Starting an online store for digital products comes with challenges. From setting up product listings to managing payments, choosing the right tools can feel overwhelming.
This guide is aimed to simplify your journey. Here, we'll introduce the Easy Digital Downloads plugin and how you can use it to display featured digital products in Breakdance.
By the end, you should be able to create a simple online store page without getting tangled in technical snags.
What is Easy Digital Downloads Plugin?
Easy Digital Downloads or EDD is a popular WordPress plugin specifically designed for selling digital products. What I love about this plugin is that it simplifies the process of setting up your online digital store.
Once the plugin is installed, the bare minimum you would do is set your address, choose your payment method, and upload your digital products. If you want to jazz things up a bit, there’s also a variety of add-ons you can use.
Here’s a summary of all the features of Easy Digital Downloads:
- Supports numerous extensions to add functionalities to your online store, such as affiliate systems and product licensing
- Provides options for discounts or promotional codes
- Supports a lot of payment gateways, including PayPal, Amazon Payments, Stripe, and Braintree
- Provides detailed reports about important metrics like sales, earnings, and taxes
- Protects digital downloads by providing purchase keys only to customers
- Incorporates a built-in shopping cart system where users can buy multiple downloads at once
- Comes with order management system to track order status, manage refunds, and assign roles
Steps to Setup Your Easy Digital Downloads Store in Breakdance
1) Install Easy Digital Downloads Plugin
First off, you’ll need to download and install the Easy Digital Downloads plugin in your WordPress site.
On your dashboard, head over to Plugins > Add New. Search for the plugin. Then, install and activate.
You can also download the zipped file straight from the Easy Digital Downloads site. Then, upload the file into your WordPress. Click install and activate.
2) Configure Your Easy Digital Downloads Settings
Once the plugin is activated, the first thing that you need to do is configure the options for checkout, payment gateways, emails, styles, taxes, etc.
Go through the plugin’s settings by clicking ‘Downloads.’ Under the general settings tab, you’ll be presented with a lot of options.
But don’t worry. If you’re just setting up a typical online store, you won’t need to change most of the settings. However, you do need to set your country and address. Click ‘Save Changes.’ And that’s it!
Under the payment gateways, choose your payment method to process all the transactions in your site. The default is Store Gateway which will be used for test purchases. When you’re ready, feel free to choose your mode of payments.
Note that some payment gateways like Stripe, GoCardless, and Braintree may require you to purchase a premium plan.
On the emails tab, you might want to add your store logo for branding purposes. Emails are automatically generated, so you won’t really need to change anything on this page.
For the other tabs like styles, taxes, and miscellaneous settings, you don’t need to change anything as well, unless you want further customization. But for a typical store, everything should already work right out of the box.
3) Install EDD Featured Downloads Extension (Optional)
In this guide, we’ll also be using the EDD Featured Downloads Extension. I personally find this the easiest way to display featured digital products if you don’t want to use custom codes.
4) Add Digital Downloadable Files
It’s time to add your digital products. Navigate to Downloads then click Add New.
Here, you can add a product title, description, category, etc. You can also set a pricing for your downloadable file.
On the right side of the page, go to Download and add your download image.
Then, let’s add this product to our featured downloads. On the same settings, check the ‘feature this download’ option.
Finally, click the icon within the File URL field to upload your digital product. This can be in any format, like .pdf, .mp3, .zip, etc.
4) Create a Page to Display Featured Products
Now to the fun part! Let’s create a page in Breakdance to display our featured digital products.
Note that Easy Digital Downloads automatically creates a page for each downloadable. But you might want to consider adding this page for a better shopping experience.
On your Breakdance editor, go ahead and add a section and heading for the title.
Then, let’s add a shortcode block and paste the code below:
[downloads featured="yes"]
Finally, adjust your layout as desired. Save the changes.
5) The Final Result
Here’s the final look of our Easy Digital Downloads store.
Once a customer decides to purchase one of your products, Easy Digital Downloads will automatically lead them to the checkout process.
To verify the order, go to Downloads > Order. You should see the list of orders, as shown below.
Note that EDD will also generate the default email for you and the customer. This email will contain:
- the customer's download file
- product license key (if you’ve set this up)
- customer's website account to log back in and access their purchase history
Wrapping It Up
And that’s it - you’re now ready to set up your digital store and showcase your products to your customers.
The next step is to populate your store with more digital products you’re proud of. You can also extend your store’s functionalities like creating discount codes or coupons, integrating an affiliate system, or adding an auto-invoicing feature. Feel free to tweak your page as you learn more about your audience.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Please leave a comment below if you have any questions or suggestions!
