You may read many guides such as how to earn $xxxx a month, how I earn $xxxx with selling xxxx, blablabla… Now I will tell you how to build a shop from scratch for selling digital downloads.
First of all, you should choose one or more platforms, or build your own online shop. With my experience, I prefer to launch and operate my own online shop primarily, but don’t give up the third-party marketplaces, because the traffic is gold, drive the traffic to your own online shop, build your own brand.
There are many marketplaces such like Creative Market, Envato and Mojo Marketplace. If you are a graphic designer, musician, web designer or web developer, these three are good places to start your business quickly, just do your work, and upload your work to these platforms, that’s it!
Build Your Own Platform
Do not over-rely on a third-party marketplace, we need to walk with two legs, so the reliable way is starting to build your own platform in the next stage. How to do that?
Now just let the non-technique people know three words: WordPress, Easy Digital Downloads or WooCommerce, and Web hosting.
WordPress
“WordPress is open source software you can use to create a beautiful website, blog, or app. ” You can learn more on WordPress.org.
Please note that it’s different from WordPress.com, the latter one is a blog or website building platform. For our requirement, create a self-hosted website with WordPress software is the answer, because of more scaleable space and lower cost.
Easy Digital Downloads / WooCommerce
Easy Digital Downloads (Let’s call it EDD in this article) and WooCommerce is the E-Commerce plugin which can be installed on WordPress website. EDD focuses on digital downloads and it’s easier to use than WooCommerce, but WooCommerce is more powerful that support both digital product and physical product, over 28% of the online shop is powered by WooCommerce in the world.
For comparison of these two plugins, you can read What Is The Best Way To Sell Digital Downloads With WordPress? In my opinion, Easy Digital Downloads plugin is enough.
Web Hosting
You can understand it as a space to save your website files, for example, WordPress should be installed on web hosting. So you need to buy a high-performance web hosting with quick technique support, especially for the latter factor, the good support manner will save your life!
There are many hosting choices, now let’s say BlueHost, because I have used for 2 years. They offer CPanel to control your web hosting, it’s easy to use.
Install WordPress
OK, this step, you should learn about how to install WordPress. Although it’s very easy, if you don’t know any web knowledge ever before, maybe this is a challenge for you, but don’t worry, just follow this video tutorial.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kv4M1M5krAo
Install Easy Digital Download plugin
After WordPress is installed, just log in your backend, go to the Plugins page, search “Easy Digital Downloads”, install and activate it. Just refer to the official documentation. In the documentation, you will know how to install and initialize your first EDD online shop.
The free version of Easy Digital Downloads plugin only offers the basic e-commerce feature, such as adding to cart, checkout and download feature. If you have any other needs, for example, the specific payment gateway, license manager, etc, you may have to buy their premium Add-on plugins separately, of course, there are also many free Add-ons in WordPress.org.
Choose A WordPress Theme
WordPress theme handles the website appearance. No doubt that a good looking website is very important to catch your potential customers eyes. How and where to choose a theme?
First of all, the theme must be compatible with Easy Digital Downloads plugin, so you can search “EDD themes” on google, or go straight to visit the Themes page on the official website, there are so many free themes and 3rd-party premium EDD themes which are recommended by the official team. Two of our EDD themes DGWork and Dew are also included in the recommended list.
DGWork EDD theme is based on WPBakery Page Builder and Dew theme is based on Elementor page builder. Both of these page builders are the most popular in the WordPress community. Even you don’t know any coding knowledge, you can use these page builders to design the web pages easily. Of course, in our themes, we also include some predesigned templates that you can one click to import.
OK, now your own website is launched. Upload your amazing pictures and write the attractive copy for your products, and then, start to sell.
