E-Commerce Archives

The Beginner’s Guide to Building a Store using Easy Digital Downloads

July 25, 2016 by Namrata Leave a Comment

In terms of e-commerce plugins selling digital products, Easy Digital Downloads is right up there with WordPress biggies like WooCommerce and WP e-Commerce.

What sets Easy Digital Downloads (EDD for short) apart from the rest, is that it focuses specifically on easy selling of digital downloads, from e-books, songs and videos to bookings, orders and reservations.

This is perfect for a company selling only non-physical goods, since all the additional features that platforms offer for real products are anyways redundant here.

In fact, if we objectively compare EDD and WooCommerce, EDD does definitely have the upper hand in the selling of digital products. And the reason why we use EDD for our online store too.

EDD was set up by Pippin Williamson, a WordPress enthusiast and the developer of over 75 plugins, including AffiliateWP and Restrict Content Pro.

Over the years, the plugin has developed directionally, with nearly a 100 extensions and integrations for extending its core functionalities.

Let us have a look at the various plugin features.

A Brief Overview of Easy Digital Downloads’ Features

Easy Digital Downloads has a bucketload of features that make it a versatile e-commerce plugin. These include:

Ease of Use

For a full-fledged e-commerce plugin, EDD is extremely light, easy to set up and use. The interface is user friendly and has clear directions, that help you set up your downloads in no time (more on that later)!

The Multi-Purchase Shopping Cart

Easy Digital Downloads has a Shopping Cart functionality used to add multiple, downloadable products from your website. The ‘Add to Cart’ as well as ‘Buy Now’ buttons can be displayed optionally on the download page, the format of both being fully customizable.

Carts can be saved by perceived customers and you get to decide whether the checkout has to be as a registered user or the customer can proceed as a guest.

Integrated Payment Gateways

EDD has in-built payment gateway integrations for PayPal and Amazon, and integrates with PayPal Pro and Express, Stripe, Coinbase, Braintree, 2Checkout, Skrill, PayPlug, Authorise.net and about 30 others; you get the picture.

The checkout process is quick and streamlined which makes for faster transactions and less halfway-customers.

Comprehensive Customer Management

Maintaining customer records at the backend is easy with EDD. Every member and purchaser on your website has a separate profile containing the complete sales and contact details. The customer lifetime value is visible here too, i.e. how much net profit can be obtained from the given customer, in the years to come.

These customer records can be linked with user profiles and are a comprehensive database of the date and time when the download was completed, where the file was downloaded and the payment details of the transaction.

Data Analytics

Easy Digital Downloads has a data cruncher as a core feature, that checks your earnings daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly, or for any given period of time really.

Reports can be segregated by product or product category and compared at a glance using line graphs, with the current and forecasted earnings for the specified time period.

These reports can be exported as CSV files for future reference.

Promotional Codes and Discounts

EDD loves discounts, as do we all.

Product sales are proportional to the extent of product marketing and EDD understands this. Which is why, it provides options for you to add discounts using coupons and set limited edition discount codes.

You can even set a minimum purchase limit to avail of the discount or a maximum discount limit that can be availed of!

Customizations Galore

Easy Digital Downloads is completely flexible in terms of customization.

You can have simple or variable pricing for products, create download widgets and insert them in posts or pages, even customize purchase receipts and the e-mails to be sent, using twelve different templates.

Products can be sold as single downloads or as bundles which can be restricted for specific users, with download limits and link expiration per download. EDD is compatible with most WordPress themes out there, though there might always be a few exceptions.

EDD is cleanly coded and provides several hooks and filters for developers to make use of and extend its core functionality.

So much for the theory, let’s try out some of these features practically and set up a store using EDD!

Getting Started with Easy Digital Downloads

Well, just like any plugin on WordPress, there are two ways in which you can install Easy Digital Downloads.

You can search for it in the plugin repository and add it to your website, or you can download it from wordpress.org, and upload it to your server using an FTP client of your choice.

Let’s walk through the plugin settings.

General Settings

Once you have activated the plugin, the ‘Downloads’ tab will appear in the admin panel.

Click the Settings sub-heading under it to get to the General Settings page. This page has the options to configure the download Page, Store Location and the Tracking settings.

Page settings include selecting which of your website pages will be the Checkout, Success, Failed Transaction and Purchase History pages.

The Store Location tab allows you to set up your base location and the state or province where your website is located. This is useful for configuring Payment Gateways, which we will come to in a minute.

Tracking settings is merely an option which enables EDD to keep track of your plugin usage for building customer data and analyzing how the plugin is working in real time.

Right next to the General Settings is the Currency Settings mini-tab which lets you define the currency you will be using for product pricing on your website.

There are over 30 currencies available from around the world though not all are always compatible with the existing payment gateways.

E-Mail Settings

On the same page, click the Emails tab to go to the e-mail settings.

Here you select the email template that is to be used while sending Purchase Receipts to your customers. There is a default email template that is used or you can download an additional 12 templates and 10 corresponding Purchase Receipt formats by buying the Email Templates extension.

You can also choose a company logo to be displayed at the top of the customer email, which can be uploaded here.

PRO TIP: Under the Purchase Receipts mini-tab make sure you verify ‘From Name‘ and ‘From Email‘ fields are set as appropriate. In the New Sale Notifications mini-tab, under ‘Sale Notifications Emails’, you can set email ids of recipients who will receive a notification email once a purchase is made.

Product Purchase Settings

Moving to the Payment Gateways and Taxes tabs can help you set up the product purchase settings.

In the Payment Gateways tab, you can decide which of the default Payment Gateways (PayPal Standard, Test Payments and Amazon) are to be displayed. The other gateways can be integrated by installing the respective extensions, available on the extensions page of the EDD website.

In the Taxes tab, you can configure the taxes to be applied based on the country you are from. You can also choose to display the original product prices without taxes, in which case it is calculated separately and added to the total cost on the Checkout Page.

Miscellaneous Settings and Style

Under the Styles tab you can decide the default styling of EDD elements to match with the color scheme on your site. Optionally, if you know a bit of CSS (well, more than a bit), you can disable EDD’s default styling and set your own.

Miscellaneous settings have an array of settings which can be left as is. However, the two important setting options you need to focus on are: Checkout Settings and Terms of Agreement.

Under Checkout Settings, you have the option to enable/disable guest checkouts
Under Terms of Agreement, you can add terms related to product purchase which the customer has to agree to before buying a product

A Short Note on Payment Gateways

Apart from the three default gateways available in EDD, over 30 others are available as extensions and can be integrated to work seamlessly with your site.

However, Payment Gateways can be specific to regions, that is, they may or may not always be universal.

For example, the PayPal gateway doesn’t work in several counties, so you might have to consider installing country/currency specific gateways to allow customers from these countries to make purchases.

It is therefore necessary to check which gateways are compatible with your location, or countries your buyers are in, and install them accordingly, to ensure a smooth and uninterrupted checkout process.

Creating Your First Download in EDD

Creating products or ‘Downloads‘ in EDD is exactly like creating a new Post or Page on WordPress.

All you have to do is,

Click on the ‘Add New‘ sub-heading under the Downloads tab.
Edit the ‘Name’, ‘Description‘, ‘Price‘, ‘Product Categories’ and ‘Tags’ (for categorisation purposes) of the Download.

For downloads which do not have a fixed price, or when you want to offer options, you can choose the ‘Variable Pricing‘ option.

In the right-hand sidebar, you can set a ‘Download Image‘ which will be displayed on the Shop page.
You can also set up a download size limit for the file and define the Purchase Button behavior. The ‘Product Shortcode‘ link is available here too, which can be inserted anywhere on your site to provide a quick-link to the Product Page.

The download file can be set under ‘Download Files‘.

To create a bundle, you need to set the ‘Product Type Options‘ to ‘Bundle‘, and add downloads part of the bundle.

Once all your settings are finalized, click on ‘Publish‘ and your Download is ready to sell!

Extensions: Must-Haves and Supplementary

Coming to the most awaited chapter; the plugin extensions available for Easy Digital Downloads.

Let me begin by saying right away that there are nearly a hundred different extensions available for functionalities like accounting, licensing, marketing, analytics and more (this excluding the third-party extensions).

Most of these are premium, though some free ones are available too and can be downloaded from the EDD Extensions repository.

To give you an idea of the diversity of the extensions present, here is a short overview of 5 very different add-ons, each providing a new functionality to the core EDD setup.

Software Licensing

EDD revolves around digital downloads, so a licensing extension is a must for any company selling softwares, plugins, themes, or even non-WordPress applications.

The Software Licensing extension is used for incorporating license generation, activation and validation for your customers. It also has an API that allows you to enable automatic upgrades for the WordPress plugins and themes that you are selling, for users having active licenses.

A complete licensing plugin, Software Licensing lets customers upgrade or renew their licenses as per the validity.

EDD Product Updates

EDD Product Updates is a simple way of informing users about the updates available and providing them with the download links.

The extension allows for email customization, batch sending of emails, email preview confirmation which lets you check how the mail will look at the front end and even test mail sending.

EDD Product Updates works with Software Licensing to send update emails only to existing license holders.

PDF Invoices

As the name suggests, the extension generates PDF invoices for you and your customers, which can be downloaded from the Payment History tab in your admin panel.

The invoices and email purchase receipts are available in 12 different formats and can be customized further as required.

Reviews

Not only are reviews an important part of customer feedback, but they also provide your future customers, a reference point to work with. A four- or five-star rating immediately changes customer perspective and makes them that much more inclined to at least check the product.

The Product Reviews extension lets your customers add reviews and comments which can be edited or modified by you later, if necessary. You can also choose which comments are to be displayed and which are to be hidden, with shortcodes available to embed featured reviews in posts and pages.

AffiliateWP

This is another popular plugin developed by Pippin Williamson and Andrew Munro which makes connecting with your affiliates easy and fun.

The AffiliateWP plugin extension works seamlessly with Easy Digital Downloads and is used to track your affiliates’ referrals, view their statistics and interact with them dynamically. Built on the concept of making affiliate association easier, the extension works well, with practically all WordPress membership and ecommerce platforms.

Easy Digital Downloads has several other integrations with newsletter plugins like MailChimp, Aweber, Sendy and MailPoet Newsletters, accounting plugins like Recurring Payments, EDD Bookings, Fraud Monitor and Advanced Reports. You can check the full list of extensions here.

EDD also offers a core extension bundle, with 25 different extensions for various functionalities. This is useful for incorporating all the basic features into your website in one go.

Epilogue

Easy Digital Downloads is an out-of-the-box solution that takes care of everything you need, to sell virtual products online. A light, cleanly coded core, extensions to balance individual requirements and provision of tailored options for specific customization make EDD a great choice for digital goods’ marketing.

The plugin is easy to use, is localization ready with translations into 26 languages and has a very strong documentation, with step by step explanations for pretty much every query that could turn up. The support forums are also very active and the developers at EDD revert back to user queries quite quickly.

All said and done, Easy Digital Downloads is a robust plugin and works perfectly with all other WordPress themes and plugins. If you are a company looking to sell digital products on WordPress, Easy Digital Downloads is definitely the way to go!

How to Generate more Revenue without Increasing Traffic

January 25, 2016 by admin Leave a Comment

This is a Guest Post by Shahzad Saeed, a freelance blogger and content marketer who has been featured in top internet marketing blogs like Problogger and John Chow several times. Connect with him on Twitter @shahzadsaeed and LinkedIn.

Let’s face it- there are two ways to generate more revenue from your e-commerce store; either by driving more traffic to your store in order to make more sales, or by boosting sales by simply optimizing your website without increasing the traffic.

As acquiring each and every customer is going to cost you, evaluating your store’s sales funnel and thus focusing on your conversion rate is vital to improve your overall return on investment.

That being said, how would you generate more revenue without increasing traffic to your store?

Here are a few ways.

Convert more visitors into customers
Increase each customer’s order value
Entice customers to return, in turn generating more sales.

Focus on the right KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) is a metric that is vital to the success of your business. It totally depends on company’s objectives and shows whether a business is moving towards these objectives or not. That said, focusing on the right KPIs can help you ensure that you are not going off the track.

There are a lot of tracking tools that can tell you the most accurate KPIs for your store including Google Analytics and RJMetrics.

Let’s take a look at some important e-commerce metrics below.

1. Conversion Rate

Conversion rate tells you how many of your visitors end up reaching your target goal- in our case buying a product from the store.

Here is how conversion rate is calculated:

Conversion rate (%)= (Total number of sales) / (Total number of visits) x 100

In order to get the best results by tracking the conversion rate, make sure you break it down into email conversion rate, checkout page conversion rate, paid ads conversion rate, referral program conversion rate, etc.

2. Average Order Value

When conversion rate reveals how many people actually buy from your site, the average order value reveals how much money each order brings in.

Average order value is calculated as follows:

Average order value = (Sum of Revenue Generated) / (Total number of Orders)

Calculating AOV for all customers can be used as a comparator for all marketing acquisition campaigns. It will even help you evaluate your overall online marketing and pricing strategy.

3. Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

The metric, shopping cart abandonment rate shows you the percentage of your visitors who added products to the shopping cart but didn’t complete the checkout.

It is calculated as follows…

Shopping cart abandonment rate = (Total visitors who didn’t complete the checkout) / (Total visitors who added products to the cart) x 100

Recommended reading: The 7 Biggest E-commerce Mistakes You Can Easily Avoid

From Monitoring KPIs to Generating more Revenue- Actionable Strategies

In the above section, we’ve seen three important KPIs that can help you increase the revenue of your store without increasing the traffic to your store.

Now with a few real examples let’s look at the next step – what does each indicators mean to your e-commerce business goals and how would you use this metrics to make a real impact on increasing the revenue.

Let’s get started

1. Increasing Conversion Rate

It doesn’t matter how much effort you put into driving traffic. Unless you are making sales your business isn’t going to succeed.

By increasing the conversion rate of your store you’re making more visitors to buy from your e-commerce site and thus generating more revenue. Here are a few ideas to increase conversion rate of your store.

#1: Create a Sense of Urgency

Shoppers often procrastinate. And the worst thing, they often forget to buy those products later.

Creating a sense of urgency will help convincing your buyers to purchase immediately and stop procrastinating. Displaying low stock indicators and time sensitive shipping are some of the common practices in the e-commerce industry to create a sense of urgency.

#2: Improve the user experience of your store

Increasing the user experience of your store can have a big impact in increase in the sales and thereby revenue.

By improving the user experience you’re making it easier for your customers to buy from your store, which can positively impact in increasing the revenue.

Here are a few usability hacks that can make a positive impact in sales.

Make the site navigation easier.
Make the search bar prominent on your site

2. Increasing ‘Average Order Value’

Here are a few practical tips to increase the AOV of your store.

#1: Offer Discounts on a Minimum Spend Threshold

Offering discounts for a minimum spend threshold can be a good strategy for convincing your users to spend more while making a purchase.

#2: Upsell

This is one of the most common tactics to increase the average order value. In fact, a study of Predictive Intent’s e-commerce customer base, upselling drives an average of over 4% of sales. And in terms of driving sales it is 20 times better than cross selling by displaying recommended products.

Here are a few ideas for upselling your products.

Add-on sales: Sell additional products or services along with the actual sales. For example, when selling electronic products like laptop, you can sell 2 years additional warranty.
Product bundles: Offer various products altogether as a bundle for a discounted price.

3. Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

According to Baymard.com, the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate is about 68.53%.

The reasons for shopping cart abandonment can be many. Some of them are

Shipping costs
Lack of discount coupons
Complicated checkout process

Here are a few methods to reduce the shopping cart abandonment rate.

#1: Display Shipping Fees Prior to Asking Payment Info

One of the main reasons for the shopping cart abandonment is unexpected shipping cost. Displaying shipping fees in the early stage of a sales funnel can reduce the abandonment rate to a great extent.

#2: Reinforce your Privacy Statement on the Payment Page

Even though it’s been many years since people started buying products online, still many are concerned about providing their payment info and personal information online. Adding a security seal like McAfee secure to your payment page offer a sense of security to such buyers and is a good strategy to reduce the cart abandonment rate as well.

KPIs are milestone for the success of your e-commerce stores. Monitoring the right KPIs helps you track the progress of your business goals.

Once you set your business goals and selected KPIs for your store, make sure you monitor those metrics on a regular basis, even daily.

What are the Key Performance Indicators for your store? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section.

Images by freepik

6 Web Design Trends Taking Over Ecommerce in 2016

January 12, 2016 by Rishabh Leave a Comment

The Information Age has also ushered in an era of exceptional and almost lazy convenience when it comes to buying things you’ve always wanted, all from the comfort of your couch.

Any thing. Any brand.

Yes, we’ve all fallen prey to the pleasures of online shopping, known in corporate circles as e-commerce.

Apart from the big players like Amazon, Alibaba, and more recently, Flipkart, we have millions of online stores selling products we all want at the click of a button. And many of these store look just as beautiful as an actual store of a high end designer brand down the corner. (Apple Stores, anyone?)

Web Design is just as tactful as designing a physical product store. There are trends that catch on to the masses imagination, just like there are trends that are forgotten in an era bygone.

Dwelling on the past aside, I came up with a list a eCommerce Design trends that you’ll most likely come across on any of these millions of e-stores in 2016.

First up on the list is..

Masonry Design

Masonry design was first conceived by David DeSandro as a jQuery plug-in called Masonry. It owes its massive popularity over the years to Pinterest, the first major website to adopt this form of page layout.

What Masonry does to your website is it optimizes the use of space within a web page by eliminating unnecessary gaps. It styles its elements in a grid based fashion, first by vertically stacking them up and proceeding to do the same horizontally, as opposed to CSS floats which does the exact opposite.

It’s akin to a mason piling up bricks on top of each other to build a wall, and hence the name.

Masonry also takes into consideration the size of every individual element and dynamically calculates an appropriate arrangement without wasting space.

Masonry is being swiftly adopted by online stores all over the internet, and, well, this is just the start.

The main reason for this, apart from its beautiful aesthetics, being that it’s incredibly eye catching. Which is exactly what you would want as a seller with a large catalogue of products: catch the customer’s eye.

Also, given that there’s no fixed size for a element, you can have images of products of varying size on top of each other right on a single page, saving user the trouble of having to navigate to another page.

Read : 25 Powerful Examples of Masonry jQuery Web Design

Apart from WordPress, which already houses several Masonry themes, eCommerce giants like Magento and Shopify are witnessing an ever increasing number of themes adopt this approach.

Combine this with design schemes like minimalism and you have a webstore with a rich and an appealing feel that attracts sales by the dozen.

Mobile First Approach

That smartphones have taken over our lives is old news, but did you know that by 2018, mcommerce will account combined global revenue of over 630 Billion U.S Dollars?

That’s about the total revenue generated by whole of ecommerce, as seen in 2013.

No wonder most retailers are now opting for a mobile first design strategy for their websites.

Let’s be clear on one thing: Mobile-first does NOT equate to Responsive Design. Sure, the two have a lot of things in common, the ultimate goal being a smooth and snappy mobile experience. But mobile-first is an altogether different web design strategy, of which Responsive Design is a part.

Traditionally, when a web designer sets about blueprinting his plans for a website, it’s usually from the point of view of a desktop. He then gradually scales down his design as the viewport decreases in size, getting rid of elements that would generally slow down the website (flash, javascripts) when viewed from, say, a smartphone or a tablet.

The end result, for a user browsing on his smartphone, is a plain and dull website that contains just about enough content and elements for the website to be functional.

Hardly impressive and completely lackluster.

A mobile first approach takes this strategy and turns it on the flipside: you start with basing your designs for an optimal mobile experience, taking full advantage of your platform, and then add elements to make your website more robust and noteworthy as you work your way up towards the desktop.

What you get with a mobile first approach is a fantastic UX for your prospective buyers, regardless of the platform. It’s called progressive enhancement.

Read: Mobile First Design- Pros and Cons

And while we’re dealing with the platform that is Mobile, an ever increasing number of users are opting to browse the internet solely via their mobile phones. In fact, global smartphone penetration will rise up to 34%, which is to say that one in three persons in the world will own a smartphone as early as next year!

To sum it all up, if you’re looking to sell online, it’s either go mobile or go home!

Customer Specific Product Listings

Behavioural targeting has been known to double the effectiveness of advertisements; one can only imagine the same will apply to behavioral marketing.

Collecting data pertaining to the browsing habits of an average visitor to your website, and analyzing it, can be a very effective precursor to increasing conversion rates for your site traffic.

One way to do this is implementing a dynamic product listing on your website, one that targets the needs of an individual visitor.

Imagine viewing a product on an online store and seeing a catalogue side listed that specifically interests you, what are your chances of making a successful purchase?

Pretty high, would be my guess.

Another idea that comes into play when you talk about behavioral marketing is the concept of behavioural cross selling.

Let’s break it down for your with an example. Suppose you were browsing for mobile accessories on this website that your friend said offered great deals, but never went through with the purchase. And now, a couple of weeks later you find yourself in dire need of a new smartphone.

Read: An In-depth Analysis of Behavioral Targeting

You log onto your favourite e-store, and are just about hit ‘Buy Now’ on the smartphone of your choice, when you suddenly spot this this awesome accessory that you never bought being offered to you with the smartphone as a part of a lucrative deal. It’s the best of both worlds!

This, my friend, is no mere co-incidence, but a very sophisticated form of intelligent cross selling by the website. The website analyzes the your behavioural data and clubs together a relevant side product to go with your purchase and offers it you as bundled package at a discounted price.

Major players in the ecommerce space like Amazon are already reaping the benefits of this strategy, and so should you!

Minimalist Design

Do you know of this little company called Apple? The one that revolutionized the electronics industry as we know it and all.

Of course you do!

Apart from its outstanding range of products, Apple is also known for its ingenious marketing and advertising skills. Their minimalist approach has been lauded by web designers and marketing professionals alike.

If you’ve keenly paid attention to its advertisements and hoardings over the years, you would have noticed how it sticks to ultra-clean minimalism: a high quality image of its product, lots of white space and closely spaced text in black and grey color scheme. It’s clean and it’s elegant. A perfect reflection of everything Apple stands for.

Their website follows the same approach, and is a prime example of how a minimalist approach can work wonders for your online store, while retaining functionality and design.

The advantages of a minimalist web design are numerous: it’s a marked relief on the eyes when compared to websites over stuffed with loud and brazen design schemes, leads to better conversion rates and of course, let’s you lay more emphasis more than ever on your products!

Take a look at this list of 13 great examples of minimal ecommerce stores and notice how they utilize the scheme to best of their advantage.

Minimal design means you can shift your focus on the functionality of your store.

Out of the many possibilities, as listed eloquently on the the above mentioned list, some that stand out are the use of banners to upsell products, optimizing the process of adding products to cart and checking out, innovative use of icons and of course, instant focus on the product range.

Less is clearly more.

Stand Out Product Landing Pages

Every product has a story of it’s own, and it deserves to be told. Move over dull and drab pages for individual products in the catalogue, 2016 is the year where you’ll see more and more full fashioned landing pages focused on marketing individual products.

While most products have a page dedicated to themselves, it’s mostly just a handful of hi-res images of the product along with the specifications and the selling price. Add to that customer reviews and product ratings and you have every average product page on the web ever.

While these pages do serve the purpose of providing the user with all the relevant information about the product, they hardly do anything about the marketability of it all.

And really suck at converting leads.

There’s nothing worse than portraying an appealing product in an unattractive manner, which is why you ought to focus more on the design and the feel of the page.

Well designed landing pages are equally great at up selling high end products from within your product line up and/or launching new products!

They basically do the same three essential things as the afore-mentioned ‘every product page ever’, but with much more elegance, poise and style.

They don’t sell you the product, they sell the deal. They don’t sell you the features, they sell you the benefits.

They don’t tell you about customer reviews, they share with you their stories.

See the difference? Not yet?

Take a look at these 8 exceptional product landing pages, and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Honourable Mentions

With that we round up my list of trending and clever designs you’ll encounter on e-stores this year, but here are a few honorable mentions that will also be spotted while shopping online in 2016.

Less-bulky, Tiled Navigation : For those who can’t find their way amidst a thousand navigation options on most websites. Basically all of us.
Full-Width Content Design: Full width background images and parallax scrolling with well spaced content. These are (and will remain) evergreen.
Material Design: Google has been all about this since the past couple of years. Need I say more?

Did I miss anything major or get any of the above details wrong? I’d love to hear from you! Comment away!

Why WisdmLabs chose Easy Digital Downloads over WooCommerce

February 23, 2015 by Namrata Leave a Comment

WisdmLabs is a certified WooCommerce Expert. 30% of the projects we undertake involve WooCommerce development. 1 in 5 leads that comes our way is related to WooCommerce. 7 out of the 9 premium plugins we’ve built are extensions to WooCommerce.

But we sell our plugins using Easy Digital Downloads.

In April of 2014, WisdmLabs was ready to launch its first premium plugin- The Product Enquiry Pro for WooCommerce. After debating whether selling on our site was better than on a marketplace (this article pretty much sums up our sentiments), we concluded selling on our site was the way forward.

This meant, we had to pick an e-Commerce plugin. And by ‘we’, I mean ‘I’. Because I was the one who had to make the decision.

To be honest I had no clue.

For me, WooCommerce was the obvious choice. We hadn’t dabbled much into WP e-Commerce or Jigoshop. The developers had in-depth knowledge about WooCommerce. Easy Digital Downloads was another option I wanted to consider, since we were to sell digital products. We had worked with it on a client project as well, and were satisfied with it.

“Choosing an eCommerce platform is like buying a house”

Choosing an eCommerce system, is the most important decision you have to take when creating an online store. It’s like buying a house. You have to get it right the first time around. Moving can be expensive and dreadful. Hence the decision has to be well thought out.

I took an objective approach, and weighed out each plugin against the requirements.

#1 We needed a store to sell Plugins

At a glance, both WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads fit this requirement. Both are free, and can be easily used to set up an eCommerce store. Here’s what they say:

WooCommerce: “SELL ANYTHING. BEAUTIFULLY. Whether it be t-shirts in all their shapes and sizes, music files or software. Even affiliated products from a marketplace. It’s all possible.”

Easy Digital Downloads: “Say hello to the world’s easiest way to sell digital downloads through WordPress for free”

All good so far. I compared the specific features we needed:

Feature	WooCommerce	EDD
Sell Digital Goods	Yes	Yes
Payment Gateways Included (PayPal)	Yes	Yes
Allow Guest Checkout	Yes	Yes
Customer Account Creation	Yes	Yes
Terms & Conditions Settings	Yes	Yes
Add Coupons	Yes	Yes
Add Sale Prices	Yes	Yes (Paid Add-on)

Good enough for me!

Easy Digital Downloads : 1

WooCommerce : 1

#2 We needed Licensing and Affiliates Systems added

The basic requirement was the availability of a licensing add-on and an affiliates add-on, for the eCommerce plugin picked.

Both the plugins provided these needed add-ons.

However, I didn’t stop at that. I considered future requirements. I compared several other available add-ons, and the extensibility of the core plugins.

Add-On	WooCommerce	EDD
Licensing	Yes – $129	Yes – $82
Affiliate (AffiliateWP)	Yes – $49	Yes – $49
Indian Payment Gateway (PayU India)	Yes – $79	Yes – $49
Product Bundles	Yes – $49	Yes – In built

As far as the add-ons were concerned, they were available for both these plugins. But the add-ons for EDD (which we would be looking to integrate) were cheaper than the add-ons available for WooCommerce.

I evaluated the extensibility of each plugin as well. WooCommerce has always been an exemplary plugin. It has the needed hooks and filters to override the provided functionality.

EDD undoubtedly is cleanly coded as well. How do I know this? a) It’s been built by Pippin Williamson and b) I consulted a senior developer here at WisdmLabs, Sumit, who evaluated the plugin as well.

If I had to consider the financials, the score now would be:

Easy Digital Downloads : 2

WooCommerce : 1

#3 We needed the Optimal solution

By now, I was pretty much rooting for EDD, even though my manager heavily favoured WooCommerce. Yes, WooCommerce was certainly the obvious choice. But EDD was the logical choice. Like I said, picking an eCommerce plugin is like buying a house. And with that house there is maintenance.

WooCommerce certainly provided lot more features. But they weren’t the ones we needed. We weren’t (and certainly aren’t) planning on selling shippable goods. And we did not need the additional load to maintain. I certainly didn’t want to be the one dusting cobwebs.

Selling digital goods was a part of WooCommerce, but selling digital goods was what EDD was built around.

Hence, the most important reason why Easy Digital Downloads was the eCommerce plugin for us, was because “it was the optimal solution for the problem at hand”.

Easy Digital Downloads : 3

WooCommerce : 1

So were there any pitfalls?

There were certain drawbacks, I can’t deny those:

Absence of Sale Prices: We would have certainly liked to include sale prices, but we use Coupons instead. EDD does provide a paid add-on for sale prices, but coupons work just as well. JC Penney would agree.
Most add-ons are Paid: We aren’t in the process of integrating any new add-ons, but most of the add-ons available for EDD are paid, while WooCommerce has several free add-ons.
Few unfriendly words thrown my way: We love WooCommerce. My manager certainly seemed to think choosing WooCommerce was the better decision to make. But he couldn’t deny the facts either. EDD was a better fit.

Would we ever switch?

Looking at the way things are going, my guess is ‘No’. Certainly time will tell. But we are very satisfied with the functionality it provides us. More importantly we’ve gotten to explore an entire new eCommerce system, which is great for us. We have the expertise to now build over and expand it as well.

Choosing Easy Digital Downloads was certainly not an easy decision to make. But we are happy with it. We bought a great house, and it suited us well.

A Brief Overview of Easy Digital Downloads’ Features

Ease of Use

The Multi-Purchase Shopping Cart

Integrated Payment Gateways

Comprehensive Customer Management

Data Analytics

Promotional Codes and Discounts

Customizations Galore

Getting Started with Easy Digital Downloads

General Settings

E-Mail Settings

Product Purchase Settings

Miscellaneous Settings and Style

Creating Your First Download in EDD

Extensions: Must-Haves and Supplementary

Software Licensing

EDD Product Updates

PDF Invoices

Reviews

AffiliateWP

Epilogue

Focus on the right KPIs

1. Conversion Rate

2. Average Order Value

3. Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

From Monitoring KPIs to Generating more Revenue- Actionable Strategies

1. Increasing Conversion Rate

#1: Create a Sense of Urgency

#2: Improve the user experience of your store

2. Increasing ‘Average Order Value’

#1: Offer Discounts on a Minimum Spend Threshold

#2: Upsell

3. Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

#1: Display Shipping Fees Prior to Asking Payment Info

Masonry Design

Mobile First Approach

Customer Specific Product Listings

Minimalist Design

Stand Out Product Landing Pages

Honourable Mentions

“Choosing an eCommerce platform is like buying a house”

#1 We needed a store to sell Plugins

#2 We needed Licensing and Affiliates Systems added

#3 We needed the Optimal solution

So were there any pitfalls?

Would we ever switch?

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