Introduction

PrestaShop is a platform that has many features which allow you to create the Online store you had always dreamed of. After the recent release of PrestaShop 1.7, there are even more improvements. As the technology changes, PrestaShop upgrades accordingly with it as well. In the latest release there are 3 types of products available:

• Standard Product - It is a physical product as clothing, fashion, electronics, that you have somewhere in stock;
• Virtual Product - It is a downloadable product, such as e-book/PDF files, service, booking or downloadable games, phone applications, software upgrades and so on;
• Pack of Product - It is a combination of at least two existing products.

If you want to create an Online store, that, for example, is offering some sort of service, booking or a downloadable product, then you can easily use the “Virtual Products” feature. In this tutorial, you are going to learn how to configure a Virtual Downloadable Product in PrestaShop.

Step 1: Accessing the PrestaShop “Catalog” page

Once you login into the PrestaShop admin area, on the left vertical navigation menu look for the “Catalog” option. When you find it, click on it. A drop-down menu will appear with a lot of options, such as: “Products”, “Categories”, “Monitoring”, “Discounts” and so on.

To access the page where all of your products will be managed, please, click on the “Products” link.

Step 2: Adding a new virtual product

When you click the “Products” option you will be redirected to a page called “Products”. There you will be provided with a list of all the sample products that PrestaShop creates for you with its default installation.

If you do not want any of these products existing on your Online Store you can simply click the “Select All” checkbox button and from the “Bulk Actions” drop-down to delete all of them.

After all the products are deleted a button saying “Add your first product” will appear on the page. You can either click that button or to click the “New Product” button, that is positioned on the top right side of the page.

Once you click it you will be redirected to a page where you can actually start adding products to your catalog.

First, you will have to enter the product name. Right next to it you will see a drop-down menu. To actually make the product virtual, you have to click the drop-down menu and select “Virtual Product” from it.

When you click it, you will notice that the organization of some of the settings will change to a different one. Let’s start with the first tab called “Basic Settings”.

Step 3: Configuring the Basic Settings of a virtual product

By default, once you click the “New Product” button, the “Basic Settings” tab will be selected.

After you enter the “Basic Settings” tab, you will see a section of settings that were already explained in another tutorial from our Prestashop 1.7 series - “How to add products in PrestaShop 1.7”. The only difference is that when you add a standard product, in the “Basic Settings” tab there is a section about making different combinations with the products. While, when you add a “Virtual Product” that option is removed.

There is a drastic difference between PrestaShop 1.6 and 1.7. Let’s start by configuring the virtual product by filling the “Enter your product name” field.

The name of your product will be displayed on all product listings on your website so you might want to type it carefully and double-check it when ready.

The next thing that you might want to do is to upload a product image. To do that, Prestashop 1.7 provides you with a whole section, located right under the “Basic Settings” tab. To upload images you can either drag and drop those or just click the “Select Files” icon so you can actually tell Prestashop 1.7 which images should be uploaded.

Please, bear in mind, that there is a recommended size for the dimensions of the images - 800 x 800 px and those have to be jpg, GIF or PNG file formats.

After the image uploads, it will be shown in the same section as a thumbnail.

There are quite a lot of other settings in the “Basic Settings” tab, however, we will not review those in this tutorial.  For more details on filling all other fields in this section please check our tutorial “How to add products in PrestaShop 1.7”.

Step 4: Configuring the Virtual Product tab

Once ready configuring the settings in the “Basic Settings” tab, you can proceed to the second tab called “Virtual Product”.

The “Virtual Product” tab has very few settings to configure. The first field is called “Quantities” and here is the place where you should input the total amount of stock for this product.

Next, is the “Minimum quantity for sale” field. This field is used when you would like to set a minimum quantity for sale for each product. A customer can only purchase this product if that minimum quantity is selected.

For instance, if the minimum is set to 3, then the customers will be able to purchase the product only if they take at least 3 in quantity of it. You can also set to 1 to disable this feature.

At the frontend of the Online store, that information will be visible in the “Product Details” section.

Next, is the “Low stock level” field. If you leave that empty you will disable that setting, but you can also type a number that will notify the customers when the product is getting low on stock.

If you want to be notified as well when the quantity goes to low in stock, then mark the checkbox right next to the “Low stock level” field - an email will be sent to you every time the quantity of the product reaches the low stock level or below that.

After the “Stock” section, you will see a section called “Does this product have an associated file?”

On the right side of the “Does this product have an associated file” field there will be two radio buttons. By default, the “No” radio button will be marked. If your product does not have an associated file, then just leave it like that. But, if you click on the “Yes” option, then PrestaShop will open a new form for you, from which you can upload the file you intend to sell.

The options in that new form are as follow:

1. File – you have to click the Browse button to upload the file from your computer.
2. Filename – that is the name of the file. This field is automatically filled after the file has been uploaded. It is not recommended to change it to another value.
3. A number of allowed downloads – you can set the number of time the file can be downloaded once the customer has bought it. You might prefer to limit this to 1, or 5. If you want to keep it unlimited, then set the text field to 0.
4. Expiration date – virtual files can be of promotional nature or lose their selling value after a certain date. If so, you can set the expiry date after which the product will not be available in your shop anymore. Leave it blank if there is no expiry date.
5. Number of days – you can set a number of days after which the downloaded link becomes non-functioning. If there is no limit, set the text field to 0.

Now, when you want to configure that a product is out of stock to go to the next section called “Availability preferences”. By default, an option “Use default behavior (Deny orders)” will be marked.

You can either leave it like that or change the “Availability preferences” as you like. You can also set “Label when in stock”, “Label when out of stock” and the “Availability date”. With the availability date, you are basically saying to the customers that the product is out of stock, but it is going to come in in the next two weeks or so, for example.

The next tabs you will find right after the “Basic Settings” tab are the “Pricing”, “SEO” and “Options” tab. Every setting that comes as an editing option in each tab is exactly the same as the settings for “Standard Product”. If you would like to find out more about the “Pricing”, “SEO” and “Options” tabs and their settings, please, check out our “How to add products in PrestaShop 1.7” tutorial.

Now, once you are done managing all the settings in the different tabs, please, remember to click the “Save” button at the very bottom of the page. This will save the new product to your Online Store.

Congratulations! In this tutorial, you learned what a Downloadable Product is and how to configure it.