Need a quick and easy way to sell digital products on your site? You don’t need a fully-featured eCommerce plugin — you need a lightweight, simple solution like Easy Digital Downloads. Find out how you can get started selling your digital products in our Easy Digital Downloads review.
Why Sell Digital Products on Your Site?
Selling digital products on your site is a great way to earn money from your blog. You don’t need to have a lot of money to invest in your business; you can create digital products for free.
Though it requires an upfront investment of time, once your products are created and published, it’s a more passive way to earn money from your blog.
When selling on your own site instead of another platform (like self-publishing on Amazon, for example), you don’t have to worry about giving up a cut of the profits. Instead, you set your own prices and get to keep 100%, minus any payment processing fees.
Ready to get started selling digital products? Easy Digital Downloads makes it easy to sell right from your site.
Is Easy Digital Downloads the Right Plugin for You?
When selling anything on a WordPress site, you could choose to use a popular eCommerce plugin like WooCommerce. WooCommerce works for selling both physical and digital products. You can read about how it works in our WooCommerce review.
But WooCommerce includes a lot of features that you won’t need if you’re only selling digital products. It can be time-consuming to navigate through all the options just to find what you need.
Easy Digital Downloads is designed to make selling simple, without offering unnecessary features.
How to Start Selling Your Digital Products
After installing and activating the plugin, you’ll be redirected to a welcome screen.
First, you’ll want to set up your payment processor. Click on Downloads » Settings and then click on the Payment Gateways tab to choose and set up your payment gateway.
You can navigate to Downloads » Add New to add your first product. Enter the product title and description, and scroll down for more options.
You can set the pricing and upload the file below. If you choose to enable variable pricing, you can add on options with separate fees.
Under Product Type Options in the Download Files tab, you can choose to create a bundle of your existing downloads, instead of a single product.
You can also limit the amount of times someone can download the file, and set categories and tags just like with a blog post.
At the top, you’ll see a Download Stats box that will show you the number of sales and your total earnings.
To sell your product, you can insert a purchase button onto any page or post. Just click the Insert download button in the editor.
Select your product and the display options. You can choose to display a link or button, and decide what color you want the button to be.
It will generate and insert a shortcode for you to display the download link.
When they check out, they’ll be sent to an order form to complete the download.
Sell More With Advanced Features
Easy Digital Downloads also allows you to:
- Set your tax rate
- Use a shopping cart for multiple downloads
- Track all your payment transactions
- Keep a database of customers
- Set up discount codes
- Generate earnings reports
- Customize receipts
- Import and export payment history, products, and settings
Build Your Business With Add-ons
Looking for even more functionality? Add-ons are available for:
- Building your email list with MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, and AWeber, Wysija, ActiveCampaign, iContact, and Constant Contact integrations
- Processing payments with Stripe
- Setting up recurring payments
- Automating your business with Zapier
- Allowing user product reviews
- Adding customer invoices
- …and more
There are over 100 extensions to choose from.
Add-ons are available from the official Easy Digital Downloads site.
Easy Digital Downloads Pricing
Easy Digital Downloads is free for anyone to use. You can subscribe to premium passes to get access to addons. Packages start at $99.50 per year.
There’s a 14-day 100% no-risk money back guarantee on all plans.
See our comparison: Easy Digital Downloads: Free vs Paid Version.
Documentation and Support
Easy Digital Downloads offers detailed documentation on their website, including tutorials for all their features and help with troubleshooting common issues. Developer documentation is also available.
You can file a support ticket on the official site if you get stuck.
Our Verdict
Easy Digital Downloads lives up to its name: it really makes it quick and easy to start selling digital products on your site. We were impressed with the quick setup and available options, and also with the great-looking design of the buttons and forms.
We give Easy Digital Downloads 5 out of 5 stars. Here is the breakdown of our review scores:
I am building my website as we speak.
Which page of my website will this download into? I will have a bookstore page for example. Can EDD be installed into that page?
FYI the boxes for inserting info are very light and difficult to see what I am typing.