Selling Pay Per View content online is very profitable. It allows your customer to access content for a short period of  time. The good thing about Pay Per View content is you don’t have to worry about the security of the product as you are not giving away any product. The content is on your site. You are just giving certain content access to your customers temporarily once they pay for your content.

So how does Pay Per View Content work?

A customer lands on your product page where you have the pay per view content (e.g. videos). The customer chooses one and pay for it. After the payment he/she gets redirected to your site and can access the video.

In this tutorial I’m going to show how you can setup the pay per view content with WP eStore, a very popular WordPress shopping cart plugin.

Configuring Pay Per View Content with eStore

1. First we are going to create a normal HTML page with a video in it. We want our customers to come back to this page once they successfully pay for the video. Sometimes It’s really easy to navigate to a WordPress page by clicking on different links on your site. But we don’t want anyone to discover this page. That’s why I just created this static HTML page and uploaded to my server.

2. Now let’s configure a product which will be used to charge payments from the customers for this video. So click on Add/Edit Products under eStore menu on your WordPress Dashboard.

3.  This is how the Add/Edit Products menu looks like -

4. You need to enter a name and price for the product (e.g. video)

5.  Now go to the Digital Content Details section. In the Digital Product URL field you need to enter the URL of the page where you have the video. Check the Pay Per View Content option (that way the plugin will know what type of product this is).

Click Save Product at the bottom of the page to save the product.

6. After you save the product, it will be assigned with an unique product ID which you can see at the top of the page. You will need the product ID to use within the shortcode later.

7. To find the product ID of any product you have configured so far you can go to eStore->Manage Products.

8. Now that we have configured one product we are going to create a page and place an Add to Cart button on it. We need to use the following two shortcodes on that page -

The first one creates an Add to Cart button for the product ID – 33 ( the one we just configured) and the second one display the items in the shopping cart once the Add to Cart button has been clicked.

This a sample Test Product page -

9. Once we publish the page we can see an Add to Cart button on it.

10. Now Let’s create a Thank You page where your user will be redirected to once they make a successful payment. You can place the following shortcode on this page if you want to deliver the URL of the video page to your customer via Thank You page.

Don’t worry the page URL will be encrypted so the customers won’t know know the actual URL of the page.

This is a sample Thank You page -

If you publish the page you won’t see any page link. The page link will be only visible after anyone purchases the product.

11. Now Let’s go to settings (under eStore->Settings).

12.  There are many things that you can customize in the General settings. I’m just going through the basic settings. The first thing you need to do is specify the URL of the Thank You page in the Return URL field. It will allow the customer to be redirected to the Thank You page after making a successful payment.

13. Make sure to keep the following checkboxes checked -

a) Use Automatic Post Payment Processing – Which allows the plugin to do post payment processing (e.g. sending out email to the buyer with the encrypted video page link).

b) Use Automatic Customer Record Removal – The plugin will delete the customer record from the database if refunded.

c) Enable Transaction Result Display – Allows you to display the encrypted page link on the Thank You page after a successful payment.

14.Once you are done click Update Options at the bottom of the page.

15. Now go to the Payment Gateway Settings tab at the very top of the page

16. If you want to display the encrypted video page link on the Thank You page you need to also specify the PDT Identity Token under the PayPal Settings. (please click here to learn how to retrieve the PDT Identity Token from your PayPal account)

Click Update option at the bottom to save the settings.

17. Now that we have configured the settings we can now go back to the Test Product page to do a test purchase and see how everything goes. First click on the Add to Cart button. You will see that one item has been added to the shopping cart. You can now click the Checkout With PayPal button to proceed to the PayPal payment page.

18. After the payment your customers will be redirected to the Thank You page where they will be able to click on the encrypted page link to go to the video page. The seller and buyer will also receive separate emails containing the transaction details.

19. Once the customers click on the link they will be redirected to the video page.

As you can see that the plugin has masked the actual URL of the page so that the customers don’t know the URL of the page. Even if the customers copy the mask URL for later use they won’t be able to view it until they pay for it again.

Want to Try eStore?

If you are interested in setting up your site with pay per view video you can get eStore from here

• WP eStore