Selling products online requires to create an online store with all e-commerce functionalities. WooCommerce and EDD are two major plugins that offers the powerful solution to build e-commerce website on WordPress.
But what should you select to build your online store? This question is quite confusing! Still, you can make the best decision after understanding about these plugins and comparing the functionalities of both the plugins.
By the end of this post, you’ll be able to choose the right e-commerce platform that fits your business needs.
Let’s get started.
Table of contents:
- WooCommerce: Best E-commerce Plugin for WordPress
- Core Features of WooCommerce
- Easy Digital Downloads: Sell Digital Products Online
- Core Features of EDD
- WooCommerce Vs EDD: A Quick Comparison
WooCommerce: Best E-commerce Plugin for WordPress
WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce solution for WordPress. If you’re a small or medium business, you can use it to build the store exactly you want and sell products online. It offers a customizable solution so that you can personalize your e-commerce store as per your wish.
WooCommerce is perfect for selling both physical and digital products online.
The core platform of WooCommerce is free and open-source. It offers almost all the options that are required for an e-commerce store such as marketing, shipping, payments, mobile app, and many more.
There are many WooCommerce themes available in the market that you can use to improve the website appearance. And, with the help of WooCommerce add-ons, you can integrate more functionality on your website.
Features of WooCommerce
Now, let’s explore the amazing features that you will get from WooCommerce to launch and manage your e-commerce store.
1. Easy to set up online store
With WooCommerce, you can easily create your online store with beautiful homepage design, menus, site structure, and payment and shipping options. And, you can also use this guide if you’re new to WooCommerce.
2. Flexible and Secure Payments
You can accept credit cards, bank transfers (BACS), checks, and cash on delivery on your WooCommerce store. Choose from the 140 region-specific gateways and inetgrate with Stripe, PayPal, Square, and Amazon Pay. Moreover, WooCommerce now also supports Apple Pay, Google Pay, subscriptions, and deposits.
3. WooCommerce Dashboards
Update your products and fulfill orders quite easily from your WooCoomerce dashboard. This will help you to easily manage products online.
4. Take advantage of automation
WooCommerce saves a lot of time by providing functionality of automated tax calculations. Besides, it also provides you with live shipping rates from leading carriers and options to print labels at home.
5. Multilingual
WooCommerce is translated into 24 languages. This allows you to manage your e-commerce store with multilingual content and multiple currencies. Utilize multingual functionality and make your store reach at global level.
6. WooCommerce Blocks
Organize your products in a modular way. WooCommerce blocks include many useful options such as products by attribute, products by category, featured products, best-selling products, top-rated products, hand-picked products, newest products, and on-sale products.
7. Additional features and benefits
Other features offered by WooCommerce include the marketing functions, shipping options, REST API, jetpack security, mobile app, and many more.
Easy Digital Downloads: Sell Digital Products Online
Talking about Easy Digital Downloads plugin, this plugin is especially designed for selling digital products online. For example, you can sell WordPress themes, plugins, e-books, PDFs, audio files, video files, and so much more that are downloadable in nature.
And, it’s free to get started with your simple EDD store. Besides, if you want to take advantage of more functions, simply upgrade your e-commerce store by selecting from its four different pricing plans.
You can also add more value to your EDD store with the help of various third-party add-ons for EDD and improve your website appearance with the help of WordPress themes that are fully compatible with this plugin.
Features of Easy Digital Downloads
The Easy Digital Downloads plugin comes with lots of useful functionality that are required to manage an online store. Let’s take a look at the amazing features offered by EDD:
1. Shopping cart
EDD plugin allows users to integrate customizable Buy Now or Add to Cart buttons. It supports registered user or guest checkout option and you can make it mandatory for customers to agree with terms before purchase.
2. Customer management
The customer management features include adding, viewing, deleting, or maintaining customers record separately, tracking customer lifetime value and activity. Besides, you can also link customer records to user profiles and create customer account page easily.
3. Discount Codes
You can offer discounts to your customers on the flat rate or on a percentage basis. It’s up to you whether you want to provide a discount on all products or you can also specify products to include or exclude. Automating start or end date will help you manage your promotional campaign. Besides, you can also specify the minimum cart total amount which is required to avail such offers.
4. Data Reporting
This functionality allows you to view how much you have earned by date range and category. You can filter reports by specific product, track collected taxes, monitor download, sales, & API request logs. You can also export the data of your EDD store into CSV file format.
5. Additional features
Apart from the above-mentioned features, you’ll also get some additional features and benefits by using EDD plugin. Such additional features include complete RESTful API, File download logs, Customer account page, Extension catalog, Refund tracking, Mailing list integration, Payment history, File access control, secured Payment gateways, Affiliate system integration, External file storage, licensed under GPLv3, Developer friendly, and many more.
WooCommerce Vs EDD: A Quick Comparison
So far we have discussed all about WooCommerce and EDD along with their core features. In order to take wise decision for selecting the right e-commerce platform, we would recommend you to take a look at the following comparison chart. This will help you better understand how they differ from each other and what would be the best for your business.
| Basis of Comparison | WooCommerce Plugin | Easy Digital Downloads |
| What you can sell online? | Sell physical and digital products both online. | Sell products that are downloadable in nature. |
| Payment options | 140 region-specific gateways. Besides, integrate with Stripe, PayPal, Square, Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, subscriptions, and deposits. | Integrate PayPal, SOFORT, EDD Wallet, 2 Checkout Payment Gateway, Conditional Gateways, Authorize.net, PayPal Pro and PayPal Express, Braintree, Stripe, ClickBack, and more. |
| Software Licensing | WooCommerce provides software licensing. | EDD also provides software licensing. |
| Mobile App | Offers Mobile App for Android and iPhone. | EDD doesn’t offer mobile app. |
| Marketplace | WooCommerce has a large marketplace. Many third-party plugins and themes are available that are compatible with WooCommerce. | As compared to WooCommerce, EDD has a small marketplace. |
| Set Up Wizard | WooCommerce provides a set up wizard which makes it easy to set up an online store on WordPress. | On the other hand, EDD doesn’t offer any setup wizard. Instead, you need to visit to the settings page to configure your online store. |
| Pricing Plans | WooCommerce is open-source and free WordPress e-commerce plugin. Although the cost is incurred on purchasing WordPress hosting, its add-ons, and compatible themes as per your business need. | EDD offers 4 different pricing plans to choose from: 1. Personal Pass worth $99.00 2. Extended Pass worth $199.00 3. Professional Pass worth $299.00 4. All Access Pass worth $499.00 All the pricing plans are billed yearly until cancelled. |
| Download Link | Get WooCommerce Here | Get EDD Here |
Wrapping Up
To sum up, we can say that WooCommerce is an ideal choice of yours if you’re about to start an online store for selling physical products and digital products, and, if you would like to manage your store from an app on your mobile device. On the other hand, prefer Easy Digital Downloads, if most of your products are of digital nature.
So, what’s your choice? Would you like to share your thoughts? Use the comment sections section below.
Stay tuned and we’ll get back with more useful information.
