Selling products on WordPress
In this 21st century, selling digital goods and services is one of the smartest ways to make money online. This is far more profitable to selling physical products as there are no shipping costs or inventory costs involved.
What are digital goods/products?
Digital goods is a general phrase used to describe any goods that are stored, delivered and used in its electronic format. Digital goods are shipped electronically to the consumer through email or download from the Internet, they are virtually endless, comprises of videos, music, PDFs, website themes & templates, eBooks, Audio files, WordPress Plugins, PSD files, games and much more.
Many companies have seized the online space and created very big online shops widely used all over the world, companies like amazon, themeforest and lots more.
Some companies like Selz, shopify allow new businesses to create a virtual online shop within few minutes. Companies or shopping platforms like these actually take a percentage of your sales or have a monthly fees you as a user pays either monthly or yearly which could be cool for someone just starting out, but for those who are very serious about selling online and have seen the advantages and comfort of selling online will want to create their own virtual store so as to cut out the middlemen completely.
This has actually been made easy with the invention of WordPress and many others. They have made creating an online store incredibly simple to do with the use of so many plugins, APIs and lots more.
For WordPress , there are two most popular ones almost everybody is familiar with, we have WooCommerce and Easy digital downloads. WooCommerce has over 5 million active installs and powers many online stores, it was originally created to handle physical products, although it can now be used for digital products as well, it can be fast , but it takes some tweaking and if you are dealing with a lot of traffic you will most likely end up needing an optimized WordPress hosting.
With all I have said about WooCommerce and would love to draw your attention to a more easier plugin for digital products, it’s the Easy Digital Downloads Plugin. As its name implies, it is very easy to use, focuses purely on digital products, loads within 600ms, you can have it up and running within few minutes even as a novice. All it requires is for you to add your payment details create your digital products, and you are good to go. Just like WooCommerce it has so many extensions and integrations which allows you perform other numerous operations.
Easy Digital Downloads has over 60,000 active installs with a 5 star rating on the WordPress repository. Developers like me love it so much as it is well documented and easy to use. I got to know about it late 2019 from a WordPress Expert Sunday Ukafia.
Easy digital downloads allows customers to purchase multiple products and at the same time have multiple files attached to them. Another outstanding and amazing feature is the ability to create discount and promotional codes which could have expiration date, maximum use limit which is very cool.
Easy digital download has just 3 payment gateways by default which is PayPal, Amazon and manual but many others are available as extensions. This might not really be cool for Nigerian users since they don’t really have access to PayPal accounts or cant sent PayPal funds to their local banks.
This why I would be introducing you to a plugin I fell in love recently, has all the fetures Easy Digital Download has and words just like Easy digital downloads.
It’s the Paystack Easy Digital Downloads which was developed by Tunbosun Ayinla .It is a Paystack payment gateway for Easy Digital Downloads. It allows you to accept payment on your Easy Digital Downloads store using MasterCard, Visa, Verve cards and Bank Accounts.
Note: This plugin is meant to be used by people/merchants in Nigeria and Ghana.
This plugin is very much advisable for users in Nigeria/Ghana who wants to sell digital products online.
Follow me on twitter.
Visit my portfolio webiste, Here.
