Product with both physical and digital variants?

Hello, we are a publisher/bookseller who is rebuilding our site on Squarespace, and would like to use the eCommerce functionality to sell our books. However, our products have both physical and digital variants within the same SKU: a customer can either order a physical copy of the book and have it shipped to them, or a digital download of the eBook.  We cannot see an intuitive way to do this within the Squarespace e-commerce platform. Obviously we could replicate each product (making a physical and digital version for each title), but this would be a user experience nightmare on both ends. We had also considered making the eBook download link part of an individualized confirmation email per product, but naturally Squarespace doesn’t allow for that either.

I’m curious if anyone has any experience with this problem, or any creative ways they've seen other similar stores approach this within the Squarespace limitations. Thanks for any help you can give.

There isn't a built-in solution for this because, as you have discovered, you cannot have a digital variant of a physical product.

However, if you add the items as separate products, a developer should be able to customise it so that instead of an Add-to-Cart button there's a "Buy Paperback" button and a "Buy eBook" button on the product detail page. If the digital version is a PDF, the file will be available for download in the Order Confirmation page. The customer will also receive the standard order confirmation email, followed by an email containing a link to the file.

Interesting. No, our files are DRM free, so attachment to an email or link to an external file from the email would work fine. So, theoretically (with some know-how) it would be possible to customize each order confirmation email per product?

A separate email is automatically sent to the customer, with a link to the file. For more information, see Digital Products.