Easy Digital Downloads (often referred to as EDD) is a unique ecommerce plugin for WordPress as it focuses completely on allowing users to add digital products to their website.
EDD is also a very popular alternative to WooCommerce for said digital products but is any good and should you consider using it for your WordPress site?
Well, that is what we are going to be looking at in our in-depth review, so let’s get started…
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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 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
They also have an All Access Pass, which costs $499 a year and can be used on up to three sites and includes:
- All Professional Features +
- Fraud Monitor
- Slack Integration
- Product Comparison
- Purchase Rewards
- Email Attachments
- Conditional Emails
- CRM Capabilities
- Email support
- Plugin Updates
This can make Easy Digital Downloads quite an expensive option, especially as you will be paying this on top of your website hosting and any other paid options such as themes and/or plugins.
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
- Amazon
You can also add mobile wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay via Stripe but one thing to note with Stripe is that in the standard plugin, you will pay an additional 2% 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?
In its standard form, it is very basic in terms of features and the additional 2% transaction fee Stripe is going to be off-putting for some users.
And the core plugin doesn’t really offer a lot over WooCommerce, which can also be used for digital products as standard. The paid passes for EDD are very expensive and the limited number of themes that offer EDD integration is also limited.
EDD will get the job done for creating an online store using WordPress to sell digital products, we feel that the likes of WooCommerce and Ecwid are much more viable options.
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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!