If you’re going to be selling digital or downloadable products, you’re probably going to end up using Easy Digital Downloads.
EDD is a great plugin for these types of products since it’s specifically built to handle them. It works just as great as WooCommerce, but without extra added bloat that it might cause.
So let’s go through how you can get started with Easy Digital Downloads today!
Installing the plugin
First, you’re going to need to install and activate EDD, which is pretty easy. From your dashboard, go to “Plugins” and “Add New”. Then search for “Easy Digital Downloads”. Then hit “Install” to install it and then “Activate” once it’s done installing.
Easy Digital Downloads is now installed and activated on your website.
Setting up the settings
The settings for EDD are far less complex than WooCommerce. In the “General” tab, you can add in your business name as well as your location that can help you with taxes later on and with any third-party plugins that might need this information.
You can also set the currency settings for your store here as well.
There are also page settings here that you can adjust. By default, EDD will create several pages with the appropriate shortcodes to add the necessary functionality to your website: checkout page, receipt page, my account page and transaction failed. You can change these pages in the settings, but make sure that the new pages have the appropriate block or shortcode so that you don’t break the functionality.
Emails
You can also easily customize the emails that get sent out with EDD. You can add in your business’ logo to the header of all emails and change the from email address and name.
You can also customize the text for purchase confirmation emails, admin notification emails and other emails that might get sent out by various EDD add ons you might end up installing. In addition to plain text, there are also merge tags that you can add in to display dynamic data about what has been purchased. A list of those tags can be found on the email settings screens.
Taxes
Taxes are annoying, but EDD makes setting them up pretty simple. You can choose to show prices with or without taxes and whether to show the tax rate wherever the price is listed.
Adding in rates is pretty simple as well. You can select a country and a region of that country (like states in the U.S.). Then you add in the rate for that country and region and then hit add rate. Now if someone is in that region, they will see that tax rate.
Policies
EDD also has support for privacy policies and terms and conditions.
Under Privacy Policy, you can show an “Agree to Privacy Policy” checkbox on the checkout screen and customize the text for it. You can also choose to display your website’s entire privacy policy on checkout as well.
For terms and agreements, you can show an “Agree to Terms” checkbox on the checkout page with a customized label. And you can customize what the terms of agreement are.
Download buttons settings
Finally, you can customize the download buttons site-wide by going to “Misc” and “Purchase Buttons”. Here you can choose between a button or plain text as well as set default background and text colors. You can also choose to customize the default text for various button types, such as complete the purchase, add to cart and checkout.
If you add in any other EDD add-ons, you’ll see their options and settings here on this page as well under “Extensions”.
