Easy Digital Downloads WordPress Plugin Review

In this article, we will review and share the pros & cons of a the Easy Digital Downloads eCommerce WordPress plugin, check if is it worth it

By Claudio Pires
Updated on June 29, 2023
Easy Digital Downloads WordPress Plugin Review

An ecommerce store can offer diverse inventories, including physical goods, multi-vendor stores, and digital products. In this article, we will review the pros and cons of a WordPress ecommerce plugin for easy digital downloads. This plugin is free to download, and like any quality WordPress solution, its functionality can be extended with many free and premium add-ons.

The core version of Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) is a user-friendly plugin suitable for selling digital files on your website and accepting payments via PayPal or Amazon.

The free version is suitable for creating a simple digital shop; the real power of Easy Digital Downloads comes from the vast number of plugins available to add functionality. It’s an incredibly flexible product. So now, we’ll tell you about the company behind Easy Digital Downloads, review what the plugin offers, and show you how to use it to create a professional eCommerce store.

Behind Easy Digital Downloads

Easy Digital Downloads was created by WordPress developer Pippin Williamson and his company Sandhills Development. You may be familiar with Pippin already or have read one of his many WordPress tutorials on his website, Pippins Plugins. Sandhills Development is well respected in the WordPress world for several reasons:

  1. They have an excellent reputation for good customer service.
  2. Developing high-quality WordPress products.
  3. They’ve published hundreds of helpful WordPress development tutorials.

Sandhills Development is also behind other successful WordPress plugins, such as the affiliate plugin AffiliateWP, membership plugin Restrict Content Pro, Stripe payment plugin WP Simple Pay and calendar plugin Sugar Calendar. But Pippin and his company are held in such high esteem because of their approach to transparency.

The decision to be so open about major company decisions on their blog has given them a lot of attention. In particular, their ‘Year in Review’ blog posts that reflect on the previous 12 months give everyone an insight into how their company operates and help them get to know team members.

Other popular articles include reflecting on increasing the cost of addons in 2018. Detailing what happened when they enabled automatic membership renewals. All of their articles give you an insight into how a professional WordPress company operates. Check out the Pippins Plugins blog to learn about the people behind Easy Digital Downloads.

Easy Digital Downloads Features

The core version of Easy Digital Downloads comes with the basic tools you need to start selling digital products on your WordPress website. Also, upload any digital files that you plan to sell on your website. A shortcode is provided to help you to insert your products into posts and pages.

You can offer discount codes to encourage customers to purchase. In addition, limitate the times a file can be purchased. This is useful for promotions, for example, ‘Only 11 copies left’. PayPal Standard and Amazon Payments are supported in the free version. However, you can add other payment gateways through extensions such as PayPal Pro, Stripe, 2Checkout, Authorize.net, and Coinbase.

Customers view their entire shopping history with their accounts. Moreover, you can display this to customers using a single shortcode. In the back-end, website owners can generate reports for any period and download these reports in CSV format.

You can see data for report type, earnings, earnings by category, downloads, payment methods, and taxes. In conclusion, with the pros and cons of the WordPress eCommerce plugin comes the beauty of Easy Digital Downloads which is its simplicity.

Customers

The Customers tab offers information on the customers of your store. In addition to the contact details, the tab offers important information such as the number of purchases and the total spent on the store.

Easy Digital Downloads Reports

The Reports section lets you create reports about your store’s sales performance. Moreover, the reports are pretty comprehensive and allow you to drill down to the basics of the sales performance of the store.

Creating Your First Product

To create the first product, you must go to Downloads → Add New and add the product title, product description, upload file, product price, etc. When done, click the Publish button.

Discount Codes (Coupons)

In this section, you will create discount codes that you can distribute to increase sales on specific occasions. In short, just go to Download → Discount Code and click the Add New button.

Files Download

Firstly, this is a great option for stores that deal in digital downloads. Consider a scenario where the campaign allows downloading 10 copies of a file by setting the file download limit to 10. Secondly, you can have complete control over the download process. In addition, set up the download limit for individual products while adding/editing the product.

Conclusion About Easy Digital Downloads WordPress Plugin

That’s it! I hope you can easily set up a high-performance ecommerce store with the Easy Digital Downloads WordPress plugin after this pros and cons review. If you have any questions or want to clarify, feel free to ask in the comments section below.

Claudio Pires

Claudio Pires is the co-founder of Visualmodo, a renowned company in web development and design. With over 15 years of experience, Claudio has honed his skills in content creation, web development support, and senior web designer. A trilingual expert fluent in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, he brings a global perspective to his work. Beyond his professional endeavors, Claudio is an active YouTuber, sharing his insights and expertise with a broader audience. Based in Brazil, Claudio continues to push the boundaries of web design and digital content, making him a pivotal figure in the industry.