Easy Digital Downloads Review – A Good WordPress Plugin?
Is Easy Digital Downloads any good? It’s ok but it wouldn’t be our first choice for an ecommerce plugin for WordPress for two main reasons:
- The free plugin is very basic and other free plugins offer more in terms of features
- The paid plans do include some good features but if you want all the features EDD has to offer, it is one of the more expensive options for selling digital products on WordPress
It isn’t a bad plugin, it definitely gets the job done for selling digital products but there are better options out there for both the free and paid versions.
3.3/5
EcommerceGold Score
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Easy Digital Downloads Pricing
The core EDD plugin is completely free to use and can be downloaded directly from the WordPress plugin library and includes a basic set of features that allow you to start selling digital products via your WordPress site but if you want to use Stripe and/or Square, you will pay an additional 3% transaction fee.
But EDD does also have a selection of additional paid features that can be added but you can’t install these features individually, instead you need to buy an annual pass.
Personal | Extended | Professional | All Access | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Annual Price* | $99.50 | $199.50 | $299.50 | $499.50 |
| Number of Sites | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Number of Products | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Transaction Fee | ? | None | None | None |
*Offer price, the normal price is double the stated prices
The personal plan doesn’t say that there aren’t any transaction fees but we couldn’t find any information on whether there is a fee and if so, how much it is, which is why we put a ?.
In terms of the difference between the plans, it all comes down to the features that are offered, with the larger plans having access to more features, with the All Access plan being fully loaded and offering everything that EDD has to offer.
Easy Digital Downloads Features
The standard Easy Digital Downloads plugin is pretty light on features as it is designed to provide you with a basic shopping cart for digital products, with if offering:
- Customizable action button
- Registered or guest user checkout
- Customer record management
- Discount codes either fixed amount or percentage based
This is very basic and while it might work for some stores, most will have to buy one of the annual passes in order to get access to the features that can help them grow their store and also make it easier to manage.
If you want to add Abandoned Cart Recovery, EDD recommends using Recapture, which is billed based on your stores monthly revenue but starts from $29 a month, which is expensive for one feature.
Easy Digital Downloads Theme Selection & Customization
When it comes the theme selection, Easy Digital Downloads doesn’t come with the biggest offering, especially when it comes to free themes. A search for Easy Digital Downloads within the free WordPress theme library returns a result of only 22. There is an additional free one available direct from the Easy Digital Downloads website.
The amount of available themes does increase a lot when you start looking at premium themes, EDD recommends 48 paid themes on their main website and a search on Themeforest returns a result of just over 440 themes.
When it comes to theme customization, it really does depend on the theme that you are using as to the options that are available but EDD does have a selection of blocks that work with Gutenberg page builder, meaning that you can add blocks such as:
- Products
- Buy Button
- Registration Form
- Checkout
This means you can add these to your site’s pages and blog posts but from testing, it does depend on the theme you are using as to how well these blocks display.
Easy Digital Downloads Payment Gateways
In the standard plugin, EDD offers 3 payment options:
- PayPal
- Stripe
- Square
You can also add mobile wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay via Stripe but one thing to note with Stripe and Square is that in the standard plugin, you will pay an additional 3% transaction fee over the standard Stripe fees and if you don’t want to pay this additional fee?
You guessed it, you need to upgrade to at least the Extended Pass.
Easy Digital Downloads Support
All EDD users get access to support emails, which is great for the free plugin but there are no premium support options for any of paid passes, which isn’t great if you are spending $499 a year.
The support teams are only available between 9 am and 5 pm EST, Monday to Friday.
How Easy is Easy Digital Downloads to Use?
Ease of use is very important when it comes to using a plugin for your WordPress site and to test this out, we have looked at three different areas:
- Getting Started
- Inventory Management
- Order Management
Getting Started
Getting started with EDD is the same as any other WordPress plugin, simply search Easy Digital Downloads in the WordPress plugin library, install it and activate it.
Now unlike other plugins, EDD doesn’t have any kind of setup guide. So you have to go into the settings yourself and start getting it configured. A simple setup guide would have been a nice addition.
Navigating your way around the EDD plugin is pretty simple, once installed it will add a new heading to the main WordPress sidebar called Downloads.
There isn’t a main summary dashboard for EDD, like there is with some other plugins, instead all the information about your downloads, payment history, customers and reports have their own separate sections. While this isn’t bad, having snippets of information in a summary screen can be helpful.
Inventory Management
Being able to effectively create and manage your inventory is very important and it doesn’t matter whether it is physical or digital products.
Creating a new download in EDD is very simple to do and the single-page layout and uses the Gutenberg Page builder, which means you can add custom blocks to the page.
But the page itself on includes a couple of different settings:
- Title of the download
- Pricing
- Type of download (default or bundle)
- An area to add the downloadable file
- A box for download instructions
It is very easy to add a new product using EDD but the lack of options around the product does show the limited features of the core plugin.
With EDD, you can also create a hierarchy for your products by using the WordPress category system and this allows you to create both parent and child categories.
Managing your stock isn’t such an issue with digital products as unlike their physical counterparts, you rarely will sell out or have to restock them. But you may need to update your prices and to do this quickly and effectively, you can use the quick edit option to quickly update the price and also the product title and/or URL if you want to.
Managing Orders
In general, managing orders is much easier to do with digital products, this is because you don’t need to print order invoices or packing slips in order to be able to ship the product as they are automatically delivered once the order has been placed.
There are still some order management options within EDD, with the main ones being the ability to edit order statuses from the main order overview page, either in bulk or individually.
Within the reports section of EDD, you can also export your order history, which is useful if you use third-party accounting or management software.
Conclusion
Easy Digital Downloads
Is Easy Digital Downloads Any Good?
It’s ok but it wouldn’t be our first choice for an ecommerce plugin for WordPress for two main reasons:
- The free plugin is very basic and other free plugins offer more in terms of features
- The paid plans do include some good features but if you want all the features EDD has to offer, it is one of the more expensive options for selling digital products on WordPress
It isn’t a bad plugin, it definitely gets the job done for selling digital products but there are better options out there for both the free and paid versions.
3.3/5
EcommerceGold Score
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Hi, I'm Paul, the Owner and Founder of EcommerceGold.
I ran my own Ecommerce Business for over 7 years and now help others start their own online retail empires!
