Post by Crenel » Sat Nov 18, 2017 2:17 pm

I'm very new to OpenCart and wanted to search the forum for discussion about this, but the forum won't let me search at all, it keeps telling me to wait (n) seconds -- and n increases every time I try.

Anyway...

I thought this was a bug until I read the tooltip over the option in the system settings. The guest checkout option is intentionally disabled when a downloadable product is in the cart. This prevents me from moving forward with my intended implementation of OpenCart, because I want to be able to sell my downloadable products (my novels and other digital content) without requiring buyers (readers) to create an account as part of the process. A guest checkout is every bit as meaningful for me for a digital product as it is a physical product.

My first question is "why was this decision made" but a more relevant question is "can this functionality be changed so I can move forward with this project?" I'm sure I could find the code myself to modify, but hacking core for any pre-built site software is something I try to avoid.

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Post by straightlight » Sat Nov 18, 2017 11:50 pm

Even though the checkout process would work for the digital products, it will not prevent the download controller on validating the customer as being logged in or not. The reason why it was removed was for security reasons. Opencart does not provide a token by default for guest users who wishes to download a product which means any guests could just pretend to the browser that a specific can be downloaded as you'd have no specific ways to track these down other than with the IP addresses which would still be limited information compared to have a secured token.

In addition, it is also useful to restrict those downloads that way for merchants who do not use SSL.

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Post by Johnathan » Sat Nov 18, 2017 11:55 pm

I would suggest just disabling guest checkout, but if you don't want to do that, you'd need to find a mod that will auto-create a customer account for the guest when they check out. That way, they can still access their downloads after purchasing.

I don't know of a mod like that off the top of my head, but I believe some exist. You should try searching the marketplace.

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Post by straightlight » Sun Nov 19, 2017 12:55 am

After some reflection, followed would be the closest module that could be used:

- https://www.opencart.com/index.php?rout ... h=restrict payment

Restricting payment providers to be used would be ideal in this case from the cart page since each associated products that needs to be purchased as downloadable products as guests must have available options via their payment providers for editing those profiles either manually or by recurring billing cycle. This topic was a hard request but quite an interesting one. :)

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Post by Crenel » Sun Nov 19, 2017 2:35 am

OK, I understand the rationale now. I think it would be better if an expiring token was assigned for a guest digital purchase, but this is more in the realm of a feature request than a design fix or bug fix. Now I have to decide whether this is really a blocking problem as it seemed when I first looked at it, or if I can get an acceptable user experience in some form. I like the idea of automatically creating accounts for buyers. There are some other use cases that I'm not sure how I'll handle but they may not be directly related to this specific issue so I'll not stray from this topic here.

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