Create Easy Digital Downloads Product Template Page
Selling digital goods and services is ane of the smartest ways to make money online. Different selling physical products, there are no inventory costs or shipping costs involved. Plus, the options for digital products are virtually endless: videos, eBooks, music, audio files, PDFs, website themes & templates, WordPress plugins, development time, photography and much more.
Companies like Selz, Etsy, WooCommerce and Shopify allow new businesses to create a virtual online shop in minutes. The catch is many of these shopping platforms accept a percentage of your sales or have monthly fees. That's alright for someone just starting out, merely the ones who are serious about selling online volition want to create their ain virtual shop and cutting out the middleman. Thankfully, with WordPress, creating an online store is incredibly simple and easy to do. So today we are going to dive into Easy Digital Downloads. We'll show you some advantages to using it over WooCommerce, making information technology a great Shopify alternative, with instructions on how to install it on your WordPress site.
Recommended reading: WooCommerce vs Easy Digital Downloads: Which One Should You Use?
Why Choose Piece of cake Digital Downloads?
At that place are numerous e-commerce plugins for WordPress, and 2 of the most popular ones you lot are probably familiar with are WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads. WooCommerce has over one million active installs and is used by loyal digital shop owners around the globe. In fact, as of Jan 2018, WooCommerce powers over 35% of all online stores! And even though we love WooCommerce, that doesn't mean it is e'er the right selection for your business or product.
Piece of cake Digital Downloads (EDD), created by Pippin Williamson, is a free WordPress e-commerce plugin that focuses purely on digital products. Its primary goal is to make selling digital products simple and complete. WooCommerce was really originally created to handle concrete products, although y'all can now employ it for digital products as well. One great affair about Easy Digital Downloads is that it is fast right out of the box. WooCommerce can exist fast, simply information technology takes some tweaking and if you are dealing with a lot of traffic you will virtually likely end upwards needing optimized WooCommerce hosting.
Hither is an example of a alive EDD shop running on Kinsta hosting. Information technology loads in under 600 ms! The nifty thing about digital downloads and services is that a lot of times they won't accept huge catalogs of products bogging down their site. Typically they sell just a couple products or a unmarried product with different license costs.
Another huge benefit of Easy Digital Downloads from a user perspective is that it is very easy to utilize. Y'all tin can take it upward and running in a matter of minutes. Just add your payment details, create your digital products, and you're pretty much all fix. And only like WooCommerce, information technology has thousands of extensions and integrations which permit you to procedure credit card payments, handle reoccurring transactions, accept advantage of affiliates, etc. It's very versatile and provides y'all with an easy mode to analyze and track your sales. Information technology also has a keen team backside information technology which is committed to WordPress coding standards, ensuring that making changes to the codebase is simple and easy.
EDD currently has over 60,000 agile installs and a 5 out of 5-star rating on the WordPress repository. This is very high for a WordPress plugin! Developers love it for its easy to apply and well-documented hooks.
We're using EDD as a mode to offer Support. Our service has a downloadable plugin each support client must actuate afterward they sign up with u.s.. EDD allows us to rename the slug (products) and name it whatever we want. I love that hook! EDD allows u.s.a. to overwrite templates in lodge to meet our demands. I love that EDD is easy to update. Nothing really to worry about. We still update in staging to be safe.
– Add together-ONS –
EDD allows united states of america to apply the Software Licensing Add-on to update the plugin across all of our clients. Information technology integrates with Stripe, creates an account for our clients and manages all the day to day tasks we would need to hire two people for. — Aaron, web programmer at WebDevStudios
Back up
EDD has a diversity of support resources available.
- You can easily ask for help on the WordPress support forums. Pippin himself is really very agile on there. Equally of writing this, xxx out of 39 tickets had been marked solved over the last two months.
- They accept helpful how-to videos, tutorials, and a very extensive and well-documented knowledgebase.
- Bones back up is free, merely yous tin can as well opt for priority support, which is either $39 per month, or $129 per year.
Easy Digital Downloads Features
EDD's master selling point is the ease of selling digital downloads. The platform allows customers to buy multiple products and at the aforementioned time have multiple files attached to them. Back-finish users can easily packet products together, and the plugin uses AJAX for a smooth shopping cart experience in the forepart. Another outstanding characteristic is the power to create discount and promotional codes. Discounts can be offered as a percentage of the base price and can have an auto-expiration date and a maximum use limit set.
EDD offers three payment gateways past default (Paypal, Amazon, and manual) but many others are available as extensions. One of the best features EDD has to offer is their commitment to helping you evangelize an outstanding customer experience. It has a congenital-in customer access expanse then customers tin hands access the files they paid for and continue track of their purchases. If they ever accidentally lose/delete a file they downloaded, customers tin log in to their account and re-download it.
EDD offers a complete history of all sales, and detailed sales and earnings graphs. One particularly cool metric is the projected sales report which gives y'all an idea of the sales you can expect in the future based on your past operation. The ability to track best selling products and also find out what products are non selling helps business concern owners to find and exploit the products that are the virtually profitable. It allows you to focus on the areas of your business that have potential and revamp the rest.
Information technology volition also work on whatsoever well-nigh any WordPress theme. From our experience, this just isn't the case with WooCommerce. Typically with WooCommerce theme developers need to practise extra work to build in support. EDD is built a niggling differently and this makes it a perfect addition to whatsoever theme you already take installed.
Easy Digital Downloads Extensions
There are numerous EDD plugins available to purchase to further extend the platform. Some of them are created past the EDD developers, while others are sold past third parties.
Here are a few popular ones:
- Stripe Payment Gateway: We are big fans of Stripe at Kinsta. Easily accept credit carte payments and process them with the Stripe payment gateway extension without customers leaving your site.
- EDD Social Discounts: This extension lets users requite their customers a disbelieve if they share links to the product pages on social media. It besides has the selection of turning off the discount function and and so it becomes a simple sharing tool.
- Mailchimp: This is an outstanding extension for email marketing purposes every bit it automatically subscribes customers to a Mailchimp mailing list. Subscriptions can be filtered according to the product purchased. If yous'd like, the extension allows for customers to opt-in to the mailing listing.
- Cantankerous-Sell and Upsell: This marketing extension suggests additional products to customers during the checkout process. It tin also give customers an upsell selection, which suggests a similar but slightly higher valued product than they currently take in their cart. For example, products can exist bundled into a package that includes that product, plus boosted products. It'south a fantastic mode to increase the order value per customer.
- EDD Variable Pricing Descriptions: This free extension allows users to add together an "Option Clarification" input field for each variable priced download. It besides lets users add a longer description and automatically places the description on the front end on the product page.
- WP Menu Cart: This gratis and uncomplicated plugin automatically installs a shopping cart button in a website'due south navigation bar. It has several options, including the ability to brandish a cart icon or items/prices. There is also a premium version that has a few additional features.
- PixelYourSite: Manage and install the new Facebook pixel with just a few clicks. Check out our in-depth tutorial on how to fix conversion tracking in Piece of cake Digital Downloads.
- EDD Downloads as Services: This gratis plugin allows you to hands sell services rather than downloads. This is perfect for WordPress developers and freelancers. It removes the "no downloadable files" on the purchase confirmation page.
- EDD Software Licensing: If you sell digital products, such as WordPress plugins, that require license keys. This extension takes care of all of that for yous.
- EDD Recurring Payments: This extension makes it easy to create and sell products with automatically recurring subscriptions.
- Posts Table Pro: Instantly list your Easy Digital Downloads products in a table view with extra data. This is a great mode to improve on the default EDD layout and create a i-page social club course listing some or all of your downloads.
Countersign Protected Categories: If yous want to hibernate parts or all your Easy Digital Downloads store, then this plugin makes it piece of cake. Password protect entire download categories, or create individual categories that merely logged in users can see.
Easy Digital Downloads Tutorial Index
- Installation
- Configuring EDD
- Add Digital Downloadable Files
- Further Extending EDD With AffiliateWP
- Handling Taxes and VAT
Easy Digital Downloads Installation
Step 1
The first thing you lot will demand to do is to install the Piece of cake Digital Downloads plugin. Yous can download it for free from the WordPress repository or follow the steps below on how to install it from within your dashboard.
To install information technology from your dashboard navigate to WordPress Admin > Plugins > Add together New, search for "easy digital downloads", and click on "Install Now." Ensure that the author shows up every bit Easy Digital Downloads. 2.7+ is currently the latest version of EDD.
Step 2
Then click on "Activate."
And that'due south it! Your all done. It really is that piece of cake. At that place are no long walk through wizards. They keep information technology very uncomplicated. But in that location are some boosted configuration options you will probably want to setup below.
Configuring EDD
Step 1
The first thing you will want to do is configure options for checkout, payment, redirects, etc. To practise this, click into settings nether "Downloads" which is at present on the left-hand side of your WordPress dashboard.
EDD automatically creates pages in your WordPress site for checkout, purchase confirmation, etc. So for typical stores, you lot don't need to change any of these. The bare minimum you need to exercise on this folio is to set your state and state / province. So click on "Save Changes."
Pace 2
Next, click on the "Payment Gateways" tab. Hither you lot can cull which payment gateways you lot desire to use for processing transactions on your site. Past default, PayPal standard, Amazon, and exam payments are your choices. You can put your store into test mode which allows you lot to test purchases on your site without spending any actual real money. You volition need to take hold of a gratuitous sandbox account (PayPal, Amazon Pay) to mimic existent alive payments.
Recollect, you can likewise buy premium extensions to utilize other payment gateways such as Stripe, Braintree, Dwolla, GoCardless, etc. By default, PayPal standard will process transactions via their site. This means your customer will cheque out on your site, get posted to PayPal, and so get redirected back. If you lot want them to stay on your site, you can upgrade to PayPal Pro payments or use another provider like Stripe. Check out our in-depth tutorial on how to setup Stripe with Easy Digital Downloads or our comparison: Stipe vs. PayPal.
Step iii
Next, click into the subheader "PayPal Standard." If you lot are using PayPal you will want to at least put in your PayPal email. Information technology will use PayPal's default page style unless you specify one. Cheque out their documentation on how to create custom page styles for checkout. Even with the gratuitous version of PayPal, y'all tin customize most of the customer's experience with your own branding.
Step iv
Then click on the "Emails" tab. By default, everything is set up to. Merely you volition want to at to the lowest degree prepare a logo for your shop or production. Emails are automatically generated to administrators and customers.
Hither is an example of the default EDD e-mail template that is sent to a customer, along with the logo. The email includes a link to your digital download file. If yous are using an extension similar EDD Software Licensing it will also automatically insert their unique license key.
You can also setup styles, taxes, and other miscellaneous settings. For many stores, none of these actually need to be inverse. That is one great thing about EDD, is that it works right out of the box. But hither are some of the additional options you accept:
- Immediately redirect to checkout after calculation an item to the cart.
- Allow detail quantities to be changed.
- Forcing a redirect to a secure checkout folio. You must have an SSL document installed to use this selection.
- Crave that users be logged in to buy files.
- Let customers to employ multiple discounts on the aforementioned purchase.
- File download limits, download link expirations, disable the ability to redownload files.
- Enabling an choice for terms of agreement upon checkout.
Adding Digital Downloadable Files
The next step is to add your digital downloadable files to your WordPress EDD store. Remember, depending on what extension you use, this could also be services offered instead of concrete files.
Step 1
Click "Add New" under Downloads and name your digital file. You can add a description (which shows upwards on the download file'southward page to the customer), category, download tag, etc.
Then give your download a price. Variable pricing is as well available with a click of a button. You lot tin then upload your digital file, whether it is a .zilch, .pdf, .mp3, etc.
Step 2 (NGINX simply)
The next step is to ensure that your folder where your digital download files are kept is secured. Otherwise, someone could just browse to the location and download the file for free. You will most likely see a warning about this on your WordPress site until yous fix it: "Download Files Not Protected on NGINX." This step is merely required on NGINX, every bit for those running on Apache, a dominion is automatically practical to your .htaccess file.
To secure your directory, add the following to your NGINX config. Notation: This example is for .zip files. Change accordingly for other file types. If y'all are a Kinsta user, you can open up a quick support ticket with our team and we will add this for you.
rewrite ^/wp-content/uploads/edd/(.*)\.zip$ / permanent; Afterwards adding the higher up lawmaking, users that try to browse straight to your download file will only be redirected to your homepage.
Pace 3
The final step is to add a way for users to buy the digital download files on your WordPress site. By default, each download volition accept its own WordPress page with a buy button. But a lot of you are probably selling licenses in which you might merely want 1 pricing page. We recommend using a plugin like Like shooting fish in a barrel Pricing Tables.
Once installed you can create a "Pricing" page on your WordPress site and utilize the shortcode from the plugin to display your pricing tables. You can then use custom Add to Cart links, along with the pricing tables to create a perfect shopping experience. Here is an case of ane which uses the download ID forth with variable pricing.
https://wp.dev/checkout?edd_action=add_to_cart&download_id=4444&edd_options[price_id]=one
And here is an example of an EDD store pricing pages, forth with custom add together to cart links and variable prices.
And that'due south information technology! Your EDD shop will automatically walk people through the checkout process using the pages it created during installation. It will generate an electronic mail to both you and the customer with their download file (and license cardinal if applicable), and create a WordPress account for them to be able to log back in and admission their by purchases.
Additional Options
And don't forget to check out the reporting data and payment history data. Ane squeamish thing also is that PayPal as well talks back to EDD. And then if you sell a product and they pay via PayPal, it will be marked every bit paid in EDD. Or if you afterwards refund a product, it will automatically update EDD to evidence as refunded, besides every bit update your total earnings for that month.
Want to create discount codes for Black Friday? No problem. Simply click on "Discount Codes" under Downloads and create as many coupons and discounts codes as y'all desire. You lot can select a percentage off of your product or a flat charge per unit corporeality. You can gear up an expiry appointment and fifty-fifty limit the apply once per customer. Having a auction every at present and and so to pump up your production is super easy with EDD.
Further Extending EDD With AffiliateWP
You tin can further extend EDD with AffiliateWP, which is a premium production also created by the same team. This integrates so well together that you won't fifty-fifty notice they are separate products.
It lets yous launch an affiliate program in just a affair of minutes. Start letting your customers sell your product for you. It provides all the data you lot demand to pay your affiliates monthly and provide them their ain disbelieve codes in which they can give to their readers to assistance meliorate sell your product.
Handling Taxes and VAT
Taxes can be downright confusing when it comes to Easy Digital Downloads. Thankfully the post-obit solutions can assist make information technology a petty easier. This includes things such as auto-invoicing, charging VAT to countries which require it, etc.
- Quaderno
- Freemius
- ProteusPay
- WP Route
- Paddle with OmnipayWP
Choosing the Right Plugin for Your Ecommerce Needs
When creating a new digital business, it'southward essential to choose the right online shopping platform. While using an existing third-party shopping platform like Etsy may seem like the easiest pick, creating your own site is always the preferred method for those wanting to take it to the next level. That way you own and command the entire business organization, and you'll be able to turn a profit more in the long run. At the aforementioned time, however, you lot don't want to have to spend hours on client service or payment issues. That's why it'south important to choose an e-commerce plugin that is both simple to navigate and reliable.
Easy Digital Downloads stands out as a great WordPress eastward-commerce plugin for a few reasons. First, it's gratis, and you lot tin can then extend it with premium extensions (check out also the best WooCommerce extensions). Second, it's reliable and has great performance. Finally, it's piece of cake to use and has a dandy support system and developer team backing it. All things considered, EDD is perfect for both novice and experienced WordPress users. If you're in the market for a great WordPress e-commerce plugin, and desire to attempt selling digital products from your website, the Like shooting fish in a barrel Digital Downloads WordPress plugin is an affordable and constructive option.
Nosotros would love to hear your thoughts. Exercise yous prefer WooCommerce or EDD?
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Source: https://kinsta.com/blog/easy-digital-downloads/