Is WooCommerce with S3 plugin best for selling large downloads?

Business
1

I’m in the planning stages of a new site that will sell videos for download (not streaming or otherwise played online) Based on current testing, I’m estimating an hour of this high quality video will be around 1GB, maybe less. There will of course be many videos, which means many GB of storage and bandwidth. Looking at the Amazon S3 cost calculator, the cost compared to the profit is dust so I’m not worried about that. My main concern is what platform to use. From what I can see in terms of features, it seems WooCommerce with the Amazon S3 plugin would be the fastest and easiest to implement for a developer. One thing I would like to have that I don’t know if Woo supports is an account area for customers to login and download items they’ve previously purchased. For example, I might have a sale, and someone buys several products, I don’t want them to be forced to download everything at once. I’m also considering WooCommerce since it’s seamless with Wordpress and the site will be a lot more than just the shopping cart. Are there any other good options?

2

I don’t have experience with this, so can’t advise you, but we do have a list of eCommerce solution in this sticky, including a couple of other options for Wordpress. You might want to take a look.

3

Looking at the Amazon’s S3 pricing, I would suggest you to opt for a different CDN having worldwide network to serve your videos. The best CDN I have found is the MaxCDN: http://www.maxcdn.com/pricing/ . You may want to check it out. I think their plan will be best suit for you.

4

I’m open to others besides Amazon S3, but what I like about S3 is that there is a plugin for WooCommerce already available. S3 pricing is pretty darn good. I don’t believe I even need a CDN because download speeds are more than sufficient directly from the S3 bucket (I conducted a test a while ago where I posted a link to a large file on a forum and asked people around the world to download it and report the speed. So, even if the bucket was in the USA and the downloader was in Europe, the speed was still fine even without a CDN like Cloudfront)