The first version of our website was built around June 2012. Prior to that, I had tried selling the Order Delivery Date plugin through CodeCanyon and I wasn’t very pleased with the results & their terms, which I came to know after keeping the plugin there for over a month.
People have their own reasons for selling from CodeCanyon, but I wasn’t happy that they decided the plugin price & that they would not provide the customer information.
So I hired someone from Upwork (then Elance) to build our first website using WP eCommerce plugin & setup 2 payment gateways: Paypal & 2Checkout. And sales started coming in. It was built for $300.
Was I satisfied with the website I had built? No. I had hardly put any effort on the User Interface. I was on a tight budget & the only thing I was concerned then was I need to have an Ecommerce website. I never focussed on finding a good theme or gave any importance to placing the right elements on the right page.
Evaluating WooCommerce & Easy Digital Downloads
Around October 2013, we realized that we couldn’t afford lifetime licenses & updates. That’s when we had to make a decision as to how to approach this change & implement it on our current site. WooCommerce & Easy Digital Downloads were the better alternatives when compared to WP eCommerce.
We needed an Ecommerce plugin that would:
- Support yearly licenses with subsequent renewals
- Would support Paypal, 2Checkout & other payment gateways (to be included in future)
- Was light-weight, well-coded
- Would be supported with a good theme
Both Easy Digital Downloads & WooCommerce were qualifying for the above needs. After finding out that Easy Digital Downloads is much more focused & specialized for selling digital goods like plugins, it was easy to make the decision. That would mean getting rid of the other fields for physical products from WooCommerce & instead only having a few numbered fields to setup my WordPress plugin for sale.
After installing both Easy Digital Downloads & WooCommerce – choosing EDD was a no-brainer for me. It had the extensions that we needed & a lot of Downloads as well (at that time, there were no “Active Installs” stats). What I liked the most is it’s tight integration with WordPress & feeling as if it is a part of WordPress itself & not a plugin.
Eat your own dog food
At that time, I never thought that some customers & friends would ask us a couple of years later:
Hey, do you use your Abandoned Cart plugin on your site? I abandoned my cart on your site & I haven’t got an abandoned email yet.
OR
Hey, you are selling WooCommerce plugins, but you are using EDD on your site to sell it? Why so?
I had to give out a clarification to the customer that we use Easy Digital Downloads & not WooCommerce for selling our plugins.
That’s when I wondered: Is it necessary for us to use our own plugins before we can sell them to others? May be for the Abandoned Cart plugin, we could use it on our site if we had built it on top of WooCommerce. But what about our other plugins like Booking & Appointment plugin or Order Delivery Date plugin? There is no way I can use those unless I start a bookable business or selling physical products.
Staying with Easy Digital Downloads
EDD has improved & grown a lot over the last few years. Since we started using it, we have not posted more then 10 support tickets to them in all these years. At each time, their support team has responded in 24 hours or less. So we will continue to use EDD on our site to sell our WooCommerce plugins.
My suggestion:
- Use Easy Digital Downloads for your plugins or softwares
- Use WooCommerce for your physical products or bookable products or any other virtual products
