Easy Digital Downloads is a complete eCommerce solution for WordPress. Right out of the box, it is prepared to power your online business without the need of any other dependencies.
Getting your e-commerce site up and running within just a few minutes is the ideal when selling products online. But you will start to notice that most of content online is about selling physical products. Some of the best e-commerce platforms provide options to sell your own digital products such as eBooks, music and video courses, but they don’t particularly focus on these digital items. Easy Digital Downloads, also known as EDD, focuses on selling online digital products.
Easy Digital Downloads works seamlessly with WordPress and is free to use. If you want to expand the platform with additional features, then you might have to pay for various plugins to extend the product. Here’s my review of the Easy Digital Downloads.
EDD really is one of the easiest plugins to install and get up and running with. It’s lightweight and does not slow down your WordPress site, something many other plugins tend to do. If your site was lean, mean, and fast, it still will be once you get Easy Digital Downloads installed.
The checkout system is smooth and easy to use for customers, especially when they want to purchase multiple products. EDD also can setup customer profiles, which allows for your customer to return and download products from past purchases.
To keep your customers coming back, EDD has a robust discount codes system. And to top everything off, the tracking system is very well thought out. Tracking payments and managing reports is simple and professional.
Some people might think free products means amateur or useless. But this is one of those times were that statement couldn’t be further from the truth.
You can download EDD directly from their website and install it to WordPress from your desktop. Or you can install EDD from the ‘Add New’ plugin feature of WordPress and search for Easy Digital Downloads. It cannot get simpler than that.
EDD also has some great documentation to help you get setup and running right away.
Adding new products is as simple as selecting ‘Add New’ from the ‘Downloads’ in the left menu section of WordPress’s dashboard. Adding a new product is just like adding a new page or post, you just upload a file to be downloaded and set a price.
The Easy Digital Downloads plugin is completely free. This is one of the main reasons it’s so popular for selling digital products. The various extensions Easy Digital Downloads offers is where you might have to spend some money.
By default, EDD can accept payments via PayPal and Amazon. But sometimes you might want to use a different payment processor, such as NETbilling, to handle payments for your EDD purchase. Depending on what you sell or what features or fees you want to deal with will determine what type of payment processor you will use.
More than 65 of all web traffic is now via a mobile platform. And Easy Digital Downloads is 100% responsive and ready to handle mobile traffic. I will mention the responsive display compatibility can be changed based on the theme you use.
Easy Digital Downloads design is minimalistic. Which allows you to work on your own CSS styling to make the site look the way you want or format it to blend with your website’s theme.
As I mentioned before, adding new products is as simple as selecting ‘Add New’ from the ‘Downloads’ in the left menu section of WordPress’s dashboard. Adding a new product is just like adding a new page or post, you just upload a file to be downloaded and set a price.
If you go to the Settings page you’ll find a Payment Gateways option to play around with the payment systems you can use. Once again, various other payment gateways are available in the EDD Extensions Store or via various 3rd Party developers, such as QCTechJunkie’s own NETbilling Payment Gateway (reviewed and approved by the EDD team)
Easy Digital Downloads has taken into consideration about y our products security and has done a great job at keeping your digital downloads safe. Payment security is handled by your payment processor.
The Easy Digital Downloads support is incredible. The company provides tons of documentation for the core EDD plugin and all their extensions. If you cannot find an answer to your question you submit your own tickets support ticket. I will note that if you are using a 3rd party extension, then your documentation and support may vary from developer to developer.
Easy Digital Downloads is lightweight, fast, expandable, and easy to use. I use it for my sites and for my client’s sites. Let me know in the comments section if you have any questions about this Easy Digital Downloads review.
As many smartphone users are becoming aware, their phone number and location is not private when they use their phone to surf the internet. All of their data is mined and can be sold thanks to their mobile advertising id (MAID). It only costs $1,000 to track someone online, according to Wired’s Andy Greenberg. In a nutshell, when you visit a website via your smartphone, both the website and the advertisers on the site have access to your phone's IP address and advertising ID. Your telecom assigns your phone an IP address, since they needs to bill you for data use. Because of this, that IP address is also tired to your billing information. And now your telecom sells your information to third party companies. Those companies allow websites and applications to take your phone's IP address and lookup all of your information on those third party resources. So, a website or application can figure out your phone number, home address, email, and phone location.
The short a simple solution... change your phone's IP address with a VPN with a services, such as Private Internet Access.
Some people may remember that Verizon was stopped by the FCC from using super cookie's. Super Cookie's allowed websites similar tracking features the mobile advertising id. Even though the FCC stopped what Verizon was doing, most telecoms figured out that they already were tracking their users with the IP addresses the assign. And since telecoms have the ability to sell your billing information to advertisers, there is no need for a super cookie. Just dump customer data to a data base, and let advertisers run a search on that data for all the data that matches your IP address. And this is not just something that Americans have to worry about, all customers globally have to worry about this.
Many people are finally starting to understand the sacrifices we make and privacy we give up when we use smartphones. The FCC is supposed to have our back, but we know that's not really the case anymore. But, like I said, many people are starting to connect the dots on their own, about why we get more spam phone calls. One Redditor commented:
“Sprint does it too. Source: I started getting random phone calls from random ass places once I got with sprint.”
Another Redditor had the same issue on another telecom’s service:
“I was with T-Mobile for years and would get 1-2 calls a month from scammers. I switched to Verizon and got them daily. Sometimes multiple times a day. I called Verizon only to have them try and sell me a call blocker service for $4.99/Mo. I downloaded a free can blocker app and have blocked 100+ numbers in 8 months…”
Like I have said before, the easy solution is to change your IP address and browse the web securely to protect your privacy. VPN's allow you to do that. But, it comes at the cost of slower speeds. Until there is legislation that fixes all of these privacy issues, like making everything opt-in, and fines perpetrators, your data and privacy are always at risk. An no, using WIFI is not a good alternative anymore, especially since there is the WPA2 KRACK.
