If you’re aware of the market trends of eCommerce industry, you’ll know that WooCommerce is the most popular WordPress plugin that turns WordPress into a powerful eCommerce application, with a massive market share of 37%.
However, when it comes to selling digital goods, Easy Digital Downloads is the preferred plugin over WooCommerce. Why?
Though it’s totally possible to sell digital goods with WooCommerce, the problem with WooCommerce is that it is bundled with lots of unwanted options and features a digital goods store will never need. So every time you create a product on your store at the backend, you’ll need to skip tons of extra files and UI features.
If you’re not aware of the Easy Digital Downloads plugin, let me explain it briefly. Easy Digital Downloads is one of the best eCommerce plugins that allows you to easily sell digital goods online with your WordPress website.
Now that we’ve looked at why should you use EDD for a digital goods store, let’s examine a few websites that use EDD plugin to empower their digital selling.
1. OptinMonster
What it does: OptinMonster.com is the leading SaaS tool that lets you create beautiful opt-in forms with ease. Although it was initially built as a WordPress plugin, they eventually transformed it into a platform-independent business. Due to this fact, now non-WordPress users can also build beautiful opt-in forms and integrate it to their website.
How they use the EDD plugin?
OptinMonster uses EDD plugin for many things like offering discounts, activating recurring payments, etc.
Unlike other freemium business, OptinMonster offers 100% no-risk money-back guarantee for 14 days. And they use the EDD plugin to process refunds a hassle-free experience.
2. Layero
What it does: Layero.com is a premium WordPress themes gallery. It is also a classic example of digital storefront powered by Easy Digital Downloads plugin. Aside from selling various premium themes and templates from their storefront, they also offer some WordPress oriented services like theme installation and customization.
Theme: Olam- WordPress Easy Digital Downloads Theme.
How they use the EDD plugin?
- 2checkout: Layero uses 2checkout as their payment gateway, which allows them to accept credit card and PayPal payments in more than 15 languages and 20 different currencies.
- Affiliates Pro: Layero runs a self-hosted affiliate program with Affiliates Pro plugin. It helps them to fully automate affiliate commissions for sales.
- Uji Popup: In order to convince visitors to make a purchase, they offer discount coupons by showing a popup to each visitor using this free plugin.
3. Skystats
What it does: Skystats.com is one of my favorite marketing automation tools. It turns your WordPress dashboard to an all-in-one business dashboard by integrating various business data like web analytics, social stats, paid search, etc. So when you’re working with different marketing channels, keeping track with each channel wouldn’t be a hassle anymore.
Theme: Custom theme.
How they use the EDD plugin?
As Skystats is a subscription-based business, they use Recurring Payments add-on along with the free EDD plugin, which makes it easier to accept recurring subscription right from their WordPress backend. This extension also supports various popular payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, and 2Checkout.
4. EnviraGallery
What it does: If you’re a photographer or a designer, you’ll need to showcase your photos or design with a beautiful image gallery. With tons of useful features, Envira Gallery is a responsive WordPress gallery plugin that helps you showcase your photos on your website.
Theme: Custom theme.
How they use the EDD plugin?
- EDD Stripe: Envira Gallery uses Stripe addon plugin on their site, which allows them to accept credit cards through their Stripe account.
- EDD Recurring Payments: Similar to Skystats, Envira Gallery is also a subscription-based business, so they use a recurring extension on their site.
- Discount codes: Envira Gallery offers discount codes to their customers. As discount codes is a built-in EDD feature, the plugin allows Envira Gallery to easy setup flat or percentage discount rates with ease.
- EDD Software Licensing: Envira Gallery uses Software Licensing extension to activate, check and validate license keys. The main benefits of this plugin include but not limited to a limiting number of activations, automatic license renewal reminders, and automatic license expiration.
5. WPSimplePay
What it does: WP Simple Pay Pro is a WordPress plugin that lets users easily create beautiful and highly optimized Stripe forms, so users can start accepting payments with Stripe.
The best thing is that you can build highly optimized checkout forms without the need for touching a single line of code. All the form created will be responsive.
How they use the EDD plugin?
WP Simple Pay Pro isn’t a subscription-based business. It just requires a one-time fee for downloading their product. Once the payment is done, users can download the plugin from ‘My Account’ section of the site. So users will need to create an account during the checkout process.
It is done seamlessly with EDD as the plugin supports both registered users and guest checkout.
They also use EDD to offer a coupon discount, which is a feature that arrives out-of-the-box with the plugin.
In addition, they also use a third-party free plugin known as Sales Metrics to get Baremetrics style sales report for WordPress.
6. PlanMarketplace
What it does: PlanMarketplace.com is a marketplace for buying and selling CAD files online. It allows vendors to sign up to the site, so they can start listing their CAD files and selling it to customers who’re looking for it in the marketplace.
How they use the EDD plugin?
Unlike other websites I featured in this post, PlanMarketPlace is a website where sellers of CAD files can meet potential buyers online.
Some of the add-on plugins they use in their store are listed below.
- EDD Recommended products: If you’re selling multiple products on your store, cross-selling could be one of the best ways to increase Average Order Value of your sales. Recommended Products extension shows customers products that are previously purchased by the same customers.
- EDD Reviews: This plugin adds a capability for your users to submit product reviews on your store. This can be a great choice if you’re running a marketplace.
- EDD Wish Lists: This plugin lets customers save the products they find interesting on your store. This helps your customers to buy your products later.
Final Words
Would you like to add some cooler EDD supported websites to the list? Feel free to share with us by dropping a line in the comments section.
This article is written by Shahzad Saeed. He is specializes in content marketing for startups and small businesses. He blogs about growth, ecommerce, marketing and design. You can hire him for your next writing project.
Web developer and SEO specialist with 20+ years of experience in open-source web development, digital marketing, and search engine optimization. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions (RSWEBSOLS)".
