The other day, I was asked if I could suggest a shopping cart solution for a site whose owner was selling only one single eBook in PDF format.
My immediate response was WooCommerce which always ranks as one of the Most Popular plugins on WordPress.org week after week or WP e-Commerce with more than 2.5 million downloads.
Both of these eCommerce plugins offer the ability to sell digital downloads. When a customer completes their transaction via a successful payment using Paypal or credit card, they are redirected to a thank you page that lists their purchase details which includes links to the downloadable files.
Because most eCommerce packages are handling physical goods, the plugin must be configured for inventory, shipping and sales tax before you can begin selling a product online.
WooCommerce and WP e-Commerce are both feature-rich plugins with extensive APIs that enable you to customize the shopping experience for your customers. Remi Corson has a list of snippets that can be added to your functions.php to extend the functionality of your WooCommerce plugin.
But for a website that is selling one or two digital downloads, the above eCommerce plugins may perhaps be overkill. So, I took a look at Easy Digital Downloads. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to configure the plugin and I was up and running with a test product within 7 minutes.
Like the WooCommerce and WP e-Commerce the customer is redirected to a purchase confirmation page that lists the details of the purchase with links to the downloadable digital products.
An added benefit using the Easy Digital Download is that you can insert a shortcode purchase link into any of your pages or posts on your site. The shortcodes can be easily copied from your list of Downloads on your Admin Dashboard ({website_url}/wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=download) as pictured below.
Via the Settings panel you can restrict the number of times a customer can download the product or leave the default setting for an unlimited number of downloads. You can also set the download link to expire after a certain number of hours. The default setting is 24 hours and this can be set on a per product basis.
I think that the Easy Digital Downloads plugin for WordPress is definitely worth a look especially if you are selling just one or two digital products. It can’t be beat for quick installation and ease of use.
