Digital listings

Digital listings offer digital products that will be downloadable upon purchase. For instance, a song (anyone else remember those days?). Digital listings have a different set of requirements and limitations compared to physical listings.

Requirements

Digital listings must have a digital file. This is the file that a customer will be able to download upon purchase. Without a file, there’s nothing to sell. Etsy supports up to five digital files.

Digital files are uploaded with Shop Uploader using a pair of fields:

• digital_file_1 — URL to the file.
• digital_file_name_1 — Name of the file.

It looks something like this:

Use the numbers 1-5 to provide more files.

Digital file URL

The digital file is provided to Shop Uploader via URL. The URL must point directly to the raw file — not a preview. That means you need to do something special if you’re using Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. to make sure the URL is the file itself.

That also means that the URL must be publicly accessible, otherwise Shop Uploader’s server will just hit a login screen when trying to access the file. Don’t like that? Check out our direct integrations for Google Drive and Dropbox to keep everything private and secure.

Digital file name

Your digital file name must include the file extension (.pdf, .jpg, .png). The digital file name will be the exact name of the file upon download. Without an extension, it will be an unknown file type and your customers will not know how to open the file.

The name you provide in a Shop Uploader template (ex: digital_file_name_1) will rename the file. It doesn’t matter what your digital_file_1 is named at the URL.

Limitations

Digital listings cannot have variations. Upon purchase, the entire set of digital files will be downloadable by your customer. The alternative is to create separate listings and link to the other listings within the description. Etsy allows clickable URLs in the description as long as it’s to another page on Etsy.com.

Digital listings cannot have shipping or returns information. If you try to provide this information, Shop Uploader will return an error.

Upload more than 5 digital files to Etsy

Etsy only supports 5 digital files but there is a simple way to work around this limitation. You can simply compress your files into a zip archive (.zip file). A zip archive can hold tons of files but is technically-speaking just a single file. Etsy only counts a .zip as a single file.

To create a zip archive for Etsy:

1. Create a folder with all the files you want to zip
2. Compress/zip the folder
   1. (Windows) Right-click > “Send to” > “Compressed (zipped) folder”
   2. (Mac) Control-click > “Compress”
3. Upload the file to Etsy

This is very useful if you want to bundle all your digital files into a single .zip as your digital_file_1 but maybe provide PDF with instructions as digital_file_2.

Deleting digital files

Etsy does not provide an option to overwrite existing digital files when uploading new ones. That means if you provide a digital_file_1 to a listing with 1 digital file already, there will 2 digital files afterwards.

Shop Uploader provides a control column called delete_all_digital_files. If this column is “TRUE”, Shop Uploader will remove all the digital files on the listing first, before uploading new ones. This is how you can replace or delete the digital files on a listing.

NOTE: Etsy still requires at least 1 digital file is present on any digital listings. That means you cannot simply delete all the digital files. You must also upload at least one new file.