How to sell download pre-orders
Accept download orders with deferred delivery
If you wish to pre-sell a download product for early access before you have the final file ready to deliver, you can initially set up the product with the Single File Download option unticked, then later use our built-in Updates & Newsletters service (for a nominal fee) to mass-email download links to early buyers, or just send them each a link manually at no extra charge using Send free download link/code.
When you first add the product in your E-junkie Dashboard, we'd recommend including some indication like (pre-order) in the Item Name, so buyers are clear what they're purchasing and have reasonalbe expections about delayed delivery of the file. Also enter a Product Thank-you Email message thanking the buyer for their early-bird purchase and advising them when they can expect to receive another email for file delivery later. Contact us to enable a "soft opt-in" for the pre-sale product, to make sure all early buyers get subscribed to the Buyer Group email list we maintain for the product, as their consent to subscribe is implicit in the fact they knowingly purchased a pre-order item to be delivered via email later.
When you have the file ready to deliver, edit the product in your E-junkie Dashboard to remove the (pre-order) (or other indication you'd added) in the Item Name and tick the box for Single File Download, which will reveal a button you can click to upload the file. Update the Product Thank-you Email message as you wish (see more about customizing thank-you emails here), along with any other settings you may wish to change, then click Submit to apply changes. Also contact us again to have the soft opt-in disabled for the item, so future buyers who'd get the file delivered instantly won't be subscribed against their wishes.
You can check your E-junkie Transaction Log to see how many pre-sales you made for the item. If there weren't a lot, you could manually issue each early buyer their download link via Manage Buyers > Send free download link/code in your E-junkie Dashboard at no extra cost. However, that might be pretty tedious if you had a lot of pre-orders, so for a nominal fee you can send a mass-email Update to your Buyer Group email list for the product.
Either of those delivery approaches will provide a unique, expiring link to each recipient, which would engage PDF Stamping if you'd set that up for the product. These methods would send the same Product Thank-you Email you have entered in the product's settings, unless you enter a custom message when you send the link(s)—in which case, you can include the template tag [%download_link%] in your custom message where you want the link inserted, ideally on a line by itself.