Your Joomla online store can now sell digital products from your Amazon S3 bucket. Got an Amazon S3 account and a few files in your S3 buckets? Great! You can sell any of those files, like eBooks, PDFs, songs, videos, softwares or anything virtual, as downloadable digital products on your eCommerce site. And guess what, you are just 3 steps away from selling your digital products. Here’s all you need to know.
If you are not already familiar with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), it is a promising web service that lets you upload, store and download any kind of files in your account. You have to create a bucket and store files as objects in the buckets. There is no limit to how many objects you store in a bucket, but each S3 account can have only 100 buckets.
So, let’s assume you have your files stored in Amazon S3. How can you sell them on your Joomla site? Apart from an Amazon S3 account, you need the following:
- An eCommerce platform like J2Store - to turn your Joomla website into an online store.
- Amazon S3 integration like Amazon S3 App - to connect your S3 account and online store.
J2Store is one of the best eCommerce solution for Joomla. If you are already a J2Store user, you must already know how easy it is to sell digital products with J2Store. You just have to create a Joomla article, select “Treat as a product” and choose the product type as “Downloadable”. That’s it. Could this be any easier?
But, if you are not a J2Store user, no worries. You can download and install J2Store in your Joomla account in just a few minutes.
Now, you only need to install the Amazon S3 extension to get started. Why J2Store Amazon S3? Let’s take a quick look into the app before going to the steps.
J2Store Amazon S3
J2Store’s Amazon S3 app allows you to integrate your online store to your S3 account and start selling the digital products immediately. Here’s how it works.
Just like shipping and delivery are crucial for physical products, security and reliability are crucial for digital products. The app generates a temporary URL which will expire within minutes (you can control its expiry from the app settings), thus effectively preventing direct access to your files. The download URL is also well masked for security.
Some of the features of Amazon S3 app includes:
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Sell any file stored in Amazon S3
It is possible to share any file that is stored in your Amazon S3 bucket irrespective of its size and type.
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Send product links through emails
Using shortcodes, you can send the product links to your customers in the email notifications.
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Allows you to control the expiry of the URL from settings
While you share your valuable information through internet, you can easily restrict its availability by defining when the URL would expire.
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Enables you to retrieve the files from the Amazon S3 bucket remotely
Retrieve the files from your Amazon S3 account on-the-fly. All it requires is the API keys and the bucket name to be keyed in the app's settings.
Now that you are familiar with the app, let’s learn how to sell the digital products on your site. Here are the three steps I was talking about:
How To Sell Digital Products On Joomla Using Amazon S3?
Step 1: Install J2Store
If you have already installed J2Store on your site, you can skip this step. Else, quickly download and install J2Store in your Joomla site. It takes only less than 10 minutes for the setup.
Step 2: Install Amazon S3 Extension
Within your J2Store workspace, download the Amazon S3 extension from the Apps section. Once it is installed, enable the app. You can now go to the final step.
Step 3: Integrate J2Store With Amazon S3 Bucket
The app has 4 fields:
- API Access Key
- API Secret Key
- Amazon Bucket Name
- Expiry for the temporary download URL (in minutes)
Go to your AWS account and navigate to the Users tab. Under your user id, you will find the “Security Credentials” tab. Copy the Access Key ID and the Secret Access Key, and paste them in the first two fields of the Amazon S3 app in J2Store.
Once you enter these keys, the list of buckets in your Amazon Web Service account will be displayed in the third field. Choose the bucket where the files you want to sell reside.
Whenever a customer wants to download your files, the app generates a temporary URL. Enter the number of minutes after which the URL would expire in the fourth field.
Take a look at this video:
Save the settings and you are done. The files from your Amazon storage are connected to J2Store. You just have to set the price and other product descriptions from your J2Store Catalog.
Voila! You have started selling files from your Amazon storage in your online store. Cool, isn’t it?
That is all it takes to sell digital products using Amazon S3 in your Joomla eCommerce site. As I mentioned earlier, there is no restriction to what products you sell in J2Store. Be it physical or digital products. So, no matter if you want to sell your newly built software or app or a music file or a PDF, you can sell it all with the best eCommerce solution ever.
So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and start selling!
