Sky Pilot allows you to offer digital content on your store by attaching digital content (including PDFs, images, documents, spreadsheets, videos, and more) to your existing Shopify Products. When your customers buy those items, they will be given a link to download the files or view the videos. You can limit the number of downloads, and make the download expire after a certain period of time.

This article will go over the basic steps needed to set up Sky Pilot.

Prepare your digital content

Since you have a limited amount of storage, we suggest preparing your files to ensure that they are compressed as much as they can be, especially any videos or other large files. You can upload your files before attaching them to products, but that is optional. You can do this by following these steps:

1. From the Sky Pilot admin, select Files

2. Either Drag and Drop your files to the right-sidebar, or select 'Upload Files' to open a file browser to choose your files

Set up products

If you have not created your products in Shopify, you will want to do that first. We suggest keeping them on Draft mode until you’ve finished setting up Sky Pilot. 

If your product is only a digital product, you will want to uncheck the “This is a physical product” box. This removes the shipping requirement (see this Shopify Article regarding digital products).

To connect your digital files and videos to your products, follow these steps:

1. In the Sky Pilot admin, select Products

2. Select the products to which you want to add a file to. You can search by product title to find the product you want.

3. Upload files by dragging them into the Add Files section, or select an already uploaded file or video (if you’re providing streaming videos through Vimeo, ensure that you have uploaded them to Vimeo).

4. You can choose whether you want this product to be marked as automatically fulfilled or not; if the product is only a digital file, then we suggest turning this option on. However, if you are shipping a physical item with the same product, we suggest turning this option off.

5. If you have a lot of products you can organize them into folders within your products by selecting ⠇> Add Folder. Once you have done this, you can move files or videos from the product into the folder by dragging them over the folder. You can also manage files and videos in a folder by clicking on the folder's name and then adding files or videos to the folder. Lastly, you can drag and drop your files to show them in the order you prefer or need.

Update settings

There are some settings you may want to update before going live. This is optional, and not a requirement for going live. All of these options can be found in the Sky Pilot admin, under Settings.

- Delivery Settings

- Set the default download limit

- Allow downloads on iOS devices (depending on your file type, you may want to prevent this as it may not be compatible with iOS)

- Enable/Disable and customize the text for the Thank You Page button

- Email Settings

- Edit the styling and content of the download email that gets sent to customers

- Access Abused Alerts

- Enable this setting to turn on alerts when a file is downloaded from multiple different IP addresses

- Theme Settings

- Customize your theme with the theme customizer, or edit the code of the theme. If you need help with the mentioned, just reach out; we are available 24/7 and we'll gladly assist.

Make products live

Once you are ready to start selling your digital content, you will want to make sure your products are live on Shopify.