However, even with powerful solutions like Easy Digital Downloads, managing your business can be a lot of work. That’s where Zapier comes in. With Zapier you can automate virtually any aspect of your workflow. Over the next few minutes, we’re going to review a few simple integrations that can greatly improve your day-to-day experience with Easy Digital Downloads.

What is Zapier?

It’s undeniable that automation is incredibly useful. Take a moment to look around. Do you see a coffee maker? Have you ever programmed it to make a pot of your favorite coffee just in time for you to wake up in the morning? How about a DVR? Have you ever set it to record your favorite show so you wouldn’t miss it? Those simple acts are examples of basic automation that we do every day without even thinking about it. Your life is automated, shouldn’t your website be as well?

Zapier is a software as a service platform designed to do just that. It integrates with an impressive 750-plus platforms and enables you to configure automations through a simple interface. So just what can Zapier do to supercharge your Easy Digital Downloads powered website?

License expiration campaigns with Software Licensing

Software Licensing is one of our most widely used extensions for selling software and managing license keys. With Software Licensing and Zapier activated, we provide several new integration points, including license key status changes. Our first Zapier example will utilize the new Software Licensing Expired License Notification integration point to add users to a special MailChimp list when their license expires.

Configuring your new Zap

For the purposes of this post, we are going to assume that you have at least a fundamental understanding of Zapier. If you aren’t familiar with it yet, you might want to stop reading until you have reviewed our introductory post on Automating your store with Zapier.

To configure your new expiration notification Zap, you’ll want to visit your Zapier dashboard and click on the Make a new Zap button. Select “Easy Digital Downloads” in the Your Apps section to begin your configuration. If you don’t see the Easy Digital Downloads app, visit the Zapier setup docs and ensure that you have authorized our app.

Zapier automations, called Zaps, are comprised of two parts: triggers and actions. Triggers are individual events which are sent from your website (or connected app) to the Zapier service. Actions are steps in the automation process actually performed by Zapier when a trigger is detected. The first step in configuring a Zap is to select what triggers the automation.

Scroll through the list of supported triggers and find the “License Key Status Changed to Expired” trigger, then save the trigger and proceed to the next step of configuration. Assuming you have connected your site to your Zapier account, you will be presented a list of connected sites. If not, you will be given the opportunity to connect your first site. Again, save and continue and Zapier will run through a connectivity test, before proceeding to the action phase of configuring your Zap.

Choosing an action

Since we decided earlier to add users to a specific MailChimp list when their licenses expire, find the MailChimp Action App in the list and select it. You will be asked to choose what action to run when your Zap is triggered. For our example, we are going to choose the “Add/Update Subscriber” action.

Once you have logged in to your MailChimp account, or selected an already connected account, you will have to set up a template which will be used to determine what should be done when the Zap is triggered. Use the following list as a guide to setting up your own Zap. Fields which are not in the list can be configured however you wish without affecting the integration.

• List: Select the list you want to add expired users to
• Subscriber Email: Select the Customer Email field from the dropdown
• Update Existing: Set to yes

Once you have configured your action, save it, test it, and get ready to profit!

A value-added solution

Congratulations, now you have a Zap configured to add users to a new MailChimp list when their licenses expire! So why is this automation important? The answer is two words which are crucial to anyone who operates a storefront with licensing support: customer retention. Let’s pretend you’re running a store with a single product worth fifty dollars which is billed yearly. Over the course of one year, you sell 500 copies of your product. A bit of simple math tells us that in one year, you’re bringing in $25,000.

Now, let’s assume that you gain 500 users each year, but only ten percent of your users renew at the end of the year. With a ten percent renewal rate, you’d make $27,500 in your second year. That’s a loss of $22,500! So how can Zapier improve your renewal rates? The fact of the matter is, you are going to lose renewals. People stop using products, change their workflow, or move on to greener pastures all the time. But, that doesn’t mean you should just forget about the users who may actually want to keep using your product!

How many times have you gotten an email, looked at it on your phone and said “I’ll take care of that when I get back to my computer” only to forget about it completely by the time you actually get to a computer? Or missed an email completely in the deluge of spam and drivel you get on a daily basis? By using the Zap we outlined above, you can send timed emails to users with expired licenses, urging them to renew or simply thanking them for using your product. Yep, thanking them even after they let their license lapse can actually improve conversions! By keeping your product in front of them and giving them another opportunity to renew a few days or weeks after the initial expiration email, you may regain users you would have otherwise lost.

So what makes this better than the existing expiration emails already supported by Software Licensing? Simply put, MailChimp is powerful. The power of MailChimp lies in its tracking abilities and the ability to segment subscribers. For example, you could build a series of email campaigns aimed at customer retention. An initial email could be sent when a license expires, prompting the user to renew. If a user opens the email, but doesn’t actually renew their license, you could then send a second email a few days later reminding them or even providing an incentive to renew. Similarly, if you have users worldwide you could use the tools provided by MailChimp to target individual users depending on where they live, or what their language is. This allows you to specifically send emails suited to a given user, at an appropriate time for that user.

Unlimited flexibility

That’s far from all you can do with Zapier though. The available app integrations provided by Zapier means you can configure it to do virtually anything with a little creativity. We aren’t going to go into all the possibilities at this time, but we’d love to hear what you use Zapier for! Maybe you’ll provide the inspiration for our next guide, or even give us a new idea to improve our own internal workflows! If you haven’t purchased your copy of our Zapier plugin yet, there’s never been a better time than today. Stop by the product page and get your copy now! If you’re already using Zapier, let us know in the comments below how you use it, and what new or unique workflows you have come up with. We’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

The post How to automate customer retention with Software Licensing and Zapier first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

This is due to many factors, including low-end hosting accounts, spam filters, and outdated email servers. Thankfully, there are a number of solutions to making email delivery nearly 100% reliable so that you can be assured email receipts, sale notifications, product submissions, and all other emails are delivered reliably.

Most hosting companies provide basic services for email delivery, meaning much of the time email is expected to just work. Unfortunately that’s often not the case, especially with lower-end and cheaper hosting accounts. There are several problems that frequently occur with hosting-included email delivery:

• Low sending limits, sometimes less than 250-500 emails per month
• Slow email processing, resulting in delayed delivery
• Poor support for modern HTML emails, resulting in frequent delivery failures
• Overly aggressive spam filters, resulting in emails getting improperly flagged as spam
• Shared email servers, meaning other accounts with the same company can negatively impact your service

If you discover that email delivery is not working reliably on your store, it could be due to one of these common factors. Even when email delivery is working reliably, it is still a good idea to consider using a service that is separate from your hosting company to manage email delivery.

The easiest way to resolve email delivery problems is to use a hosted service designed specifically around reliably sending emails.

These services create a connection between your eCommerce store and then all emails are routed through their servers.

Along with provided reliable and consistent email delivery, these services also offer a number of other benefits, including:

• Open rate reporting
• Delivery rate reporting
• Re-send capabilities
• Better spam protection
• Reputation monitoring
• Email authentication
• 24/7 technical support

When emails, whether they be purchase receipts, sale notifications, or other notifications for your store, are an integral part of your eCommerce site, it’s really important to ensure your emails work.

There are a number of services to choose from, so we’ve put together some of our favorites:

• SendGrid
• Mandrill (through MailChimp)
• Mailgun
• Amazon SES
• SparkPost

All five of these services include simple WordPress plugins available from the WordPress.org plugins repository that make it exceptionally simple and quick to connect your site to the service.

Email delivery is a common problem, especially in eCommerce. One of the best things you can do for your store’s reputation, day-to-day operations, and your own peace-of-mind is upgrade your site to use a dedicated email delivery service, removing the problem altogether!

The post More reliable email delivery first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

According to the Baymard Institute, an average of 68.81% of all online shopping carts are abandoned before completing a purchase. That’s a huge number and it does not take a lot of imagination to see why store owners can benefit greatly by implementing a sales recovery system.

Jilt, built by SkyVerge, Inc., helps eCommerce stores recover lost sales from cart abandonment and has recently launched a new integration for Easy Digital Downloads.

Before looking more closely at the features Jilt offers, let’s look at some quick numbers to see how effective cart recovery could be for you. Assume for a moment that your store earns $10,000 per month. How much of an impact on your annual revenue would it have if you increased sales by 25%?

Current sales = $10,000 per month
Current sales x 0.25 = $2,500 per month
$2,500 x 12 = $30,000 extra in annual sales

This means that by decreasing your abandonment rate by 25%, you could increase your annual revenue by $30,000. Applying this formula to your own site will give you a rough idea of how much you might increase your revenue simply by adding a good cart recovery system to your store.

Jilt is a full-featured cart recovery service and includes robust email campaigns, analytics on click and open rates, and a full reporting suite that makes it easy to see how effective your recovery campaigns are.

With Jilt you can easily create a series of automated email campaigns that are sent to customers after they abandon a checkout.

New campaigns can be added at anytime and Jilt allows you to create an unlimited number of campaigns, so, for example, you could send an email 24 hours after abandonment, three days after, 5 days after, and even a month after the customer abandons their checkout.

To provide accurate reports on how successful the email campaigns are, Jilt provides access to all abandoned and recovered orders so you can easily see which customers are coming back to complete their purchase.

The details of an abandoned order can be viewed at anytime. Store admins can also manually cancel follow-up emails for any customer when needed.

The analytics dashboard in Jilt provides insight into the total revenue recovered, the abandoned orders recovered, and what percentage of revenue has been recovered through Jilt’s email campaigns.

Registering an account at Jilt.com and connecting it to your Easy Digital Downloads store only takes a few minutes and, as they offer a 14 day free trial, you can set it up without any risk. If your store sells products for $29.99 or more, it only takes a single recovered sale to cover the cost of Jilt’s monthly subscription. That should make the decision to try it out incredibly easy.

For more information about using Jilt with Easy Digital Downloads, head over to Jilt’s website or read the extensive walk through available at SellWithWP.com.

The post Abandoned cart recovery with Jilt first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

When a product includes multiple purchase options, such as license levels, allowing customers to select the price option they wish to purchase from the checkout screen can help prevent customers from leaving the checkout screen if they change their mind on which option to purchase.

For example, if you sell a product that has three license options, customers may not be immediately sure which option they wish to purchase. It is common for customers to change their minds once they reach the checkout screen.

Giving customers a quick and easy way to update their option selection can greatly improve the likelihood of them completing their purchase. This is where Variable Pricing Switcher is valuable.

The Variable Pricing Switcher extension gives customers an option select menu on checkout when it is enabled for products in the cart.

If a customer wishes to change the option they are purchasing, they can simply select the new option from the menu and the checkout screen will be immediately refreshed and the shopping cart will show the newly selected option.

Typically it is best to remove distractions from the checkout screen, but in this scenario adding a new option actually reduces possible distractions by increasing the likelihood of customers staying on the checkout screen. By keeping customers on the checkout screen, they are more likely to complete their purchase.

While there are many ways to improve conversion rates, utilizing Variable Pricing Switcher for products where appropriate is one of the simplest.

The post Fast option switching at checkout with Variable Pricing Switcher first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

Among many other great features, ConvertKit features beautiful and fully responsive opt-in forms, a complete tool for building gorgeous landing pages, a full suite of automation tools, and even multi-day email courses. On top of all that, ConvertKit is exceptionally affordable, and scales with the growth of your business.

Connecting ConvertKit to your Easy Digital Downloads store is incredibly simple. We offer an easy-to-use extension that, once installed, will provide options to set up the subscription options for the products in your store.

Once a download product is connected to a list, and optionally set to add specific tags to subscribers, customers will be immediately subscribed to your ConvertKit account when purchasing the product(s) from your Easy Digital Downloads store.

After a customer is subscribed in ConvertKit, you can utilize ConvertKit’s tremendously powerful marketing features to continually communicate to that customer. Each store’s email marketing strategy will vary but ConvertKit can easily cover them all. Let’s look at a few examples of how you can use their tools to boost your email marketing success.

Follow-up email sequences

A common tactic employed by successful marketers is to place each subscriber into an automated sequence of follow-up emails that help onboard the customer to the product or service. This could include walk-throughs for getting started, advanced techniques for power users, information on where to find additional help, and even up-sells to other products and services offered by your company.

In ConvertKit, creating an automated email sequence is ridiculously easy.

A sequence can contain any number of emails, and you can easily configure when you want each individual email delivered. ConvertKit makes it even easier by providing suggested emails and schedules.

Once activated, this email sequence will be automatically delivered to all subscribers that match the configured forms and segments. You can easily limit the sequence to specific groups of subscribers, such as just those who have purchased a particular product.

Manual broadcasts

Automation tools are incredibly useful and should always be used in successful email marketing, but sometimes you need to send a manually created email to a specific group of subscribers. ConvertKit can do that with ease.

With a broadcast, you first configure the exact group(s) of subscribers that should receive the email and then compose it.

Powerful automation

One of the features that makes ConvertKit especially great for email marketing is their suite of automation tools. These tools let you perform certain actions on subscribers when specific events occur, such as adding a tag to a subscriber when they successfully complete an email sequence.

These automation rules allow you to truly own your email marketing and take it to the next level. They will allow you to easily segment subscribers into specific groups, put subscribers into sequences, unsubscribe customers from sequences, opt-out of or into specific emails, and so much more.

ConvertKit has even made it easier by providing blueprints for common automation rules.

Learn from the experts

ConvertKit not only excels at providing the tools to help you win at email marketing with your eCommerce store, they also literally wrote a book on how to master it.

The book is free to download and provides tremendous insights into building successful email marketing strategies.

The post Subscribe customers to email lists in ConvertKit first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

One of the most common needs we see in our support channel is an easy way to create custom checkout forms. For non-developers, custom form building is difficult enough. Bring eCommerce functionality into the picture and even the do-it-yourself crowd struggles.

The goal of this article is to help every Easy Digital Downloads user, regardless of skill level, learn how to build custom checkout forms without writing any code.

Minimum required plugins

There are at least four plugins that must work together to make this happen. I’ll explain each of them below.

Easy Digital Downloads

While Easy Digital Downloads has its own core checkout functionality, the basic system only supports one “universal” checkout form. Even if you customize the form, it will still be the same form for all transactions regardless of what is in the cart.

Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is an advanced form builder for WordPress. You can use it to create anything from the most basic contact form to complex forms that serve any purpose. With features like conditional field logic, entry organization and presentation, and add-on support, it is no doubt one of the most popular premium WordPress plugins on the market.

Gravity Forms Checkout

Gravity Forms Checkout is the bridge between Easy Digital Downloads and Gravity Forms. In order to create multiple custom checkout forms for your products, this Easy Digital Downloads extension is a necessary piece of the puzzle.

Gravity Forms Payment Add-On

Lastly, custom checkout forms created through Gravity Forms require that you use Gravity Forms add-ons to add additional functionality to the forms themselves. That means Easy Digital Downloads payment gateways will not work with Gravity Forms Checkout.

To process payments, you must use payment gateways built for Gravity Forms. In this article, we will reference the Gravity Forms PayPal Payments Standard add-on. There are additional options available like Stripe and Authorize.net.

Creating custom checkout forms

Now that you have all of the required plugins, let’s get started. We will walk through the creation of a basic checkout form for a single product. Follow along with the steps if you are prepared to do so.

At this point, you should already have products in your store that you are wanting to sell. Please note that even if you have the aforementioned tools activated or in use, your Easy Digital Downloads store will still function in its original manner.

Custom checkout forms with Gravity Forms Checkout simply adds another option. Your products can still be purchased the traditional way.

Create new forms with Gravity Forms

For the form creation process, think of it as Easy Digital Downloads integrating with Gravity Forms, instead of the other way around. With that approach, it makes sense that to create a new custom checkout form, you would first need to create a new form in Gravity Forms.

With Gravity Forms activated, go to Forms -> New Form in your WordPress dashboard. You will be prompted to give the form a title and optional description. Do so and create the form.

Adding basic fields

At this stage, you have a form entry created but it does not have any fields. All it has is a title and a description which will automatically output by default, though you can hide them if you choose to do so.

You will need to collect at least an email address from your customers. So we will add an email address field to our form to get things started.

On the right side of the screen, you will see several expandable sections of field groupings. The Email field can be found in the Advanced Fields section. To add the Email field to your form, simply click button labeled Email.

Clicking the button will add the field to your form (left side of the screen) with minimal default content. Move your cursor over the new field and when you see the visual indicator that you are hovering, single click the field to view its options.

The Email field is very simple and only needs one adjustment. Under the Rules section, mark the field as Required. With this configuration in place, the checkout form will not submit without an email address.

Many of you will also want to add fields like first and last name. We will not discuss those in this article but the process is very similar to adding the Email field.

Now that we have a required email address field, let’s add one more field before moving to product related fields.

Just for structure and becoming more familiar with Gravity Forms, we’ll add a field to the form called a Section. Sections are an easy way to break your form down into visual sections that help with the flow of filling out the form.

The Section field can be found in the Standard Fields section. Add it to your form and expand it to view its options.

Based on the field type and the fact that we will be adding a Product field next, let’s consider this Section field as a heading for the product field display.

Adjust the Field Label and Description fields to your liking. Something along the lines of “Product Information” as the Field Label and any small details you want to disclose about the product itself as the Description.

At any time during the creation process, you can preview the structure of your form by clicking the Preview link located in the navigation menu just above the form builder. Please note that some fields require that you update the form to preview.

The preview of your form is not a representation of how it will be designed on the front end. Instead, use the preview to look at the structure and functionality. As of now, we have nothing more than an email field, a section title (label), and a description.

If you are not already familiar with Gravity Forms, what you have done here so far is how you would use the form builder for any type of form that you create, not just with Easy Digital Downloads. If you are unclear on how the basic form builder functions, please visit the Gravity Forms documentation.

At this stage of the process, your form preview should look similar to this:

With the form title, form description, email field, and product information section in place, we can add a product to the form.

Adding product fields

Remember, this is an extremely basic form and its purpose is to serve as the checkout for one particular product. For those who would rather have a custom checkout form for a specific product rather than using its Add to Cart button and traditional checkout, this form would be an ideal replacement.

That said, we will add and display the Product field to the form for informational purposes. The customer is being informed about which product the form will grant him or her access to along with its price.

On the right side of the screen, find the Pricing Fields section. In that section, select to add a new Product field by clicking the button labeled Product. Once added, expand the field.

I will be selling a product called “Example Product,” which has already been created as a Download entry. After filling out the Field Label and Description sections, I will connect my Product field to Easy Digital Downloads by selecting “Example Product” from the Connect to EDD Download select menu.

Continuing with the settings, I will set my Field Type to “Single Product” with a Price of $10. Please note that because I am in full control of the form, I must set the price myself. It is not pulled from the Download entry.

Lastly, I will check the Disable quantity field box, and set the only Rules as Required.

Let’s take a look at an up-to-date preview of my custom checkout form.

With just those fields in place, you have created a form that is prepared to sell “Example Product” to your customers. All you have to do now is add fields to accept the payment.

Please note that displaying the Product field is optional. While the field must be present in order to connect the form to the product, you can select “Hidden” as the Field Type which will include the field upon submission but the customer will never see the field itself.

The reason you may want to do this is because this checkout form can be embedded (via shortcode) into a page that already gives important information about the product, including the price. If this is the case, displaying the Product field in the form can be redundant and even confusing to the customer.

Just remember that the field must be present.

At this point, you should save your form. The next step will require that you visit other pages to configure payment options. Once completed, we will revisit the form.

Adding payment fields

Now we are free to accept payments from customers. To do that, we have to set the form up to accept at least one payment method. As mentioned previously, we will use the PayPal Payments Standard add-on for Gravity Forms to process our payments.

Depending on which payment gateway you choose, you may or may not have to add a direct field to your form. For example, if you are using the Stripe add-on, it will add a Credit Card field to the form builder that you can select like you’ve done previously.

However, the PayPal Payments Standard add-on does not. Instead, you would need to follow instructions directly from Gravity Forms for setting up your forms to use PayPal for customer transactions.

In this article, we will not cover those details. They apply to Gravity Forms whether it is integrated with Easy Digital Downloads or not. So you’ll want to use the Gravity Forms documentation to find the docs that are relevant to your needs.

Complete all required steps for setting up your payment gateways. If a new field must be added to the form, do so following the same methods as described above.

Adding final payment amount (total)

While configuring your payment option(s), you would have been instructed to create a Feed for each type of payment you would accept. PayPal Payments Standard users would have visited this documentation.

In the creation of that Feed, you would have had to set the Payment Amount for the Feed. What this means is every time your checkout form is submitted, the customer is to pay a certain amount and the Feed needs to know where you pull that amount from.

The Payment Amount setting must be set to pull data from one of your form fields that holds the form’s total value. However, we have not set that field up just yet. Save your Feed progress and go back to your saved form so we can add the field.

On the right side of the form builder screen, select to add a Total field to your form from the Pricing Fields section. Once added, expand the new field.

You will see that there aren’t very many settings. The field is designed to automatically calculate the form total based on information it gets from the other form fields and possible customer interaction.

With this field added to your form and your form updated, you may now set this field as the Payment Amount in your Feed.

Continue to follow the rest of the Gravity Forms documentation to finalize your Feed settings and save the new Feed.

Using your custom checkout form

Now that you have created a custom checkout form that is prepared to accept payments, you need to display your form. Gravity Forms makes that extremely easy with the [[gravityform]] shortcode. On any page, post, or custom post type you’d like, click Add Form button to add a form to your content.

Once your page is saved, the form will output on the front end and be ready to accept payments for whatever product you have configured.

Please note that if PayPal Payments Standard is the only gateway you have configured, no PayPal related text will display on the form (unless you added custom text). Simply filling out the form and submitting will redirect the customer to PayPal to complete the payment.

Conditional logic examples

It would be impossible to cover every possible form configuration in this one article. However, we can share a few examples to help you get started with making your form smarter and more user friendly.

Let’s look at an example form that we use here on the Easy Digital Downloads site. To help new users choose the extensions they need to get their stores up and running, we’ve created the Starter Package. (Update: our Starter Package is no longer live, as we’ve made changes to our overall purchase options. You may continue reading as if it exists.)

This standalone form does not depend on the shopping cart functionality.

Separated into logical sections that include extension selections, all that a customer needs to do is select the extensions that fit his or her business needs, enter personal and payment information, agree to the terms, and complete the purchase.

Not only is the form fully custom, it can easily be one of many custom checkout forms on the site. With the information above, you can be well on your way to having just that.

Custom product packages

On our Starter Package form, you may have noticed the use of focused extension sections that allow the customer to pick and choose certain products. Let’s look specifically at the Marketing section.

Whenever a user checks a box for one of our marketing extensions, the extension is added to his or her custom starter package, thus changing the total of the form.

In order to achieve this, you must:

1. Add a new Checkboxes field to your form. Once expanded, three default checkbox options will appear under the Choices section. If you intend to use this checkbox field to allow the selection of five products, for example, you must create five choices that represent the names of your five products. Make this a required field.
2. Add a new Product field to your form. Configure the Product field to connect to one of the Easy Digital Downloads products that you referenced from your checkbox choices. On the General tab settings for the Product, set its Field Type to “Single Product” (it cannot be hidden) and give it a price. On the Advanced tab, check the Enable Conditional Logic setting and set the field to only show if the correct “Choice” from your checkbox field in step 1 is selected.
3. Repeat step 2 for all Choices created in step 1.

What this does is only add Product fields to the form when their conditions are met. Those conditions are checked Choices from the checkbox field. As long as those Choices represent your products and are linked to to them through conditional field logic, customers can create their own custom packages.

Payment method selector

Towards the end of our Starter Package form, we instruct the customer to select a payment method. We accept payments through Stripe and PayPal.

As mentioned above, different methods are used to add fields to the form for payment information. PayPal Payments Standard does not require a field but Stripe requires several. Stripe’s Credit Card field and an additional Address field have to be added to the form to process credit card payments.

In order to create this, you must:

1. Add a new Radio Buttons field to your form. Once expanded, three default radio options will appear under the Choices section. Since we are allowing customers to choose between two payment methods, you must have two choices that represent the names of the payment methods. In our case, we chose Credit / Debit Card and PayPal as choices. Make this a required field.
2. Add all necessary fields for accepting credit card payments based on the instructions from Gravity Forms. Configure the fields to collect all of the required information. On the Advanced tab of all credit card related fields, check the Enable Conditional Logic setting and set the fields to only show if the correct “Choice” from your radio buttons field in step 1 is selected.
3. Because PayPal does not require any fields in the form, all you need to do is go to your PayPal Feed for the form and in its settings, check the Enable Conditional Logic setting and set the Feed to only be used if the correct “Choice” from your radio buttons field in step 1 is selected (PayPal).

The choice is yours

This is a difficult thing to write about because once you grasp the concept of conditional field logic, you really have a blank canvas to play with every time you create a custom checkout form.

We can provide examples but the possibilities are endless. The key to it all is the conditional logic and the strategic use of Product fields.

It is up to you to decide if your products need a more specialized checkout form. Likewise, creating something similar to our Starter Package is a business choice that only you can make.

Play around with the features to see if it sparks a few lucrative ideas.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I used Gravity Forms Checkout with the Recurring Payments extension?

No. Recurring Payments does not integrate with the above configuration.

What about email receipts and purchase confirmation?

The default Easy Digital Downloads Purchase Confirmation redirect no longer applies. However, Gravity Forms will allow you to set up custom confirmation behavior if you choose to do so. A standard page with static links are recommended.

The email receipt will still be sent to the user containing any product related information you have in your receipt template. This behavior does not change.

Tip: from a custom confirmation that you create in Gravity Forms, direct your customers to check their emails after purchase and link them to important information that could minimize confusion.

If I allow customers to create custom packages, are they processed as Bundles?

The Easy Digital Downloads core bundle functionality does not apply. If a customer purchases 10 products through one of your custom checkout forms, each product is considered a separate purchase.

How do I use discounts?

In order to give discounts to customers using the custom checkout form, you must simply set the Product fields to have a discounted price. Customers will not be able to enter a discount code like the default checkout form.

How do I style my custom checkout forms?

It is important to note that all we have discussed here is building the form and its functionality. These are generic form elements and must be styled by your theme or your own custom CSS just like any other HTML element.

When testing your form, be sure to test for proper functionality. Whether or not it looks pleasing to the eye is not an indication of how it works. As you would imagine, creating the Starter Package display took several hours of custom design work.

If you have about what was mentioned in this article, please feel free to leave a question below in the comments.

For support, please use our support form.

The post Custom checkout forms with Gravity Forms Checkout first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

Marketo found that repeat customers tend to spend as much as 67% more than one-time customers. They also reported that loyal customers can often be worth ten times more than the value of their first purchase.

These are not numbers to ignore or dismiss. A successful email marketing plan is crucially important to the growth of your business. There are hundreds of tools available to help with setting up automated email campaigns, but one of our favorites here at Easy Digital Downloads is Zapier.

Zapier is an exceptionally powerful tool that lets you easily connect your Easy Digital Downloads store to more than 400 other web applications. A few examples of these web applications include MailChimp, ConvertKit, Gmail, AWeber, and so many more.

Let’s take a quick look at how we can use Zapier to set up follow-up emails for customers after they make their first purchase.

First, we need to add a new Zap. This is easily done by clicking the MAKE A ZAP! button:

Zapier will then ask us to choose a Trigger App. For this, we’ll choose Easy Digital Downloads:

We will now be presented with a list of triggers. Since we want to send an email when a new order is placed, we will select New Order.

Zapier will now ask you to select an Easy Digital Downloads account to use. Select an existing account or use the Connect a New Account button at the bottom of the screen. After your account is connected, you can choose an Action App. This is the application we will use to send the follow-up email to the customer.

For our example we will use Gmail as our action app.

On the next screen we are provided with options to configure the email that is sent. Use the Insert a Field button to set dynamic values automatically from what is passed to Zapier from Easy Digital Downloads.

We can configure the exact subject line and message for the email as well.

For this example, we’ve used a simple email and a simple set of triggers. We could also easily set it up so that emails are only delivered to specific subsets of customers, such as those that make purchases greater than $300.

In just a few minutes, we have set up an automated email that will get delivered to customers after they make a purchase. Now, you might be asking something like “why not just use the email receipts built into Easy Digital Downloads?” The answer is simple: by utilizing Zapier, we can set up customer-specific emails and select the exact conditions that trigger email A vs email B. For example, if a customer has just made their very first purchase, you might want version A of an email, but then send version B to all returning customers.

There are a lot of options for what you could include in the email, so here are a few ideas:

• A simple “thank you” message
• Links to documentation and support resources
• Discount codes for future purchases
• Answers to common questions

We can also take this integration much, much further by leveraging automated email routines offered by services like MailChimp and ConvertKit. Instead of sending a single welcome email, how about adding the customer to an automation routine that handles sending them a series of emails over 30 days?

With Zapier, we can easily connect Easy Digital Downloads to web applications like ConvertKit and then utilize the automation sequences.

If you are unfamiliar with automation sequences, take a look at the Automation page on ConvertKit’s website. Similar features are also offered by MailChimp and many of the other email marketing platforms. We recently wrote a post that shows how to setup automation through MailChimp as well.

While there are limitless possibilities, we recommend email sequences along these lines:

• Send a welcome email at time of purchase with links to resources.
• Send a check-in email 7 – 15 days later and ask how they are doing. Do they need help? Perhaps offer a discount on additional purchases.
• Send a discount or special offer at 30 days to encourage the customer to become a return customer.

You can also easily segment emails like these even more. Some examples include:

• Send an email after processing a refund to ask if there is anything that could have been done better.
• Send an email when license keys (if using something like our Software Licensing extension) expire to invite them back.
• Place VIP customers (those who purchase certain amounts or more) into special automation routines with better discounts and offers.

Automation is easily one of the best things you can do for your eCommerce business. Email marketing has also been proven time and time again to be incredibly valuable. Why are you not automating your email marketing? It’s time to get started if you are not already.

The post Automated follow-up emails with Zapier first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

Because of this reality, we oftentimes view extensions, extended functionality wrapped in separate WordPress plugins, as only-if-needed tools for enhancing our systems. While that view may not drive a business into the ground, it is certainly a strategy based on reacting to problems as opposed to making proactive decisions.

In this article, I’ll share with you several ways to improve customer experience before the apparent need for improvement arises. I’ll do this with a collection of noteworthy extensions that otherwise may go unnoticed for many store owners.

Recently Viewed Items

Let’s start at the beginning of a potential customer’s experience on your site.

Before any sales are made or items are added to the cart, most visitors are going to look around your store to see what interests them.

From a visitor’s standpoint, adding an item to the shopping cart is a commitment. However, without doing so, there is virtually no other way to easily keep track of every product that has been viewed other than memory.

This creates a gap between the shopping cart commitment and the visitor’s willingness to backtrack and find previously viewed products. This gap could be the difference between a transaction and a failed conversion.

Recently Viewed Items aims to fill that gap by instantly collecting data about a visitor’s viewing behavior and presenting those products at the most opportune times as they continue to move around your site.

This clever extension not only improves customer experience by indirectly interacting with the visitor in a subtle, but focused manner, it also solves a problem for you, the store owner, that you may not have thought to address before.

The Goal

Secure the first level of commitment from visitors by showing them which items they found interesting enough to view and encouraging them to add those items to the cart.

Learn More About Recently Viewed Items

Checkout Message

Now that we’ve made an enhancement to assist potential customers in getting items added to the cart, it’s time for checkout. Needless to say, this is an important part of the process as the conversion is not made until the transaction is completed.

For some visitors, this is the perfect time to second guess their decisions. Is this the right product for me? Will it actually meet my needs? Is it designed to work with my other tools?

All of these are valid questions. For many store owners, they are presented in support as pre-sale questions. What many store owners fail to realize is that a pre-sale question may have been just seconds away from being a completed transaction.

Checkout Message gives you the opportunity to answer important questions and provide notes to help potential customers feel more comfortable with the decision to purchase, which is a great way to improve customer experience.

The great thing about Checkout Message is that it takes an AND/OR approach to displaying messages. You can create an unlimited number of messages in your system and choose when to display specific messages based on things like cart total, cart quantity, and even which specific items are in the cart.

The Goal

Use data you already have about your potential customers’ frequently asked pre-sale questions and allow Checkout Message to answer those questions without delaying or possibly preventing the transaction.

Learn More About Checkout Message

Auto Register

Congratulations! All doubt has been removed about your products and the potential customer is ready to make things official. The only thing that can get in the way now is your checkout form.

Is it too long? Is it confusing? Does it feel like more of a commitment than your product is worth? Of course this is all subjective. However, the truth is the more streamlined you can make the checkout process, the better.

At a minimum, Easy Digital Downloads will require an email address and first name to complete the checkout form. If you allow guest purchases, this may be enough and those two fields do not present much of a threat to the flow of the checkout process.

What happens when your system does not allow guest purchases and you need a potential customer to create an account at checkout, assuming he or she is not a return customer? This forces you to add a registration form to your checkout form!

Auto Register is designed to use as little information as possible about customers to create WordPress accounts, that way the customers do not have to go through the hassle of filling out additional fields themselves.

The customer email address, which is already required by the default checkout form, will be used as the username for the WordPress account. Likewise, a secure password will be automatically generated and emailed to the user upon purchase.

The Goal

Avoid the need to sacrifice customer experience for store needs. Auto Register makes it easy for your system to collect the information it needs without complicating the checkout process for the customers.

Learn More About Auto Register

Invoices

Finally, you’ve converted a visitor into a customer with as little friction as possible. While this is an accomplishment, the important part is just getting started.

Customer experience extends well beyond the initial transaction. While your product itself will have a significant impact on the overall experience, secondary interactions like support and account management can be the difference between a one-time customer and a repeat customer.

Auto Register ensured that customers were able to log in at any time to view their account pages that you’ve set up using Easy Digital Downloads’ shortcodes. Most users will view the [purchase_history] shortcode’s output to see things like product information, purchase receipts, and even gain access to previously purchased products.

Invoices adds another element to this output that may prove handy for your customers by allowing them to help themselves instead of contacting your support.

The Invoices extension gives logged-in customers the ability to customize, generate, and even print purchase invoices whenever they please. These invoices can be used for tax purposes or even just maintaining personal records.

The Goal

Empower your customers in more ways than just providing a product or service. Give them the ability to interact with your system in ways that create confidence and trust.

Learn More About Invoices

Conclusion

Running an online business is a dynamic task. There is no official blueprint that every store owner can follow and have guaranteed success. Tools like Easy Digital Downloads will certainly get you started, but how your business operates will determine how you grow.

Periodically analyze the information you have about your customers and how they interact with not only your products, but your business itself. Think of ways you can make proactive decisions that solve not-so-obvious problems for your customers.

Several of our handy extensions provide a great way to do just that and are specifically designed to improve customer experience.

The post Improve customer experience using extensions first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

68.55% is a huge number, but let’s put it in perspective. Assume for a moment that you run a store that generates $10,000 in monthly revenue. What would your revenue look like if you increased the number of sales by just 25%? We can use the following example:

Current sales = $10,000 per month
Current sales x 0.25 = $2,500 per month
$2,500 x 12 = $30,000 extra in annual sales

By decreasing your abandonment rate by 25%, you could increase your annual revenue by $30,000.

What is your abandonment rate? Do you know? A huge majority of store owners have no idea what it is, nor do they realize how much potential revenue they’re leaving on the table. Assuming that your store is relatively average (and that’s a good thing), your abandonment rate is likely in the range of 50-80%.

CartHook automates the sales recovery process by capturing email addresses as they are entered on the checkout screen. Once the email address is captured, it is placed into an email campaign that delivers reminder emails to the customer after set time periods, such as 5 hours after abandonment, 24 hours later, and 5 days after leaving checkout. If the customer completes the purchase at anytime after clicking on a link included in one of the emails, the cart is considered recovered.

Let’s look a bit more closely at what the flow of events looks like.

Customer lands on checkout screen

At this point the customer is pretty committed to making their purchase, so they go ahead and enter their email. The customer is then asked for payment details. Here they either change their mind or get distracted (perhaps get up to go find their wallet) and they end up not coming back.

The cart is abandoned.

One hour later CartHook sends the first email

CartHook automatically detects the contents of the shopping cart and then uses that information to fill out the first email reminder that gets sent one hour after the cart is abandoned. It looks something like this:

If the customer clicks Review Your Cart and completes the purchase, the cart is successfully recovered. If the customer ignores the email or doesn’t complete the purchase  for any reason, they remain in the campaign.

24 hours later, CartHook sends the second email

At the 24 hour mark, CartHook sends a second email (as long as the customer has not completed the purchase and has not opted out). Again, this email includes details of the shopping cart:

Five days later, one final email is sent

After five days, if the customer still has not completed the order, a final email is sent.

These emails alone can dramatically decrease the percentage of abandoned carts on your site. The screenshots above are actually from our own CartHook campaign that we started on December 16th.

Since starting our own CartHook sales recovery campaign, we have recovered over $2,400 in revenue, and that was in less than three weeks.

Here’s a screenshot from our own dashboard showing the stats for December:

Remember, we enabled our campaign on the 16th of December, so these stats represent just two weeks. In that time, we recovered 22.12% of all abandoned carts. Previously, our abandonment rate was 28.73%, and we dropped that by 22.12%. This improvement resulted in $2,198.50 in recovered revenue.

If we extrapolate those numbers out, we can expect to recover more than $25,000 this year alone, through a service that costs as little $99 per month. Would you pay $1,200 a year to earn $25,000? Yes, yes, yes.

CartHook is exceptionally easy to setup and configure, and they offer a free 30 day trial. We saw results in less than two weeks so 30 days is more than plenty to determine if the service will work for you.

The installation instructions on CartHook’s website will show you step-by-step details on how to setup CartHook with Easy Digital Downloads.

Don’t you think it’s time you started recovering those abandoned carts?

The post Recover lost revenue with CartHook – We recovered over $2,400 in two weeks first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

Did you know that there are also many free extensions for Easy Digital Downloads? They can be found both on our own site as well as on WordPress.org. We’re going to take a look at four of them in this post.

EDD First Time Buyer’s Gift

The first thing you want from a customer after the first sale is the second sale. This extension allows you to offer a gift of a discount code to first time buyers, which provides an excellent incentive for your customers to come back later and buy more things. Making people feel comfortable with your store through habit and convenience will make them want to come back over and over again.

Download for free.

Easy Digital Downloads Digital Signature

When you need people to agree to something, and have it really mean something, you want a signature on it. This extension uses WP e-Signature, which are legally binding and already accepted by the US court system. Signing can be done with a mouse on a computer, or a finger or stylus on a tablet or phone, making it easy to get a real signature while remaining entirely digital.

Download for free.

Easy Digital Downloads – Additional Shortcodes

This extension makes it easy to add some conditional content to your site. For example, show only if the cart is empty [edd_cart_is_empty]Content Here[/edd_cart_is_empty]. There are several others, and they can make your site seem much more intelligent, making your customers feel more unique and cared for. Customers who feel cared for and comfortable, typically buy more product.

Download for free.

EDD Coming Soon

Marketing is what drives sales. Getting your product to market early is hugely important, even if it’s in name only. EDD Coming Soon allows you to put a product in your store, but instead of an Add to Cart button it says “Coming Soon”, with no option to buy. This gets your product ideas out there in front of people to raise awareness and interest.

Download for free.

In Summary

Your store can be generating more sales for you with Easy Digital Downloads extensions. Each of the plugins above is free and none of them require any coding knowledge at all. Simply search for them in the Add New Plugin section of your WordPress web site and you’ll be on your way to higher earnings in no time!

The post Four Free Extensions To Improve Your Store first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

In this post we’re going to talk about how to set up a testing server. Staging servers are intended to be permanent long term clones of your live site. Testing servers are intended to be stressed, broken, thrown away, and easily recreated for more testing.

I’m going to start right out by saying that the tool we’re going to use is DesktopServer Premium from ServerPress.  It costs $99.95 at the time of this writing, but will prove to be invaluable.

Let’s get started.

Step 1: Get DesktopServer installed

DesktopServer is available for either Windows or OS X.  For the purposes of this post you don’t need to set up a WordPress site or anything, simply get DesktopServer installed.

Step 2: Make a backup of your live site

DesktopServer can import backup files created by BackupBuddy, Duplicator, BackWP Up, BackUp WordPress, InfiniteWP & ManageWP.  For this blog post we’re going to us Duplicator, but any of these will work just as well, and the instructions will be the same.

In Duplicator, click the Create New button:

Once you have a completed backup, download the Archive file for it.

Note: you do NOT need the Installer file for any of the backup options.  Only the archive file.

Step 3: Import backup file into DesktopServer

In the desktop server app, choose the “Export, import, or share a website” option:On the next page choose “Import an existing WordPress website archive”:

Lastly you’ll be asked to make up a domain name and load up your backup file:

After you hit Next DesktopServer will set up the local web site for you, and present you with a link to the domain name you made up.  Below is a screenshot of Safari showing the site I made for this blog post:

Step 4: Configure for testing

At this point you have an exact copy of your live site.  All the products, settings, images; everything is there.

Testing new features or updates on your new testing server requires no special configuration or settings, except for when testing payments.   In order to safely test those you’ll want to configure your payment gateways for Test Mode.

In Downloads → Settings → Payment Gateways you’ll find the Test Mode switch right at the top:

Additionally you may wish to use a Sandbox for your payment gateway.  We have documentation on how to set that up for both PayPal and Amazon Payments.  Creating a Sandbox will really only need to be done once, and then you can use it for all of your tests in the future.

Also keep in mind that payment gateways that want to access your site probably won’t work with a local testing environment.  Your local server isn’t accessable from the web.

Step 5: Test and test some more

At this point you’re ready to test your site.  Upload new versions of plugins or themes and try your very hardest to break this new local site you’ve built.  Ideally you’ll have a battery of standard tests you run on your site.  If you don’t, now is a great time to make one.  Simply keep notes of everything you test, and test the same things every time.  Over time your list will grow as you find new things to test.

Make sure you read through the changelog for the software release you’re testing.  Make sure you test each of the items that have been changed, added, or deleted.  Testing your site is a science, and will take practice.

Bonus round

After you’ve gotten your local testing environment installed and configured for test mode, use your backup software (which should already be installed in your testing environment) to make a new backup and save it to your computer.

Then you can use DesktopServer to Remove your new testing server and make a new one.  Except this time all your settings will be pre-configured for testing, and you can immediately start testing again.  This is particularly useful when you’re running destructive tests like deleteing products, or running so many tests that resetting would be painful.

Summary

The process above can be summarized like this:

• Backup your live site
• Import it into DesktopServer
• Configure for testing
• Test it to death
• Optionally repeat

If you’re already running regular backups on your site (which you should be) then step one is fairly moot.  You simply grab the latest and import it.

One last thing that’s important to note, this process is NOT specific to Easy Digital Downloads.  You should go through this process with every change that could break your site.  When there’s a new version of WordPress coming out, make a testing server and try the betas.  Your designer has a new theme you should try out?  Make a testing server.

Once you get comfortable with it, making a testing server really only takes minutes, and there’s no excuse for not using it.

The post A Testing Server The Easy Way first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

That’s great for those who need to distribute files, but what about our users who need to sell access to content? For example, what happens if your products are in the form of articles, or perhaps streaming videos? Thanks to the extensible nature of Easy Digital Downloads, we have the world’s easiest solution for selling that too.

Let’s have a look at the Content Restriction extension and how to use it to sell access to content alongside (or not) digital files.

What is Content Restriction?

The Content Restriction extension provides a straightforward process for restricting access to content based on purchases through Easy Digital Downloads.

A basic example of this functionality and its usefulness would be requiring that your site visitors purchase Product A in order to see a post that outlines important details about the product’s usage.

Obviously, not every one of your site visitors would need to see that article. Likewise, depending on how sensitive the information is, Content Restriction may also play a role in preventing unauthorized users from being able to access vital information about the product.

This is just one use-case. There are several more situations where restricting all kinds of content becomes useful. While there is no way we can list them all, here are a few examples:

• control viewing access to streaming video by embedding it into a restricted post
• block access to bbPress support forums based on product purchases
• hide links to free download items behind a paywall
• and the list goes on

To fully understand the purpose of Content Restriction, it is important to understand what it is not. Next, we’ll outline the difference between Content Restriction and a typical membership plugin.

Content Restriction vs. Membership Plugins

As mentioned above, Content Restriction is an extension of Easy Digital Downloads. That said, its foundation is rooted in the functionality of Easy Digital Downloads.

In a typical membership plugin, customers must purchase access to membership levels. Then, based on their membership level, they’re given access to certain content or features. At its core, that makes the actual purchase of a membership level the product.

With Content Restriction, as it is based on Easy Digital Downloads, the Download entry is still the product that must be purchased and the access to content granted to the user is somewhat secondary.

So while Content Restriction has the ability to behave much like a membership plugin, it’s more of a membership platform integrated into an online store.

Your product entries in Easy Digital Downloads remain the focal point for stats and reporting while selling access to content becomes a secondary possibility.

Content Restriction Example Use-case

The most straightforward way to sell access to content would be to restrict a WordPress post or page to the purchase of one or more products.

For example, you could have two separate products in your store; one product is an eBook while the other product, presented as an up-sell, is a 1-hour consultation session. Creating the eBook product entry can be done using Easy Digital Downloads’ basic functionality. However, the consultation may need to be discussed and scheduled beforehand via email.

Perhaps the customer is required to fill out a special contact form to initiate the consultation and you are using a tool that easily embeds single contact forms into page content with a shortcode.

In order to not only make sure that customers who have purchased the 1-hour consultation have access to the form, but also that they have purchased the eBook which is directly related to the consultation focus, it is necessary to restrict the WordPress page displaying the contact form to users who have purchased both products.

Content Restriction is capable of doing just that.

With just that configuration, Content Restriction is able to restrict access to the consultation form based on the purchase of two specific Download entries.

Content Restriction even has a built-in [edd_restrict] shortcode that allows you to restrict just the content you want hidden while surrounding content remains visible to all users.

Of course, there are many more examples of where selling access to content is a desirable feature. With support for most WordPress post types, Easy Digital Downloads and Content Restriction is an easy way to have that functionality up and running in just minutes.

Additional Details

In the above example, I showed you how easy it is to sell access to content alongside a standard product. However, you do not have to sell a digital product at all.

As with any other product, a Download entry created specifically to grant access to content does not have to include a digital file. Your users can still add the product to their carts and complete the checkout process. They will also still be redirected to a purchase confirmation page for their order.

On the purchase confirmation page, a new section is added linking them directly to the content they have been granted access to.

The purchase confirmation page is also where they would normally find links to download their files. If there are no files to download, a message displays telling them so. To reduce confusion, you could even remove that message using Downloads As Services.

With the right approach, you can configure your store to include no downloadable files at all and only sell access to content.

Beyond the Download

Let Content Restriction open the door to more possibilities for your business.

Software developers, could you increase revenue by selling access to advanced development articles for your products? Musicians, perhaps your following is loyal enough to pay for viewing an embedded live stream of your talents?

Get creative. If you have questions about a use-case, feel free to ask us a question and we’ll be happy to help you get started.

The post Sell access to content with Content Restriction first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

In eCommerce terms, friction is anything that slows down the customer in the buying process.  One more field to fill out, one more checkbox to agree to, one more page for questions, etc.

The more steps people have to take to buy something, the less likely they are to follow through, or maybe even start. The easier it is for a person to buy something the more likely they are to do it. It’s been shown over and over and over again; reduce the friction in a sale and sales as a whole go up.

Stripe Checkout

Not long ago Stripe released a new payment system called Stripe Checkout. Its main purpose is to make it as absolutely simple as possible to check out. It isn’t just for WordPress, it can be implemented on any web site fairly easily.

The magic of Stripe Checkout is that it simply pops up a small window asking for payment information when the customer clicks “Buy”. Once they submit the payment info then they have access to the product.  Simple.

Stripe in Easy Digital Downloads

Stripe Checkout is available in Easy Digital Downloads of course, and I’m going to tell you how to make it work.

First make sure you have the Stripe Payment Gateway for Easy Digitial Downloads.  It’s available in the addon store here on our site.  We have some excellent documentation on how to set that up.

Next we want to make sure that when customers click a “Buy” button they’re not simply adding something to a cart, but actually checking out. It should do that automatically for normal “Buy” buttons, but if you’re making a custom one with a shortcode make sure you have Direct Purchase Link set.  You can see an example below.

In the screenshot below you’ll see what the shortcode will look like in your editor.

Pulling it All Together

Now when a customer clicks a “Buy” button on your site they’re going to have an experiece similar to this:

As soon as that process is done the customer is redirected to a “success” page and is given a link to their downloadable product. The demonstration you see above is just under 30 seconds!

This means your customer could go from viewing your product to owning your product in about 30 seconds.

Making it Happen

If you’re not already a Stripe customer I recommend it.  It’s inexpensive, great customer service, and they have an exceptional platform.

Once you’re a Stripe customer you can follow the instructions above and working in less than 30 minutes, barring unexpected problems.

Live Demonstration

To help better illustrate how Stripe Checkout works, you can use the purchase button below to complete a real purchase of our Stripe Payment Gateway. Don’t worry, you can click purchase just to see how it works without being required to enter any payment information.

The post Frictionless checkouts with Stripe first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

The automation feature of MailChimp provides a simple, yet astronomically powerful system for sending welcome and follow up emails to customers after they complete a purchase on your website.

Before diving into the specifics of MailChimp’s automation suite, let’s look at a few example use cases where you may want to utilize automatic emails after purchase:

• Special care or usage instructions for the purchased product
• Setup documentation and FAQs for a product
• Instructions for activating a license key
• Coupon codes or special offers for follow up purchases
• Just to say “Hello!”

These are all good examples of automatic emails that could benefit you and your store. The good news is that setting up these kinds of emails takes only a few minutes and is really, really simple.

First, if you don’t have one, sign up for a free MailChimp account. You can subscribe up to 2,000 email addresses before every paying a dime, letting you discover if MailChimp is the right platform for you.

Once you have a MailChimp account set up, you will need to obtain a copy of our extension that lets you connect your Easy Digital Downloads store to MailChimp. If you need assistance with setting up our MailChimp extension, see our documentation portal.

Anytime a customer makes a purchase and is subscribed to an email list, or subscribes during purchase, Easy Digital Downloads will send the purchase data to MailChimp through their eCommerce360 API. This will allow you to send unique emails based on the item or items purchased.

Let’s now walk through the basic process for creating an automation routine that sends a welcome email to all customers that purchase a specific product. To do this, first click on the Automation link in the top menu:

From here, click on the Create Automation Workflow button:

You will now be prompted to select the email list you want to use. Pick a list and then you will be shown a screen with a number of options. From this screen click on Specific Product Purchase:

At this point you will be asked to configure the workflow. This entails setting the workflow name, a from name and email address, and a few other options. Configure this to your liking and then click Next in the bottom right corner.

Now you are asked to choose the product that needs to be purchased to send this email. Choose your product from the drop down menu and then click Next step: Emails.

You can now create one or more emails that you want to send to customers after they purchase your product.

For this example, we will just create a single email but you can create any number you wish. You may, for example, want to create a series of emails and set it up so that the customer receives one email immediately after making the purchase, a second email a week later, and then a third email at one month.

The screenshot below shows an email that is delivered immediately after the purchase is made.

Go ahead and click on the Design Email button to configure and build the email.

At this point, you will be placed into MailChimp’s standard campaign email editor. You will first be asked to name your email, give it a subject, and set the from name and email. Once you have done that, you can continue to the next step where you get to select the template for your email.

Here is an example of a nice follow up email that helps to reassure customers they can contact you if they have questions. It also includes a link to a documentation site in case they want to look up frequently asked questions. And at the bottom, a 20% discount is provided for any future purchases to help incentivize the customer to returning to your site.

Once you have finished designing your email, click on to the next section for Scheduling / Segmentation.

On this screen, you will be able to configure the days of the week you want your emails to be delivered. You can also control the time of day that the emails are delivered, and even restrict sending to specific segments in your MailChimp list.

You are now done with your first email! If you want, you can now return to the workflow overview and setup additional emails.

If you’re ready, go ahead and click Confirm and then you can start the workflow!

After your workflow has been started and customers have made purchases on your website, you will be able to visit the Reports section of Automation to see how well your emails are performing.

The reports section shows detailed information about your emails, including how many emails are being sent, how many are opened, how many customers have unsubscribed, and more.

You will even be able to drill down into the report to view data about specific emails, which is great if your workflow includes multiple emails of a period of a few weeks or months.

One of the most important details in the reports section is the eCommerce360 tab. This tab will show you how much additional revenue the automatic emails in your workflow have generated:

MailChimp’s automation tools are exceptionally powerful and a huge asset to any business owner. If you’re not sending automated welcome and follow up emails, my only question to you is: why not?

The post Automating welcome emails with MailChimp and eCommerce360 first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

Getting notified of new sales is an important part of running an eCommerce site. Some owners simply want to know each time a sale is made, others want to know when sales over a certain value are processed, and some wish to know when particular products are purchased. Whatever the exact notification type is that you want to receive, Zapier can handle it for you.

For example, through Zapier you can send sale alerts to the following services / mediums:

• Slack chat rooms
• HipChat rooms
• Email
• Twitter
• Github
• Trello
• Any mobile phone via SMS
• Google Spreadsheets
• And so many more

Whatever the service or device you use, Zapier can almost certainly send a notification to it when a sale is made.

Let’s look at how you would configure new sale notifications for a Slack channel. The setup is very similar for other services, so Slack is just one example.

First, you create a new Zap and then choose a trigger and an action. The trigger is the service / application that is sending information to Zapier. In this case, that is Easy Digital Downloads. The action is the service / application that receives the data from Zapier. In this example, we’ve chosen Slack.

Second, you choose the EDD-powered website that you wish to send data from. If you have not registered any websites, Zapier will instruct you on how to create one. You can see this in our setup documentation for the Zapier extension.

Next, select the Slack account you wish to send sale notifications to. If you have already connected your Slack account to Zapier, a list of channels will be shown, otherwise Zapier will walk you through connecting your account.

Now you get to choose which types of sales you wish to send to the Slack channel. There are a lot of different ways that you can configure step 4. If you do not add any custom filters, every sale will get sent to Slack. If you would like to limit the notifications to just particular sales, add filters here to limit the notifications.

The screenshot below shows how you can limit sale notifications to just purchases of a particular product.

You could easily adjust the filters to limit notifications to sales that match just about any pattern. Here are a few examples:

• Purchases over a certain value
• Purchases with more than X products in the cart
• Purchases from customers with particular emails or email domains (such as all sales from @live.com emails)
• Purchases containing particular products or combinations of products

In the example above, we have it setup to notify us anytime the Core Extensions bundle is purchased. After you have configured your filters (if any), you are then given the option to configure the message that gets sent to Slack (this is also supported when sending notifications to other services).

For our example, we send a message that contains the amount of the purchase, the customer email, and the order ID number.

Lastly, once you have configured the notifications, you are given the option to test that everything is working as expected.

Through Zapier, almost any kind of notification can be sent, but it’s also not just limited to sale notifications. Other tasks that can be automated with Zapier as well:

• Adding customers to your CRM of choice (InfusionSoft, SurgarCRM, Highrise, etc)
• Generate invoices for sales in your accounting software (Xero, Freshbooks, Ronin, etc)
• Add customers to mailing lists and subscribe them to specific lists based on what they purchased (MailChimp, AWeber, Campaign Monitor, etc)
• Send welcome and follow-up emails to customers after successful purchases (through Gmail, MailChimp, Outlook or others)
• Add customers and/or sale records to spreadsheets in Google Spreadsheets or similar

With Zapier, the options are nearly limitless. They allow you to connect to over 400 different web services. Need inspiration or ideas? Check out their Popular apps page to see examples.

The post Sale notifications through Zapier first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

Advanced Reports

Advanced Reports is a recently released extension from CPO Themes that makes it exceptionally simple to create detailed reports. It can provide reports that show gross and net sales and earnings for your entire store, or even just a few specific products. It even allows you to create detailed sales tax reports showing the amount of tax collected for any date range you wish.

Here are a few examples of the kind of details Advanced Reports can generate for you:

• Sales and earnings over last 30 days
• Gross and net sales over last 90 days
• Refunds processed in last 60 days
• Failed purchases over last 7 days
• Sales for Product X in last 45 days
• Earnings for Product Y in last 45 days

Not only does Advanced Reports allow you to create these kind of reports, it also allows you to fine-tune each report to show specific date ranges. Want to see last 123 days instead of just the last 60? Easy. It also allows you to export any report to a CSV file, making it easy to extract the data from your site and plug it into your own external reporting tools.

Email Reports

In the case that you are more of a hands-off site owner, the Email Reports extension is perfect for you. Instead of showing reports inside of your WordPress dashboard, Email Reports send them directly to your inbox.

Google Analytics eCommerce Tracking

Google Analytics is one of the most reliable and most widely used analytics systems available. One of the many features they provide is eCommerce tracking of sales and earnings. By connecting your site to your Analytics account through the Enhanced Google Analytics eCommerce Tracking extension, you can easily see your sales and earnings right there in your Google Analytics account.

Other Reporting Options

There are a lot of ways you can track your earnings and sales in Easy Digital Downloads and the options above are just a few of the highlights. Here are a few other options for you to look into:

• Xero – an online accounting system for small businesses
• Freshbooks – online invoices and accounting
• iOS Sales / Earnings Tracker – your sales and earnings stats at your finger tips
• CSV exports – easily export sales data from Easy Digital Downloads and build your own reports

Knowing your numbers is important; these are just some of the extensions that provide additional tools to help knowing those numbers easier.

The post Advanced earnings and sales reports first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

Custom Campaigns

The idea behind custom campaigns is that whenever you publish a link on an external website (ads, guest blog posts, promotional page, etc), the URL should be uniquely identifiable, so that you can track how effective it is.

If you aren’t familiar with how Google Analytics uses custom campaigns to help you track incoming traffic, you can use these two official Google Documents to familiarize yourself with what Custom Campaign links are, and how to create them:

• What are Custom Campaign links
• How to create Custom Campaign links

This information becomes useful when you want to change the wording or design of an advertisement or campaign. By using the same campaign, but altering the ‘term’ tag, you can effectively see how a campaign performs through time, when changes are made.

Relating Campaigns to Earnings

Up until recently, in order to see the performance of a Custom Campaign, you were required to leave your WordPress admin, and use to Google Analytics dashboards to view information about a campaign. There are a few challenges with Google Analytics that users typically ran into:

• The Google Analytics user interface can be overwhelming
• It can differ from your sales data at times due to external influences like disabled Javascript, payment gateways, etc
• Data is slightly delayed in Google Analytics while they parse it

The Campaign Tracker extension for Easy Digital Downloads solves all 3 of these issues, and without leaving your own site.

By giving you access to sales and earnings data directly from within the existing reporting section of EDD. You can filter by dates and campaigns to get the specific report you are looking for.

Campaign Tracker doesn’t rely on any Google Analytics resources to log the sale within EDD. It identifies visitors arriving at your site with the Custom Campaign parameters described above, pulls out the relevant information, and saves directly in the Easy Digital Downloads purchase data. Because of this, Easy Digital Downloads (and WordPress) have access to seeing campaign information without needing to wait for Google Analytics to parse the data.

It also works in real-time. No waiting for Google Analytics to parse through your campaigns, as sales come in, any campaign data is readily available from the moment they hit ‘Purchase’.

Using this data

At Easy Digital Downloads we use Custom Campaigns to help us understand the effectiveness of some key parts of our business. Links from social media, email campaigns, plugin directories, and other sources, all contain these campaign parameters. Combining campaigns with changes helps us know if we’ve improved or damaged the effectiveness of a link back to our site. Using the Campaign Tracker extension, we can get a quicker view into how a campaign is performing, and if we want more detailed information about campaigns, we can supplement it with the data provided in Google Analytics.

The post Using Campaign Tracker to monitor Google Analytics campaigns first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

Blog post published…now what?

At Easy Digital Downloads we’re constantly releasing new versions, new extensions, and new content. We employ a mixture of social media engagement and email marketing to make sure people are aware of our changes, releases, and tips on running a successful eCommerce site.

Maximizing Social Media

Social media plays a huge role in how we announce new products and releases. The problem is, with Twitter specifically, depending on what time you share your post, you could be missing a large number of your followers due to the time of day in their local timezone. There are plenty of services out there to schedule Tweets, but at Easy Digital Downloads we use Post Promoter Pro to handle this within our publishing process. (Full disclosure, the author of this post is the creator and developer of Post Promoter Pro).

The premise behind Post Promoter Pro is we can schedule our Tweets for the next few days and weeks to make sure we reach the largest number of our demographics. The best part, is it’s right in your WordPress admin, as you write your post. No need for external tools or services. Everything is right there at your fingertips and part of your publishing flow.

This plugin has helped us gain a large amount of traffic and conversion, without the need for remembering to share our content at a later date. It also includes custom Google Analytics Campaigns, so if you’ve configured your site to record transactions into your Analytics, you can see how the social media impact is having on sales.

You can read more at PostPromoterPro.com.

Email Marketing

Some of you may be reading this article via an email we sent you. This is one of our other means of reaching out to customer’s when we announce new products, versions, or helpful content. Email marketing is more than just junk mail. While social media is a broadcast means of reaching your customers, email marketing is targeting your higher conversion customers. These are people who have actively requested to receive your updates. The Easy Digital Downloads mailing list is powered by Mail Chimp, and uses some of the more advanced features to keep you all updated on what’s happening in the Easy Digital Downloads ecosystem.

You can read more in our article about using Mail Chimp to super power our product promotion.

We use a combination of sign up forms and the Easy Digital Downloads Mail Chimp extension to subscribe both potential and current customers into the correct lists so we can be sure to get the most relevant information in front of them.

When it’s all configured and setup, we’re able to see specific details about individual customers to help measure conversion. Here’s just a sample of some of the type of information we can get in MailChimp:

These are just some of the tools we use to help get new products, versions and guides in front of our customers, and with them, we’ve noticed an significant upturn in our traffic and conversion alike.

The post Tools for promoting your product releases first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

When I see that active install count, though, I don’t particularly accept it as-is. What I try to assume is that roughly 20,000 of those active installs are live sites while the other 20,000 are staging clones of the live sites (you can’t blame me for wishful thinking).

EDD being an e-commerce platform means that a significant portion of our users are trying to earn income from their websites. There are many users who have been able to do so successfully and some who are still a work-in-progress. But one thing they all have in common is that certain aspects of the platform are expected to be automated and accurate, thanks to EDD and its add-ons.

Every once in a while, there’s a hiccup in one of the processes. That’s the nature of software development. There will be bugs, shortcomings in functionality, and other common obstacles. For the most part, though, the core functionality of an EDD-based e-commerce system is rock solid.

That said, problems are more likely to be introduced as other components are added and functionality becomes more complex. This is where having a staging site becomes extremely important.

Allow me to explain.

What is a staging site?

In layman’s terms, a staging site is a clone of a live site and is used to for testing purposes.

When it’s time to switch themes, add or remove plugins, integrate custom code, or make any significant changes to the site, it’s best done on a staging site that is a replica of the live site.

The reason this is so important for e-commerce sites is because they earn revenue and deal with customers who have so graciously opened their pocketbooks to you. Making purchases online is a lot less personal which means trust is built through the purchase process, making it that much more important to the customer that things are working properly.

Staging sites are used to ensure that everything works properly before it is presented to the customer. Likewise, they can be used for troubleshooting issues found on the live site without running the risk of interfering with your users or breaking even more functionality.

Theoretically, any issues found on the live site should be replicable on the staging site. With temporarily switching themes and deactivating plugins being very common troubleshooting steps, having a staging site is a great way to track down issues without having to place your live site in maintenance mode or removing expected functionality for testing.

How do I set up a staging site?

First, let’s clear a few things up about staging sites so this is not any more complicated than it needs to be.

1. A staging site is not a special kind of site that requires a different installation or configuration approach than your live site. It’s just another WordPress install that is set up just like your live install.
2. Most of EDD’s add-ons require licenses. However, these licenses do not restrict functionality. They are simply gateways to support and dashboard updates. So, yes, you absolutely can activate extensions on both your staging site and your live site. Just reserve license activation for your live site only.
3. Staging sites concentrate mainly on functionality, not content. For example, it’s more important that your EDD settings are the same on both sites than it is the descriptions of your downloads match.

The point here is that a staging site does not require a whole new level of thinking. It’s just the site you’ve already created, created once more.

Let’s get on with the setup.

Ask your hosting provider.

One thing I love about some hosts is that they have services in place to clone your live site to a staging site with just a few steps. Here on the EDD site, our staging set up is as simple as clicking a button. It’s just as easy to update the staging site from the live site any time we need to.

Hosts like Pagely and WP Engine make it extremely easy to make sure your staging site is an exact clone of your live site whenever you need it to be.

Install WordPress Yourself.

It’s not a big deal if your host does not have a simple way for you to set up a staging site. You can do it on your own just the same way you created your live site.

As mentioned before, the staging site is about functionality, for the most part. Create a subdomain or subdirectory, whatever you’d like, and treat the WordPress set up as if it was a new project you were working on. Once up and running, you’ll want to install (and activate) the same theme and plugins that you are using on your live site.

Believe it or not, that alone will replicate the vast majority of functionality you need to have an effective staging site. You can definitely take things further, though.

What I would suggest is a complete database clone from the live site. I would export my database from the live site and import it to the database I have connected to my new staging site. There are plenty of online resource to help you accomplish this (here’s one).

With the same theme and plugins activated on the staging site as you have on the live site, and a full database export/import, you should be very close to a completed staging site.

For many, you may not even have to go that far. WordPress has its own built-in export/import functionality located under the Tools menu in the dashboard. You can export data directly from your live site and import it to your staging site, though it’s not as thorough as the aforementioned method.

Support for EDD Issues

If you’ve been using EDD for a while and have opened a support ticket or two, there’s a chance I have helped resolve your issue or answered your questions. With quite a few tickets, though, I’ve had to ask users to temporarily switch themes and deactivate plugins. Many are okay with this. Some are not.

What must be understood here is regardless of why the issue exists, it’s present and must be dealt with. Troubleshooting will almost always begin with looking for conflicts from other resources. So don’t wait until there’s an issue to set up a staging site just to see if you can replicate the issue.

The absolute best time to find an issue is when you are testing new functionality on your staging site, and it has not made its way to your live site yet. The goal is to get issues sorted out in a testing area first, that way rigorous troubleshooting can be done without potential loss of revenue or damaged user experience.

Next time you have a few moments to spare, consider setting up a staging site if you do not already have one. Let that be a testbed for every line of code that will touch your live site. Consider this one of the most important steps for creating your online business.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask below.

The post The importance of having a staging site for your e-commerce business first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

Subscribing customers to groups within a list has many potential use cases. Let’s look at a few of them.

Email Customers of Specific Products

One of the most basic reasons for using groups in MailChimp is that they will allow you to easily separate customers of each product on your site into separate groups. This then makes it exceptionally easy to send an email to just the customers that have purchased Product Y or just those customers that have purchased Product Z, or even those customers that have purchased Product Y and Product Z.

When constructing your email, simply select the list and the groups you want to email. It’s that simple!

Note: you can also utilize eCommerce360 tracking in MailChimp to send an email to customers that have purchased a particular product or from a category of products.

Segregate Email Subscribers by Store

If you run multiple e-Commerce stores and all stores share a common list in MailChimp, you may want to separate customers from each store into their own groups. Keeping all email subscribers in the same list would allow you to email all customers across your network of stores at one time, but you will want to have a way to also email just those customers from a particular store. Using groups makes this easy. Simply create a group for each store and then select that group when building your email campaign.

Connecting EDD Products to Groups

In order to leverage the power and control that MailChimp groups give you, you will need to instruct Easy Digital Downloads to place customers of specific products into a particular group when they make a purchase. This is simple:

1. Purchase and install the MailChimp extension (if you have not already)
2. Go to Downloads > Settings > Extensions and enter your API key for MailChimp
   
3. Go to the main Downloads menu and click Edit on the product you wish to configure. On the product edit screen, there will be a MailChimp box that displays all of your lists inside your MailChimp account. This will also display any groups you have created for your lists. The groups will be shown as indented options under the list they belong to:
   
4. Simply select the lists and/or groups you wish the customers of this product to be subscribed to.

When a customer purchases a product that has lists/groups connected to it, they will be automatically subscribed to the selected lists/groups when their purchase is confirmed.

The post Subscribing Customers to List Groups in MailChimp first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.

The nature of this functionality, however, can present a challenge for store owners as they walk a fine line between vendor control over submitted products versus their own control.

Should vendors be able to set their own prices? How about the file download limit, who sets the value? These questions and many others are what make each FES installation unique.

In this article, I am going to show you how to leverage FES’s functionality to give your vendors the exact amount of control you want them to have.

Download Meta Data

The first thing we need to cover is how information is tied directly to download entries (individual products in your store).

We’ll use one of the basic EDD download settings as an example. If you go to create a new download entry or edit an existing one, you will see a “Download Settings” meta box in the sidebar of the edit screen.

Let’s say you, the store owner, had a unique stocking system for your products and it was important that each download entry on your site have a specific SKU (stock keeping unit). Unless your vendors have the ability to create SKU values when submitting their products, you will have to set them yourself for each product. With enough scenarios like that, it would eventually begin to feel like giving vendors the ability to submit products was creating more work for you instead of the other way around.

The SKU setting shown in the screenshot above is a setting that does not have a ready-made FES field that you can place in your FES Submission Form. However, there is a way for your vendors to use the setting.

In WordPress, single Post or Page entries can have what is called “meta data” connected to them. Meta data is nothing more than stored information that is connected directly to that entry. And because EDD’s Downloads are essentially the same thing as Posts and Pages, they also support meta data.

Meta data is organized by unique identifiers called meta keys, that way each piece of information can be managed by itself. In this particular case, the meta key for the SKU setting is edd_sku.

As the store owner creating a new product, all you have to do to save a value to the edd_sku download meta is type your value into the text field provided. Likewise, you can edit a vendor’s product submission to input an SKU value if you do not give them the ability to do so themselves.

With this understanding of meta data, meta keys, and basic knowledge of how to add fields the FES Submission Form, I will show you how to give your vendors more control and reduce your workload.

Submission Form Field Meta Keys

Creating your Submission Form in FES is fairly simple. All you have to do is add the fields you want your vendors to complete or at least have the option to complete.

Fields that your products will require, like the title and description, do not require much configuration and are automatically included in the Submission Form.

Other fields like “Download Prices and Files” are built to serve a specific purpose. So even though it is not a required field by default, the settings are very specific to the purpose of the field.

The majority of fields, however, are more like tools based on the field type, not the field purpose. This means that a general Text field can be used in any way that you see fit. In my example, a Text field is what we are going to use to allow vendors to set their own SKU value.

Keeping in mind what you’ve learned about meta data, and the fact that each piece of meta data has a unique meta key for identification, what we have to do is connect our FES field directly to the meta key we want the vendors to control… and it’s very easy to do.

As you can see in the above image, Text fields have very general settings and fields. In this case, the most important field is “Meta Key.” Because I set it to match the meta key for the actual setting in EDD, we are now giving vendors a field that directly edits the SKU setting for the product.

With this field saved in the submission form and required, store owners never have to worry about setting the SKU value or giving vendors back-end access to the site in order to set it themselves. They can do it directly from the FES vendor dashboard when submitting or editing their own products. Awesome.

Using This Information In The Real World

As simple as this sounds, you will still have to do a little bit of homework to get it set up in each case. Meta keys are not just displayed next to the settings on an Add/Edit Download page. So finding them can be a challenge.

One easy way to find the meta key for a simple setting is to use your browser’s inspector. By inspecting the actual field element of the setting you need to give your vendors access to, you can oftentimes see the meta key value in the “name” attribute of the input element that controls the setting.

In the image above, you can see that “edd_sku” is the meta key needed to connect your submission form input field to that setting.

This may be a little more difficult in other cases. First, it must be understood that some settings are just too complex to control from an FES Submission Form. Likewise, some extensions are already integrated with FES and create their own FES submission form fields for the settings they add to the Add/Edit Download screen.

When the aforementioned does not apply but you still do not have the meta key you need, it’s time to dig into the code. There’s no limit to the amount of meta data that can be added to a download through settings. So if you have a number of EDD extensions installed, or perhaps other plugins that have nothing to do with EDD, you may have more settings to consider.

What you have to do here is look at the source code for the plugin/script/etc. that adds the setting to the download. Every setting that receives and saves input from the user (you) on that Add/Edit Download screen deals WordPress post meta functions like add_post_meta() or update_post_meta(). Both of these functions can be used to create a new setting and both of them require that you specify the meta key for that setting. So if you can find these functions in the code, you can find the meta keys.

The basic structure of the code will be very similar to this:

add_post_meta( $post_id, $meta_key, $meta_value, $unique );

In that code, $meta_key represents the value you will need for your FES field meta key.

Note: In some unique cases, the code can be a little more complex and include things like PHP variables as the meta key. If that’s the case, it may be time to start looking for a custom developer.

Handy Download Setting Meta Keys

There are a few default EDD settings that are not connected to FES form fields. Below are the names of those settings and their corresponding meta keys that can be used in appropriate FES form fields.

File Download Limit – _edd_download_limit
Download Notes – edd_product_notes
Output Purchase Button – _edd_hide_purchase_link

The Takeaway

As you’ve probably noticed, there is no one snippet of code that will satisfy all of your needs here. Even more, FES simply can’t be integrated with every single setting on your site. But a basic understanding of download meta data, meta keys, and FES fields can take you a long way.

Think carefully about what level of control your store vendors need and work to streamline the process as much as possible to improve user experience. Vendors are considered store owners within your marketplace. Implementing what you’ve learned in this article benefits both ends of the partnership.

The post Integrating the FES Submission Form with Various Download Settings first appeared on Easy Digital Downloads.