A Beginner’s Guide to Selling Digital Goods with WordPress

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However, we’ve but to talk about what to do if your recognition isn’t always on physical items. Still, alternatively, you’re just promoting digital or virtual items that may be downloaded — which includes ebooks, images, fonts, templates, and Sketch/Photoshop brushes, themes or plugins, and many others.

For such stores, WooCommerce can still get the activity completed quite simply. With that stated, many WooCommerce capabilities — consisting of stock control, shipping settings, and so forth. — might be of little use right here and can appear like overkill.

As a result, it’s in all likelihood higher to show toward a dedicated answer for selling virtual goods.

Easy Digital Downloads is an on-hand and definitely lose WordPress plugin that makes a specialty of building e-commerce shops for digital and downloadable goods. Much like WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads could be very famous and has thousands and thousands of customers.

In this newsletter, we’ll be taking closer to examine the diverse capabilities of the Easy Digital Downloads WordPress plugin.

What are Easy Digital Downloads?

As noted, Easy Digital Downloads is an unfastened WordPress plugin intended for e-commerce shops that deal in downloadable digital items. The middle plugin in itself is loose. However, you could opt for club passes that let you get the right of entry to all or some of the extensions of the center plugin.

Building an E-commerce Store with Easy Digital Downloads

Using Easy Digital Downloads is easy to install. You can install it from the legit repository, simply as you would set up another loose WordPress plugin. Once it’s established, you simply move ahead and spark off the plugin.

Unlike WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads doesn’t group your merchandise as “Products” however as a substitute for “Downloads.” After activating the plugin, you’ll word a brand new menu to your WordPress admin panel named Downloads. This is where all the activities related to the management and functioning of Easy Digital Downloads tend to manifest.

The Downloads tab inside the WordPress admin

Like WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads came with its personal set of integrations and fee gateways and delivered functions which include cut-price codes, coupons, client statistics, and extra.

Also, like WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads has its own atmosphere of extensions that may be used to extend and beautify the capability of the middle plugin. Commonly known as “accessories,” such extensions are to be had in both loose and top-class flavors. It is probably an excellent concept for the top-class extensions to observe the professional Easy Digital Downloads shop for the top-class extensions. The loose add-ons for Easy Digital Downloads are determined within the reliable WordPress plugin repository.

You’ll maximum possibly need to install some accessories. For example, while selling downloadable items, it’s often an excellent idea to seize leads and inspire your shoppers to enroll in your weblog or publication. Similarly, you could wish to integrate a price gateway that could otherwise no longer be natively supported by the Easy Digital Downloads middle plugin itself. For all such features and more, there are reliable add-ons that can make lifestyles less complicated for you:

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Easy Digital Downloads upload-on Store: top class and loose options
Easy Digital Downloads add-ons in WordPress repository: loose most effective
It’s worth noting that Easy Digital Downloads has a subscription model for pricing. If you’re planning to be an extended-time period consumer of the plugin, it is probably an awesome concept to opt for one of the subscriptions. For agencies and freelancers, $499 according to 12 months gives an all-get right of entry to pass to all of the add-ons and extensions of the plugin and add the potential to use those extensions on an infinite number of sites. On the other hand, for single-website licenses, pricing options variety from $99 in line with yr as much as $299 in line with 12 months.

Easy Digital Downloads has a subscription version for pricing

Using Easy Digital Downloads in WordPress

Easy Digital Downloads adds a custom submit type, Downloads. In this method, there’s a hard and fast of custom taxonomies as nicely: your downloads will have their very own categories in addition to tags. Furthermore, all your downloads could have a featured photograph that’s prominently displayed on the front quit.

Adding a new downloadable item for your save, as a result, is as easy as including a brand new weblog post on your website. Navigate to the Add New Download sub-alternative inside the Downloads menu. Once you’re achieved adding information, including title, content material, download class, and tags, you can scroll down for advanced options.

You can choose to apply simplified pricing on your download, or you may have variable pricing as nicely (e-book+code documents, as an instance), in which you get to specify one-of-a-kind prices in keeping with the choice. It’s noteworthy that Easy Digital Downloads help you to pick out among two product sorts. On the one hand, there’s the Default product kind that’s just a downloadable object, entire with a goal URL to the final record.

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Default product kind

On the opposite hand, there’s additionally a Bundle product type — that is, because the call indicates a package of more than one merchandise clubbed together as one.

Bundle product kind

There’s additionally an option to restrict the variety of downloads for a given product. Perhaps you most effectively need the consumer to get admission to the download link five instances. You can also disable or alter the default behavior of the Download/Buy Now or Purchase button.

Easy Digital Downloads also generate a default shortcode for each product that you add. You can then use this shortcode to feature a Purchase hyperlink for the given download on any given page or blog publishes on your website online.

Download settings

Once you’re performed modifying, you may truly hit Publish to take your download to stay for the arena to see and buy.

Easy Digital Downloads Settings

The Settings alternative may be located beneath the Downloads tab itself. It’s divided into various sub-sections that you could scroll thru and configure as required.

For instance, inside the General web page, you could specify your base us and custom pages for Checkout, Account Management, and other functions, and even set the default forex for use for your keep.