadable products.
How to create downloadable products
Just like other Magento 2 product types, the downloadable products can be created at Catalog > Products section of your Magento 2 administrator panel. Click the dropdown button near the ‘Add Product’ button and select ‘downloadable product’.
The downloadable product settings are the same as simple product’s. With the exception to Downloadable Information section.
The first part of the section is dedicated to Links. In the Links section you specify the links to the downloads you will be selling.
Here you can specify the link title, upload a file or specify a link to it, decide if you want customers to share the links, and specify how many times customers can download products.
At the screenshot above, you have probably noticed that each link can have dedicated price. Yes, you can set specific price to every link you sell. This price will be added to the price of the downloadable product you have specified in the General product settings section. If the downloadable product price is $10, and you have set link price to $20, customers will need to spend $30 total to purchase a product.
The second part of the Links section is Samples. Here you can specify the links or upload samples of the files you are selling. Customers will be able to download samples directly from the product pages.
And that’s pretty much it. Once you are done with Downloadable Information section you can hit ‘Save’ button and see how the product performs at the frontend.
How Magento 2 downloadable product works
At the frontend of the store, in the product catalog downloadable products look like this:
You can see that every piece of the product settings we have filled in the previous chapter is now visible at the Magento 2 downloadable product page.
When the product is purchased and the order is completed, customers can proceed to their account dashboard to download the products purchased.
In My Downloadable Products section, customers can find all the links for the downloadable products they purchased. If the link has a limited downloads, the number of the downloads left will be displayed in the Remaining Downloads column.
Magento 2 downloadable product import and export
There are two way of importing and exporting downloadable products, and products in general. Using default Magento 2 import and export functionality and Improved Import and Export extension by FireBear Studio.
Buy Imporved Import & Export extension for Magento 2
With default Magento 2 import and export you can expect to handle products and customers. You will get a properly formatted CSV table with all products or customers from your store.
With Improved Import and Export extension, in addition to multiple supported file formats like CSV, XML, Json, Excel and OpenOffice; you get access to the following entities:
- Categories
- Orders
- CMS blocks and pages
- Cart price rules
All these entities and be both imported and exports along with products and customers.
As for the import and export sources you will be able to import from: Dropbox, Google Sheets, FTP/SFTP, direct URL, Rest and Soap APIs. Meaning that you can integrate your ERP systems using API with the extension.
Improved Import and Export product page with full list of features
In this guide we will be using Improved Import and Export extension as it allows to import downloadable product options. With default Magento 2 import and export you can also import downloadable products, the process is pretty similar without additional features though. So you will get idea how to use both tools.
Exporting downloadable products
To export products using native Magento 2 export, proceed to System > Export.
The process is very limited and simple. You choose the entity, and click ‘Export’ button.
With Improved Import and Export, proceed to System > Export jobs.
Here you can schedule the export job to run automatically, select the file format you want to get: XML, CSV, Excel, OpenOffice and define other unique features.
For a full export guide refer to the extension manual.
If you are new to Magento 2 export and import procedures I recommend starting with CSV files. Such file can be easily edited in Google Sheets and you will learn all the basics of Magento 2 import pretty soon, if you follow FireBear guides on Magento 2 import and export processes:
Magento 2 import starter guide
Magento 2 Import and export guide list by entity
Editing file with downloadable products
Both Magento 2 native import and Improved Import and Export support CSV file types, so let’s have an example in CSV. For editing purposes use Google Sheets, this is the most simple and convenient way of editing CSV files.
When you get the file with downloadable products it will look something like this:
The top row is taken by the product attributes, all the rows below are different products with the attribute values. You can find the full list of product attributes and their description in the Complete Import Guide.
However, I advise to take a look at the we have composed for you. In this Google Sheets we have gathered all entities available for import into Magento 2. Every attribute in the table comes with the description, sample values and instructions on how to fill in the values, and what values can be accepted by Magento 2.
In the Master Table you can also find a . In this sheet you will find sample downloadable products with sample data filled in.
Downloadable product attributes
When it comes to downloadable products and their import, the only difference they have from simple products in terms of attributes is the attribute downloadable_links.
The structure of the attribute is the following:
price=link_price,url=https://url-to-the-file.com/file.pdf,downloads=number_of_downloads_available,group_title=title_of_the_downloadable_links,title=link_title
Where:
For example:
- if you want to import a product with the link price of 10;
- want it to be FireBear logo (wow! don’t however);
- want to let customers download it only 15 times;
- want the links group named ‘Download me’;
- and want to name link ‘FB logo’.
The value for the downloadable_links attribute will look like:
price=10,url=https://firebearstudio.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Firebear_logo_294x84_quer.png,downloads=15,group_title=Download me,title=FB logo
Try it out yourself and use the Google Sheet we have composed for you.
That’s it. You now know how to compose downloadable_links attribute value. As for other product attributes and its values you can always refer to our Guide List and to learn how to compose values.