Selling digital products has grown dramatically since the last decade. Unlike offering physical products, you can benefit from the lack of inventory and shipping management. You’re able to offer videos, ebooks, audio, or any other types of virtual products.
Setting up an amazing digital product store doesn’t come as a complicated task when you have the right tool. WooCommerce, empowering over 3 million websites, proves an effective plugin to turn your website into an online shop within seconds.
Although WooCommerce strongly focuses on creating online stores for physical goods, it can also handle digital items efficiently. However, as a beginner, you might face a set of challenges and limitations such as protecting product files or creating product bundles. Thanks to the huge support from free plugins available on WordPress repository, selling digital products on WooCommerce stores has become much easier now.
To help extend WooCommerce functionalities, we’ve ranked and reviewed the top 7 most popular free plugins available in the repository to maximize your WooCommerce virtual products. But before we begin, let’s take a quick look at how to sell digital products using WooCommerce.
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How to sell WooCommerce digital products
As soon as you create a product page, there is an option in the Product data section allowing you to decide between virtual or downloadable and physical products at the bottom of the page.
Shipping details are available there too. This means you can sell both physical and digital items at the same time. To take one example, when providing a music CD, it’s possible for visitors to get a physical CD and a download link using WooCommerce.
To start building a WooCommerce product page and selling products there, simply:
- Head to Products → Add new in your WordPress dashboard
- Provide product details such as description, image, etc.
- Scroll down to the Product data section and tick the Virtual and Downloadable checkboxes
- Update or publish the product
As mentioned, there are still limitations when selling digital products using WooCommerce only. For instance, you couldn’t manage the number of downloads for a custom purchase, and it’s really difficult to remove unimportant fields from the checkout page. The following 7 plugins will help you handle them all without any hassle.
#1 Digital Download Goods Checkout for WooCommerce
The longer and more complicated the checkout process is, the higher chances buyers give up their items before finishing their payment. This inspires developers to create Digital Download Goods Checkout for WooCommerce plugin.
The plugin simplifies your WooCommerce checkout process by enabling you to take out unnecessary fields on the checkout page. These areas can be last name, company name, billing address or postal code, and more.
This helps increase user satisfaction and makes it easier for customers to make purchases. As a result, you can increase sales and improve conversion rates.
Besides the main feature of excluding multiple fields on the checkout page, Digital Download Goods Checkout for WooCommerce lets you set a quick checkout button on the Shop page. This button leads customers to the checkout page immediately without adding the product to their carts. This page requires them to fill in 3 most significant areas only: first name, last name, and email address, then they can place the order right away.
You should notice that the plugin is particularly designed for digital products only. In other words, you’re unable to shield checkout fields for other types of goods.
#2 Prevent Direct Access for File Protection
Recognized as the #1 file protection plugin, Prevent Direct Access secures unlimited WordPress media files, including images, PDFs, audios, videos, and so on. You’re selling ebooks, online courses via WooCommerce? This plugin is definitely for you.
Prevent Direct Access redirects unauthorized users to a 404 page every time they attempt to access your protected product files. Only those with the correct permission like admins, members, or logged-in users are allowed to view these files. You can decide how long or many times customers can download your files too.
On top of that, the plugin comes with a powerful WooCommerce Integration extension to restrict customers from sharing the order page, downloadable product files, or customer login pages based on IP addresses.
When a consumer buys digital goods on your WooCommerce store, the plugin sets up a system to log their IP address. Suspicious IPs using the same username and password of the customer will be blocked right away.
Despite the low number of downloads which are over 1,000 active installations only, Prevent Direct Access is receiving a lot of love from users. Overall rating of 4.7-star with 100 5-star reviews has proved that. What’s more, most users prefer using its Gold version which provides more useful functionalities.
#3 WPC Product Bundles for WooCommerce
Trusted by over 10 thousand WooCommerce users, WPC Product Bundles for WooCommerce assists you in creating product bundles effortlessly. It simply combines multiple downloadable products for sale together. The plugin supports not only digital items but also all other types of products.
You can think of the plugin as an effective cross-selling tool for your online WooCommerce shop to boost sales. For instance, you can group a readable ebook and its audio file at the same time to sell at a lower price instead of offering them individually.
Customizing the product bundles shouldn’t take you a lot of time and effort. The discount can be set by both percentages or numbers. Information displays of bundled products like position, thumbnail, price, etc. are configurable too.
#4 Free Downloads WooCommerce
Free Downloads WooCommerce supports your WooCommerce store in a completely different direction. Unlike the other solutions which are relevant to boosting sales, the plugin provides free downloads on your WooCommerce shop. Users don’t have to check out in order to get the free product files anymore.
The way the plugin works is pretty simple. Rather than forcing users to add product files to the cart, you can display a download button right on the product page. A product including multiple files will be compressed into a zip file once users download it.
Even if you’re selling courses, software, or any services on your WooCommerce shop, giving free downloadable files like checklists, guides, or tutorial videos helps generate leads significantly. After that, you can educate these potential customers and turn them into actual buyers.
#5 TeraWallet – For WooCommerce
TeraWallet – For WooCommerce operates as a digital wallet permitting your users to store their money and proceed payment. They can use this money to buy both physical and digital products from your WooCommerce shop.
There are numerous ways for them to deposit money such as adding money to the wallet directly, receiving cashback, or transferring wallet to wallet.
With the help of the plugin, your users don’t have to go through an endless checkout process every time they make a purchase. All they need to do is login and pay for the downloadable product using eWallet.
From the admin’s dashboard, you’re allowed to view customers’ transaction history as well as changing their wallet amount with ease. A refund can be processed using the digital wallet too. Out of the box, the plugin is compatible with WordPress multisite. This means you can enable its features not only on your main site but also on the sub-sites.
Customers can receive a cashback when buying a product, depending on the predefined requirements like the cart value or product category. They will be notified of any digital wallet transaction via emails as well.
#6 WooCommerce PayPal Checkout Payment Gateway
WooCommerce PayPal Checkout Payment Gateway has become the most popular checkout payment gateway for WooCommerce due to its simple and straightforward features.
The plugin authorizes you to quickly integrate PayPal payments to your WooCommerce shop. Once you sell a physical or a downloadable product, the in-context checkout will proceed with the order. Users can connect to their PayPal account with just one click. Besides PayPal, the plugin also accepts payments via credit or debit cards.
You can configure the plugin settings right in your WooCommerce Payment settings page. Activating and deactivating PayPal checkout is enabled with just a single click. You’re permitted to customize PayPay checkout description there too.
#7 WC Marketplace
WooCommerce allows you to create one store only by default. So creating a multi-vendor marketplace like Amazon, eBay, and Etsy using WooCommerce sounds impossible at the beginning. With WC Marketplace, you can make it happen easily without hiring a lot of staff.
The plugin assists you in setting up a multi-vendor marketplace for many merchants and vendors. Each of them will have a separate frontend dashboard to manage their products, orders, discounts, and more.
Merchants are enabled to take full control over your weekly and monthly sales reports as well as location-based sales reports. This helps vendors create a better marketing strategy and focus on areas that bring the major sales to their stores.
You can let your vendors manage their own store by uploading virtual and downloadable products, setting shipping methods, and proving product attributes. Controlling product tags and product inventory are available as well.
Which are your WooCommerce downloadable product plugins?
WooCommerce proves an efficient platform to sell digital products. You can create a free online store and simply make money from it. In case you plan to expand its functionalities, looking for supporting tools would be a great idea.
The recommended 7 plugins above enable you to bring your WooCommerce digital product store functionalities to a higher level. While some plugins assist you in the checkout process like removing unnecessary fields or integrating with PayPal, some protect WooCommerce product files from unwelcomed users.
You can use several of these plugins at the same time too, depending on the scale of your store or how you plan to deliver your products.
Do you have any other plugins for WooCommerce downloadable products in mind? Let us know in the comment section below.
