How To Upload A Digital Product To Wordpress
Selling digital goods and services is i of the smartest ways to brand money online. Unlike selling physical products, there are no inventory costs or aircraft costs involved. Plus, the options for digital products are virtually countless: videos, eBooks, music, sound 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 take a percentage of your sales or have monthly fees. That's alright for someone simply starting out, but the ones who are serious almost selling online will want to create their ain virtual store and cut out the middleman. Thankfully, with WordPress, creating an online store is incredibly simple and easy to do. So today nosotros are going to dive into Piece of cake Digital Downloads. We'll bear witness y'all some advantages to using it over WooCommerce, making it a great Shopify culling, with instructions on how to install it on your WordPress site.
Recommended reading: WooCommerce vs Easy Digital Downloads: Which Ane Should You Apply?
Why Choose Easy Digital Downloads?
At that place are numerous e-commerce plugins for WordPress, and ii of the most popular ones y'all are probably familiar with are WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads. WooCommerce has over 1 1000000 active installs and is used past loyal digital store owners around the earth. In fact, as of January 2018, WooCommerce powers over 35% of all online stores! And even though nosotros love WooCommerce, that doesn't mean it is always the correct choice for your business or product.
Easy Digital Downloads (EDD), created by Pippin Williamson, is a gratis WordPress e-commerce plugin that focuses purely on digital products. Its chief goal is to make selling digital products simple and consummate. WooCommerce was actually originally created to handle physical products, although you lot can now utilise it for digital products likewise. I great matter about Easy Digital Downloads is that it is fast right out of the box. WooCommerce can be fast, but it takes some tweaking and if you lot are dealing with a lot of traffic y'all will well-nigh probable end upward needing optimized WooCommerce hosting.
Here is an case of a live EDD shop running on Kinsta hosting. It loads in nether 600 ms! The keen thing near digital downloads and services is that a lot of times they won't have huge catalogs of products bogging downward their site. Typically they sell only a couple products or a single product with different license costs.
Another huge benefit of Easy Digital Downloads from a user perspective is that it is very easy to use. Y'all can take it up and running in a affair of minutes. Just add your payment details, create your digital products, and yous're pretty much all prepare. And simply like WooCommerce, information technology has thousands of extensions and integrations which allow you to process credit card payments, handle reoccurring transactions, take reward of affiliates, etc. It's very versatile and provides yous with an easy way to analyze and track your sales. It also has a neat team backside it which is committed to WordPress coding standards, ensuring that making changes to the codebase is uncomplicated and like shooting fish in a barrel.
EDD currently has over sixty,000 active installs and a v out of five-star rating on the WordPress repository. This is very loftier for a WordPress plugin! Developers love it for its piece of cake to use and well-documented hooks.
We're using EDD as a way to offer Support. Our service has a downloadable plugin each support customer must activate after they sign up with us. EDD allows us to rename the slug (products) and proper name it whatever we want. I dear that hook! EDD allows the states to overwrite templates in gild to meet our demands. I love that EDD is easy to update. Nothing really to worry nigh. We still update in staging to be safe.
– Add-ONS –
EDD allows usa to employ the Software Licensing Addition 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 ii people for. — Aaron, web developer at WebDevStudios
Support
EDD has a variety of back up resources available.
- You can hands ask for help on the WordPress back up forums. Pippin himself is actually very active on there. As of writing this, 30 out of 39 tickets had been marked solved over the last 2 months.
- They have helpful how-to videos, tutorials, and a very extensive and well-documented knowledgebase.
- Basic support is complimentary, but y'all tin also opt for priority back up, which is either $39 per month, or $129 per year.
Piece of cake Digital Downloads Features
EDD's main selling betoken is the ease of selling digital downloads. The platform allows customers to purchase multiple products and at the same time have multiple files attached to them. Back-finish users tin easily parcel products together, and the plugin uses AJAX for a smoothen shopping cart experience in the front. Another outstanding characteristic is the ability to create disbelieve and promotional codes. Discounts can be offered as a percent of the base toll and can have an auto-expiration date and a maximum use limit set.
EDD offers three payment gateways by 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 lot deliver an outstanding customer experience. It has a built-in customer access area so customers can hands admission the files they paid for and keep rails of their purchases. If they e'er accidentally lose/delete a file they downloaded, customers can log in to their account and re-download it.
EDD offers a complete history of all sales, and detailed sales and earnings graphs. One specially cool metric is the projected sales report which gives you an idea of the sales you tin can wait in the future based on your past performance. The power to rails all-time selling products and besides find out what products are not selling helps business owners to observe and exploit the products that are the most profitable. It allows you to focus on the areas of your business concern that have potential and revamp the rest.
Information technology volition besides work on any almost whatsoever WordPress theme. From our experience, this simply isn't the instance with WooCommerce. Typically with WooCommerce theme developers need to do actress piece of work to build in support. EDD is built a picayune differently and this makes it a perfect add-on to whatever theme yous already take installed.
Easy Digital Downloads Extensions
In that location 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 by third parties.
Here are a few pop ones:
- Stripe Payment Gateway: We are big fans of Stripe at Kinsta. Easily have credit card payments and process them with the Stripe payment gateway extension without customers leaving your site.
- EDD Social Discounts: This extension lets users give their customers a discount if they share links to the production pages on social media. It likewise has the option of turning off the disbelieve office and so it becomes a simple sharing tool.
- Mailchimp: This is an outstanding extension for email marketing purposes as information technology automatically subscribes customers to a Mailchimp mailing list. Subscriptions tin can be filtered according to the product purchased. If you'd similar, the extension allows for customers to opt-in to the mailing list.
- Cantankerous-Sell and Upsell: This marketing extension suggests additional products to customers during the checkout process. Information technology can also give customers an upsell option, which suggests a similar but slightly college valued production than they currently have in their cart. For example, products can be bundled into a packet that includes that production, plus additional products. Information technology'southward a fantastic manner to increase the order value per client.
- EDD Variable Pricing Descriptions: This free extension allows users to add together an "Pick Description" input field for each variable priced download. It also lets users add a longer clarification and automatically places the description on the forepart end on the product page.
- WP Card Cart: This complimentary and simple plugin automatically installs a shopping cart button in a website'southward navigation bar. It has several options, including the ability to brandish a cart icon or items/prices. There is too a premium version that has a few boosted features.
- PixelYourSite: Manage and install the new Facebook pixel with just a few clicks. Check out our in-depth tutorial on how to set up conversion tracking in Easy Digital Downloads.
- EDD Downloads every bit Services: This free plugin allows y'all to easily 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 yous sell digital products, such every bit WordPress plugins, that require license keys. This extension takes care of all of that for you lot.
- 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 neat way to ameliorate on the default EDD layout and create a one-page guild form listing some or all of your downloads.
Countersign Protected Categories: If you want to hibernate parts or all your Piece of cake Digital Downloads store, then this plugin makes it easy. Countersign protect entire download categories, or create private categories that only logged in users can see.
Easy Digital Downloads Tutorial Index
- Installation
- Configuring EDD
- Add Digital Downloadable Files
- Farther Extending EDD With AffiliateWP
- Treatment Taxes and VAT
Easy Digital Downloads Installation
Pace 1
The offset thing y'all will need to do is to install the Piece of cake Digital Downloads plugin. You 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 it from your dashboard navigate to WordPress Admin > Plugins > Add New, search for "piece of cake digital downloads", and click on "Install Now." Ensure that the author shows up as Easy Digital Downloads. 2.vii+ is currently the latest version of EDD.
Pace two
Then click on "Activate."
And that's it! Your all washed. It really is that easy. There are no long walk through wizards. They keep information technology very simple. Just there are some boosted configuration options you volition probably want to setup below.
Configuring EDD
Step one
The first thing you volition want to exercise is configure options for checkout, payment, redirects, etc. To do this, click into settings under "Downloads" which is now on the left-hand side of your WordPress dashboard.
EDD automatically creates pages in your WordPress site for checkout, buy confirmation, etc. So for typical stores, you don't need to change any of these. The bare minimum y'all demand to exercise on this page is to set your country and state / province. Then click on "Salve Changes."
Step 2
Next, click on the "Payment Gateways" tab. Here yous can cull which payment gateways you want to utilize for processing transactions on your site. By default, PayPal standard, Amazon, and test payments are your choices. You can put your shop into test mode which allows you to test purchases on your site without spending whatever actual existent money. You lot volition need to grab a complimentary sandbox account (PayPal, Amazon Pay) to mimic real alive payments.
Remember, y'all tin can also buy premium extensions to use other payment gateways such as Stripe, Braintree, Dwolla, GoCardless, etc. Past default, PayPal standard will procedure transactions via their site. This means your client will check out on your site, get posted to PayPal, then get redirected back. If y'all want them to stay on your site, yous can upgrade to PayPal Pro payments or apply 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.
Pace three
Side by side, click into the subheader "PayPal Standard." If you are using PayPal you will desire to at least put in your PayPal email. It volition use PayPal's default folio style unless y'all specify one. Bank check out their documentation on how to create custom folio styles for checkout. Even with the free version of PayPal, y'all tin can customize most of the customer's experience with your own branding.
Subscribe At present
Step four
Then click on the "Emails" tab. By default, everything is ready to. Only yous volition desire to at least fix a logo for your shop or product. Emails are automatically generated to administrators and customers.
Here is an example of the default EDD e-mail template that is sent to a customer, along with the logo. The e-mail includes a link to your digital download file. If you are using an extension like EDD Software Licensing it will as well automatically insert their unique license key.
You tin too setup styles, taxes, and other miscellaneous settings. For many stores, none of these actually need to be changed. That is i not bad affair about EDD, is that information technology works correct out of the box. But here are some of the additional options you take:
- Immediately redirect to checkout subsequently adding an item to the cart.
- Let item quantities to exist changed.
- Forcing a redirect to a secure checkout page. You must have an SSL certificate installed to use this choice.
- Require that users exist logged in to purchase files.
- Permit customers to utilize multiple discounts on the same purchase.
- File download limits, download link expirations, disable the ability to redownload files.
- Enabling an option for terms of agreement upon checkout.
Adding Digital Downloadable Files
The next step is to add your digital downloadable files to your WordPress EDD shop. Call back, depending on what extension yous apply, this could also be services offered instead of physical files.
Footstep 1
Click "Add together New" nether Downloads and name your digital file. You tin can add a description (which shows upwards on the download file's page to the client), category, download tag, etc.
So give your download a price. Variable pricing is also bachelor with a click of a button. You can so upload your digital file, whether it is a .zip, .pdf, .mp3, etc.
Step 2 (NGINX only)
The next step is to ensure that your folder where your digital download files are kept is secured. Otherwise, someone could only browse to the location and download the file for complimentary. Y'all will most likely meet a alert about this on your WordPress site until you prepare it: "Download Files Not Protected on NGINX." This step is but required on NGINX, as for those running on Apache, a rule is automatically applied to your .htaccess file.
To secure your directory, add together the following to your NGINX config. Note: This example is for .zip files. Alter accordingly for other file types. If you are a Kinsta user, you can open a quick support ticket with our team and we will add this for you.
rewrite ^/wp-content/uploads/edd/(.*)\.zippo$ / permanent; Afterwards adding the above code, users that try to browse direct to your download file will simply exist redirected to your homepage.
Step 3
The last step is to add a fashion for users to purchase the digital download files on your WordPress site. By default, each download will have its own WordPress folio with a buy button. Simply a lot of y'all are probably selling licenses in which you might but want 1 pricing page. We recommend using a plugin like Easy Pricing Tables.
Once installed you tin create a "Pricing" page on your WordPress site and use the shortcode from the plugin to display your pricing tables. You can so use custom Add to Cart links, forth with the pricing tables to create a perfect shopping feel. Here is an instance of one which uses the download ID along with variable pricing.
https://wp.dev/checkout?edd_action=add_to_cart&download_id=4444&edd_options[price_id]=1
And here is an instance of an EDD store pricing pages, along with custom add to cart links and variable prices.
And that'southward it! Your EDD store will automatically walk people through the checkout process using the pages it created during installation. It will generate an e-mail to both yous and the customer with their download file (and license key if applicable), and create a WordPress account for them to be able to log back in and admission their past purchases.
Additional Options
And don't forget to check out the reporting data and payment history data. I prissy thing too is that PayPal also talks back to EDD. So if you sell a product and they pay via PayPal, it volition be marked as paid in EDD. Or if you later refund a product, it will automatically update EDD to testify as refunded, likewise as update your total earnings for that month.
Want to create discount codes for Black Friday? No problem. Simply click on "Discount Codes" nether Downloads and create as many coupons and discounts codes equally you want. You can select a percentage off of your production or a flat rate corporeality. You lot can fix an expiry date and even limit the use once per customer. Having a auction every now so to pump upward your product is super like shooting fish in a barrel with EDD.
Further Extending EDD With AffiliateWP
You can further extend EDD with AffiliateWP, which is a premium production also created by the aforementioned team. This integrates and then well together that you won't even discover they are divide products.
It lets you launch an affiliate program in just a affair of minutes. Start letting your customers sell your product for yous. It provides all the information you need to pay your affiliates monthly and provide them their own discount codes in which they tin can give to their readers to help meliorate sell your product.
Treatment Taxes and VAT
Taxes tin exist downright confusing when it comes to Easy Digital Downloads. Thankfully the post-obit solutions can help brand it a piddling easier. This includes things such equally car-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, information technology's essential to choose the right online shopping platform. While using an existing third-party shopping platform like Etsy may seem like the easiest option, creating your own site is always the preferred method for those wanting to accept information technology to the next level. That way you own and control the entire business, and you lot'll be able to profit more in the long run. At the same time, however, yous don't want to have to spend hours on client service or payment issues. That's why it'southward important to cull an eastward-commerce plugin that is both uncomplicated to navigate and reliable.
Piece of cake Digital Downloads stands out as a peachy WordPress e-commerce plugin for a few reasons. Outset, information technology'southward free, and you can then extend information technology with premium extensions (bank check out likewise the best WooCommerce extensions). 2d, it's reliable and has bully operation. Finally, it's easy to use and has a great support organization and developer team backing it. All things considered, EDD is perfect for both novice and experienced WordPress users. If you're in the market place for a corking WordPress east-commerce plugin, and want to try selling digital products from your website, the Easy Digital Downloads WordPress plugin is an affordable and effective option.
Nosotros would love to hear your thoughts. Exercise you prefer WooCommerce or EDD?
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Source: https://kinsta.com/blog/easy-digital-downloads/
Posted by: hamiltonsagoonger.blogspot.com
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