Consumers are always riddled with a truckload of questions. It’s their habit. It’s their right. The questions are usually centered around meeting certain requirements that they might have. These questions usually translate the distance between the requirements and a solution.
In today’s post, however, we’re going to traverse this distance in the opposite direction. We’ll start from the solution. Along the way if you think the solution makes for a good business proposition then I have earned myself a happy reader and you have earned yourself a potential money-making idea!
The focus of attention for this discussion is Easy Digital Downloads – An eCommerce plugin specifically developed & designed for digital (Read: downloadable) products. Let’s take a look at the different environments the plugin can be employed to make the most of it.
The first and most obvious type of website that can be developed around this plugin is a marketplace for software products. Themeforest is a classic example of this type of a website.
So if setting up an eStore for software products such as plugins, themes, templates etc sounds like a plan to you, then be my guest and continue exploring.
An important feature that is required for a software product marketplace is an option to license the products. This is what makes EDD a coveted e-commerce plugin option to sell software products. Easy Digital Downloads provides a software licensing add-on which allows eCommerce store owners to license every product that is sold on the website.
The plugin has been licensed and sold. What next?
It can often happen that with an increase in sales the volume of support requests will also increase. In order to be able to provide effortless and uninterrupted support to all existing and potential customers, it is important to have a system in place to handle the requests. It makes the process simple and the probability of missing out on any request is close to zilch. Take a look at how support can be made easy.
If by now you have made up your mind regarding a marketplace for software products it might be well worth considering the inclusion of statistic widgets to your website. It’s habitual for buyers to look for statistics while making a purchase and such widgets will reinforce their faith in your product.
Developing an online music website like Spotify can be another promising e-Commerce business possible using the Easy Digital Downloads plugin.
Subscriptions and Social Media Marketing are two paramount features for an online music store. The first feature can be incorporated using the recurring payments extension.
Social media marketing, on the other hand, can make for an entire horizontal in a business and will need a separate post for a detailed explanation. Using the social media plugins for Easy Digital Downloads is a good place to get started with on this front.
An option to play the music before purchasing it makes adds to the overall user experience and makes all the difference between converting a website visitor to a customer. If you want to make this difference then what you’re looking for is the Audio Player extension for Easy Digital Downloads.
A last step in the direction of user experience would be incorporating the Auto-Register plugin which automatically creates a WordPress user account at checkout. And like a told you before include statistic widgets , no information is useless information after all.
No, I don’t mean to say handling the learning part with the Easy Digital Downloads plugin. Here EDD will essentially be used to sell the online courses from the website.
In the online LMS scenario, it is also important to manage all student data which includes their purchase history. Hence, it is important that EDD should be synched with a CRM system to automatically translate the purchase history into the CRM software in use. This can be achieved with Zapier, an extension that seamlessly integrates over 300+ third party web services with EDD.
Apart from that, the Auto-Register plugin mentioned earlier would be a good add-on in terms of user experience.
Did you think Services can be sold online? Not booked, SOLD! Well yes, they can be. Let us assume you provide content creation services and have predefined purchase packages based on the cost. EDD works perfectly in such a situation. You can define the various packages as EDD products which can be purchased by from the website. Similar packages can be defined for services such as a yoga class, prepaid internet services, prepaid traveling services etc. So do away with cash and make way for convenience using the Easy Digital Downloads plugin.
But there’s a small, very small hiccup in fact. The EDD receipt displays a message which reads, “No downloadable files found”. While this message does not affect your service in any way it can often lead to some amount of discontentment on the user’s end. The simple solution to avoid this situation is the Download as a Service extension which allows you to classify certain products as services and thus hides the unnecessary message.
A service based eCommerce website can be taken a step ahead by providing customers with downloadable email attachments. These attachements can consist of an invoice for the service they have subscribed to or gift coupons that can be used at the time of the next purchase.
Lastly, no service business can flourish without good support. So don’t even think of faltering there.
My Take
All the websites mentioned above and many other similar ones can be developed with WooCommerce, without a doubt. What sways me towards EDD though is this.
- It was specifically developed keeping in mind digital products. Which means its every aspect has been modeled keeping in mind this concept.
- Also, there is nothing such as an EDD compatible theme. Almost all themes available on the market are compatible with EDD. So while you are on a scavenger hunt for the perfect theme for your website the last thing on your mind will be the theme’s compatibility with EDD.
- Also, it’s vast bank of add-ons related to marketing, payments, website analytics, affiliate system etc makes it an absolutely competent system to use.
Opportunities of growing the business of an online digital products store are endless. You just have to know how to use the system to your advantage. So what are you waiting for? Download the free version of Easy Digital Downloads and start experimenting towards your eCommerce business. And if you are stuck along the way, I am right here along with our in-house Easy Digital Downloads expert always ready with an answer. All you gotta do to reach out to us is use the comments section below.
Adios! 🙂
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