Starting today, Google Checkout will begin providing additional support for digital goods such as software and music. Users have always been able to buy and sell digital goods with Google Checkout but we want to be able to offer an improved user experience tailored specifically to digital goods. Now merchants will have option of tagging an item as digital within the shopping cart and specifying details about how it should be delivered. You'll be able inform a buyer that their digital purchase will be delivered via email, or you can provide a set of instructions along with a URL and license key.
Here’s an XML snippet showing how you can specify digital goods within the shopping cart:
<item>
...
<digital-content>
<description>
Please visit <a href="http://yoursite.com">our
website</a>, for instructions on downloading your
software.
</description>
<url>http://yoursite.com</url>
<key>1456-1514-3657-2198</key>
</digital-content>
</item>
Here’s a screenshot of how that digital content will be shown to the buyer:
We’ll be continuously making improvements to this feature so stay tuned. If you’d like to learn more, please take a look at the API documentation for Google Checkout Digital Delivery. Permalink | Links to this post |
4 comments:
Very cool stuff.
This baby is gonna hum when everything's all dialed in at the end.
Looking forward to putting this into actions!
Best Regards,
Chuck Crawford
Chuck Crawford Web Design
When will the Sample PHP API code be updated for this great improvement?
http://code.google.com/p/google-checkout-php-sample-code/downloads/list
How about digital delivery on generated PIN codes such as prepaid phone card PINs?
I'm very glad that Google is taking steps towards supporting digital delivery, but I do have the following thoughts.
1) How does one integrate with the "buy now" buttons? I would hazard a guess that the majority of digital content purchases would be single item orders, and so why force the use of a shopping cart? Indeed, your screenshots would suggest that the order complete screens support a single download URL.
2) Why not just give us field in the "buy now button" definition that would allow us to return the buyer to an "order complete" page on our site? You'd append the order id to it:
http://www.foo.com/complete.html?id=123456
We could then take it from there - check to see if the order has been successfully charged, or ask the user to wait a moment (then we'd refresh). Simple, sweet, and secure.
3) How about improving the delivery API, so that we can add more appropriate info to the order status page. Right now, you support only FedEx, etc, and you seem to have the urls for those hardcoded.
It would seem to be rather straightforward to have a "digital delivery" option there, into which we can stuff an URL with appropriate values for the given order.
I have my gripes with PayPal, but this is one thing they do quite well. At the completion of the order, my buyer is directed directly to the download page. With Google, they have to wait for an email - and there is often apparently an extremely long delay as our mail goes through Google to them.
RQ
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