MediaShop enables you to sell software, documents, or any other type of file on your website. MediaShop handles all sales on this site, but it can do much, much more. We are creating a whole new business model that no other product can offer.

MediaShop creates "Buy Now" buttons on your site that redirect the customer to the payment gateway’s site for payment processing. This provides a perfectly acceptable shopping experience while minimising setup costs for the website owner. You don’t need an SSL certificate as all payment processing is handled by the gateway.

The customer arrives at a product page on your website, reads the product description, and clicks on a payment button. The customer is transferred to the payment gateway site in the same browser window or tab. He or she is now on a secure HTTPS site, and completes the entire payment process there. At the end of the transaction the customer is redirected back to your site, where MediaShop privately verifies the transaction with the gateway before displaying a download screen to the customer.

MediaShop also sends an email to the customer which can be configured to include any text of your choice, a download link, and several other variables. When the customer downloads a file, the download is logged with the transaction record, and when the download limit has been reached, or the transaction expires, no further downloads are allowed for that transaction.

Features

MediaShop includes many advanced features not found even in the "pro" versions of other products:

• Supports multiple payment gateways, currently PayPal and Moneybookers (although in the low cost version, only one gateway is offered to customers at a time).
• Allows use of a secondary PayPal email address as your merchant account - allowing you to use an email address that is a good match for each website you sell from.
• Specify the number of downloads and validity time associated with any product.
• After payment, the customer is redirected to a download page, and a confirmation email is sent to the customer confirming the download URL.
• Different products can be associated with different payment gateway accounts.
• Choose whether to allow immediate downloads for pending payments, or not.
• Prices are stored separately from products, and many products can be associated with one price. So you can easily change the price of many products simply by editing the price record.
• Product groups allow you to sell any number of downloads from any size group. Products can belong to any number of groups.
• Products can be free, displaying a direct download button.
• Exhaustive transaction checking and logging. Full details of any errors and all activity related to a specific transaction is logged on the transaction record. All downloads are logged, including the downloaded filename, version, and user’s IP address.
• The administrator can extend, revoke, or refund a transaction.
• Customer emails are configurable using templates and variables.
• "Buy" and "Download" buttons are configurable.
• The administrator can manually resend status emails to customers.
• Full logging of hits, sales, and downloads of each product.
• Reporting in the low cost version is limited. There is one basic pie chart showing the most popular products for various date ranges. However, the database collects much more information, so if you later decide to upgrade to the "Plus" version, the additional reports available immediately show your full history.
• Imports transactions, products and PayPal accounts from Joomla! P2DXT.

Language Support

Both front and back end are multi-language ready using the standard Joomla language file system. Currently English and Polish versions are supplied. Translations are welcome and will be added to the product.

The most significant messages shown to customers are customisable through the administrative interface. All other messages can be customised via the language file. Emails sent to customers are fully customisable through the administrative interface.

About PayPal and Moneybookers

PayPal is popular because it is quick and easy to work with for both customers and merchants. Most people are happy to sign up for a PayPal account and purchase online through PayPal. However, the customer must sign up for a PayPal account in order to make purchases.

Moneybookers has the advantage that customers can pay by credit or debit card (up to a limit) without registering for a Moneybookers account.

Setting up a merchant account is free with both PayPal and Moneybookers.

Why no Free Version?

We initially launched MediaShop as a free product. We also provided an optional (non-free) user guide. Unfortunately within two days of launching the product we received a truly horrible review on the JED: The main complaint seemed to be that there was no free user guide, the second being that MediaShop "only" supported PayPal and Moneybookers! We eventually got that review removed because it broke the JED rules for reviews, but it made us rethink our policy on providing free Joomla extensions. As an experiment, we are now providing the user guide for free, and charging the small amount for MediaShop that we were charging for the user guide. Let us know what you think.

The MediaShop User Guide contains full details of setting up the system, and is a mine of useful information about setting up live and test PayPal and Moneybookers accounts.

For more examples of what MediaShop can do, take a look at our Plotalot User Guide and Plugin package (a product group where the group members are not for sale individually), or our FlexiContact Themes (a product group where the members are for sale individually).

Obviously if you experience ANY problem in payment or downloading, just let us know and we will put things right immediately. And if you have any other comments about using MediaShop as a customer, we'll be very happy to hear from you.