Digital stores

A digital store is the fourth Salesive store type. It sells files instead of goods: PDFs, ebooks and archives. There is no stock, no variants and no shipping. A buyer pays, receives an email with their download link, and finds everything again in their library on the storefront.

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What you can sell

Every file is stored privately. It never gets a public link and never appears in your Media library. Buyers can only reach it through a link that Salesive checks on every request. Your storage allowance on a digital store starts at 2 GB by default.

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How buyers pay

Each product has an access setting that decides how it can be bought. Prices are in your store currency, for example 4500 for ₦4,500. A price you need must be above 0, and the price shown on catalog cards is the cheapest way in. For example a cookbook with access: "both", a one-time price of ₦4,500 and a 30-day price of ₦1,500 shows as “from ₦1,500”.

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The all-access pass

The all-access pass is one store-wide price for 30 days of every product you marked Include in the all-access pass, for example ₦7,500. It is checked live: a book you add to the pass tomorrow is available to existing pass holders tomorrow, and a book you remove stops being downloadable with the pass straight away. The period is fixed at 30 days, and the pass needs a price above 0 before you can switch it on.

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Rules at checkout

• A cart holds only digital lines. Mixing digital and other kinds of items is refused with the code mixed_cart.
• Every digital line has a quantity of 1, and the price is always recomputed from your catalog, never taken from the buyer’s device.
• Choosing the other way to buy a book that is already in the cart replaces the line.
• A buyer cannot buy a permanent copy twice. Buying a pass again is fine: it extends the same access by 30 days, on top of whatever is left.
• Buyers must be signed in with a real account, because access is delivered to their email. Guest sessions cannot check out.
• Once payment is confirmed the order becomes completed straight away (there is nothing to ship) and access is granted.
• If you cancel or refund an order, the access it gave is taken back. A pass that other purchases also feed only loses the days that order added.

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How buyers get their files

1. Email. When a payment is confirmed the buyer receives an email with a download link per title. For the all-access pass the email links to the library, because one pass covers many books.
2. Library. The storefront has a /library page where a signed-in buyer sees every title they hold, how many days are left on a pass, a Download button, a Renew button and the auto-renew switch. Expired titles stay listed so they can be renewed.

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Download rules

Developers can see the exact responses in Download a purchased file.

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Auto-renew

A buyer can choose Renew automatically when buying a 30-day pass (a product pass or the all-access pass). It works like this:

• The card is saved only if the buyer pays by card through Paystack and the card can be charged again. Other payment methods complete the purchase but do not enable auto-renew.
• A daily job (08:00, Lagos time) looks at passes that end within 3 days and charges the saved card at today’s price, through an ordinary order. When the payment is confirmed the pass is extended by 30 days.
• Buyers are emailed shortly before a pass ends (when auto-renew is on, a renewal notice with the date and amount instead), when it has ended, and whenever a renewal fails.
• After 3 failed charges auto-renew switches itself off.
• From the library the buyer can turn it off at any time, which deletes the saved card. They can only turn it back on while a card is still saved, otherwise they tick “Renew automatically” the next time they buy.

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Managing your store

In the dashboard a digital store shows these pages: There is no Point of Sale on a digital store.

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Adding a product

On Add Product, enter the name, author and description, add covers, choose how buyers get it and set the prices, then upload the file. A product without a file is saved unlisted and cannot be listed until a file is attached, so you never sell a book buyers cannot download. Replacing a file deletes the old one from storage.

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Buyer Access

From Buyer Access you can manage who can download what, without a payment:

• Grant access to a product or to the all-access pass, either permanent (lifetime) or a pass of any number of days (30 by default, up to 3650). The buyer needs an existing shopper account in your store: if the email has never signed in, you will be told they need to sign in to your store once first. The all-access pass can only be granted as a pass.
• Extend a pass by a number of days. Permanent access cannot be extended, and neither can revoked access (grant it again instead).
• Revoke access, with an optional reason. Downloads stop immediately. Revoking twice keeps the first reason.

If a buyer paid but their access could not be granted (rare, for example if a service was down at that moment), the page lists those orders and you can retry them.

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Free preview

Sellers can let shoppers read the first pages of a PDF book before they buy.

• It is on by default for PDF products, showing 3 pages. You can switch it off per product or choose 1 to 20 pages.
• A preview never shows more than half of the book, and always at least one page. A 5-page book shows 2 pages, and a one-page PDF has no preview.
• The preview is a new PDF made from the chosen pages only, so the rest of the book is not hidden inside the file. Each page carries a footer such as Preview: first 3 of 120 pages.
• Previews work for PDFs up to 60 MB. Epub, mobi and zip products have none.
• Storefront items report preview: { available, pages }, and the preview itself is a public PDF at GET /digital-products/{id}/preview. Apps read and set it with the preview field of a digital product.

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For developers and theme authors

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Theme support

Only Salesive’s default theme supports digital stores today: a catalog as the home page, product pages, cart, checkout, orders and the /library. A theme can declare "digital" in shopTypes, but a digital store on any other theme has no digital pages. /library is an automatic route: the platform serves it with the default theme.

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Store API

Digital stores use the normal catalog, cart and order endpoints, which return catalogType: "digital" and items with itemType: "digital": Renewing a pass is buying it again: add the same item to the cart with mode: "pass" (or allAccess: true) and check out.

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Apps API

Third-party apps can manage a digital store with the same scopes as the rest of the catalog: READ_INVENTORY for reads and WRITE_INVENTORY for writes. There are no new scopes. The endpoints are under Digital products and Digital access. Two limits to plan for:

• An app cannot upload the book file. Files are uploaded to private storage with a store file token that app tokens cannot obtain, so an app can prepare listings but the merchant attaches the file from the dashboard.
• An app also cannot read the book file. The dashboard-only GET /digital-products/{id}/file-url, which returns a 5 minute link to the private file, refuses app and MCP tokens with 403.
• READ_INVENTORY also exposes buyers’ email addresses through List buyer access.

Webhooks fire for digital-products and digital-access changes.

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Form builder

A product field follows the store type, so on a digital store it lists digital products. Pin it with "catalog": "digital".

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Switching store type

You cannot change a digital store into another type yourself, or the other way round. A Salesive administrator can switch a store’s type on your behalf. Nothing is deleted: each store type keeps its own catalog (products, menu items, services, digital products), so switching back shows the old items again. A digital store with buyers who still hold access needs an extra confirmation from the administrator.

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Limits at a glance