Digital products are a special kind of products. The main difference is that the digital product usually doesn’t require shipping. In this tutorial, we will create a basic digital product like eBook and show you how to set all the parameters for it. We will use Easy Digital Download plugin, which is one of the best plugins to sell digital products.
There are also some other ways to sell a digital product. The most used plugin for a webshop on WordPress platform is WooCommerce. But for selling simple products, which don’t require shipping WooCommerce is to complex to use it, basically, you don’t need options that WooCommerce offer.
Before you start selling your first digital product
Easy Digital Downloads plugin also comes with a lot of extra add-ons, some are free and some are premium payable add-ons. If you are selling ebooks, pictures, graphics… the free plugins will suffice. On the other hand, if you are selling products, that require subscriptions you will need to buy several premium extensions. They offer several bundles which include all the necessary plugins for certain type of tools.
Which bundles are available?
The basic bundle is the Personal Pass bundle which includes all the necessary plugins to get you started such as email marketing access, invoice download options, free purchase options, Variable Pricing Switcher, … This bundle will cost you $99.
The second bundle is the Extended Pass, which basically add extra options to sell subscriptions, advanced options to create discount codes, Amazon S#, and a few other plugins. This bundle will cost you $199.
The third bundle is the Professional Pass bundle. This bundle includes Frontend Submissions which allows you to accept digital products submissions from other people (useful if you are planning to create a small market for selling digital products) and Software Licensing which is a must have plugin if you intend to sell digital products with limited access(one year, one month…). This comes in handy if you selling WordPress themes as we do. The price for this package is $299.
And the last one, which is meant for the developers is All Access Pass. With this pass, you get all available plugins and unlimited sites license.
All the above prices are for a one-year subscription. You can still use the plugins after one year, but you won’t have access to the updates and support. You can also buy all plugins separately from Easy digital download plugins extension page. If you don’t know which bundle to use don’t worry, you can upgrade to any pass any time you wish.
If you ever need help with customizing Easy Digital Downloads plugin, please do check our customization services.
Let’s get started with the setup
We will be using our WordPress theme Marketeer that supports Easy Digital Downloads for this tutorial.
First Step: Install Easy Digital Download plugin
Second Step: Create your first digital product with Easy Digital Download plugin
Third Step: Conclusion
Install Easy Digital Download plugin
First, we need to install the Easy Digital Downloads plugin. Login to the WordPress dashboard and navigate to Plugins-> Add new and search for keyword Easy Digital Downloads. Now simply install and activate the plugin.
Create your first digital product with Easy Digital Download
In this step, we will create a basic Easy digital download product. We will go over the basic settings such as variable options and product type options. In the next few tutorials, we will also go over the licensing plugin and the subscription plugin.
Easy Digital plugin is now installed, so simply navigate to Downloads -> Add new to create a digital download product.
A new window will open and we can start editing our first digital product.
First, we need to enter a product name and description. In this step, there is nothing special to explain, only that the best practice for description is to follow this SEO guide.
Next step is to set product price. If you are selling a product without any other options just enter the price and you are done for this step.
If our digital product has other options we will need to set variable pricing options. This is used in the case you offer some additional services related to your product. If you check our product page you will see that we have several other options besides just a single license for a WordPress Theme. We also offer demo content install, must have plugins install and the ultimate ALL IN ONE package. Variable product option comes in handy here as you can add every option to the same product.
An example: you are selling a digital eBook, but you would also like to offer a private course with you. You have two options. The first one is a one hour course and the second one is a four-hour course with telephone support. In this particular case, it will look like:
We have set a digital product with variable options, but only one option can be selected. Here is the preview of how our current product will look like. As you can see on the image a buyer can only select one option.
If you would like to allow multiple options for the purchase you need to check “Enable multi-option purchase mode”. In this case, your buyers will be able to purchase both options.
In the next step, we need to actually add a digital product download option. By default, downloads are hosted on your server, but EDD also has a few plugins that allow you to store your downloads to different locations such as DropBox and GitHub. If you are selling larger files use DropBox since not all hosting companies have unlimited bandwidth.
If you are selling only one product set “Product Type” to default. In this case, your buyer will be able to download files that you added to the download section. Now upload the file and set a file name. In the “Price Assignment” section you can set which price variable option of this download is available. If you set “All” the file is available in all price options. This is useful if you are offering some extended product options to your basic product.
If you select the bundle product type, then the product will be assembled from different digital downloads.
An example: If you are selling photographs and you have different categories of a certain photograph, then you can create a bundle with images from a certain category. So, you are selling 100 landscape images separately, but you can also create a bundle of all landscape images.
The next step is not necessary, but if you wish you can add additional notes to your download. These notes will be visible in the user account and in the email that the user receives after the purchase.
The last step is to publish a digital download product. Congratulations, you just published your first product. If you are using our Marketer theme the product will already have a nice design and will look like this:
Conclusion
In this tutorial, we went over the basics of creating a digital download for sale on your website, using the Easy Digital Download plugin. The next step includes setting basic parameters so you can start selling your products. Thank you for reading.
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