Easy Digital Downloads

I spend a lot of my time working with WooCommerce, but it can be useful to look across at other platforms once in a while to see what they do differently (perhaps, what they do better).

Today, I thought I'd take a peek at Easy Digital Downloads—which primarily focuses on digital products, rather than covering the full gamut of product types that WooCommerce supports. My exploration was not particularly methodical: instead, I poked around willy-nilly to get a flavour of how this alternative ecommerce solution works.

Test payments

Years of practice in quickly spinning up throwaway test sites, to test various ecommerce scenarios, has drilled into my brain the need to setup a payment gateway early on. Otherwise, I've found, it's quite likely any testing I do will come to an awkward halt when the time comes to run through the checkout process.

In most of these situations, I find I don't really need an actual, real-life payment gateway: some sort of test mode will suffice. In WooCommerce, Direct Bank Transfer or Cash on Delivery can be used for this purpose ... but EDD has an even more obvious approach:

It doesn't get much clearer than Test Mode, and hovering over the information icon for the Store Gateway brings up a tooltip that makes things clearer yet. For developers and builders, this is a great start.

Moar settings

Since I'd found my way into the settings area to configure a test payment mode, I continued looking around. Some things that caught my eye:

• In Settings ‣ Payments ‣ Checkout there is an Enable Cart Saving option, documented as allowing shoppers to create a temporary link to their current shopping cart so they can come back to it later, or share it with someone. Neat!
• Over in Settings ‣ Payments ‣ Accounting there is an option to Enable Sequential Numbering. I've always thought that, for most stores, this is probably a bit of a "no-brainer" and a very sensible default, but props to EDD for including it as an out-of-the-box capability—currently, merchants using WooCommerce require an additional extension, or some custom code, to get this.
• Sending emails (order confirmations, updates, etc) are a pretty critical capability for an online merchant, so I found the option within Settings ‣ Email ‣ General to Improve Email Deliverability by installing and activating WP Mail SMTP to be a nice touch. I have no idea if the respective plugin teams are part of the same company or not, but the general idea was still a good one.

Adding a product

The product editor, or perhaps I should say the download editor (in EDD, products are called downloads—which makes sense, given the vertical), is the regular Block editor along with some specifics for managing downloads:

I'm happy to be corrected, but I'm pretty sure the EDD-specific fields added to the Blocks-based downloads editor have been implemented using a number of traditional meta boxes (the block editor doing a pretty nice job of handling these), and though this may not be 'the preferred way', it works perfectly.

I was interested to see that, like WooCommerce, a number of different product types are supported. In this case, we can choose from Single Product, Bundle and Service. The first two of those sound rather self-explanatory, to me, and I assume Service is a product that provides customers with access to, well, a remote service, but it wasn't clear exactly how this would work. Which is fine—this is why we have user documentation—but it's always interesting to think about how things can be made so clear that the need for a deep dive into the docs is avoided.

Something I really liked was the method of setting up variable pricing. This is significantly simpler, faster, and easier to understand than the WooCommerce implementation (though the latter provides much more flexibility) ... and I'm kind of curious if something like this could in fact be offered by WooCommerce (that is, the ability to toggle between 'easy' and 'advanced' modes for setting up product variables).

Wrapping up

This was a very fast and, honestly, superficial look at EDD, but before I wrap up this post I'll close with a note about the order editor. Since a picture paints a thousand words, here it is:

It's rather clean and elegant, and free of much of the noise that comes with a traditional WordPress post editor-based layout (which WooCommerce currently uses as the basis of its order editor). One would of course have to use it for real to get a sense of its ergonomics and how well it functions in general, but my first impression was very positive indeed.

Nice work, EDD team!