Building Your Own Online Marketplace: A Comparison between WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads
In the realm of WordPress plugins, WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) are two popular choices for building online stores. Each platform has its unique strengths and weaknesses, making them suitable for different types of stores.
WooCommerce: A Versatile Choice
WooCommerce is a highly flexible and widely popular plugin, boasting a large community and an extensive ecosystem of third-party themes and plugins. It supports selling both physical and digital products, making it a versatile option for various store types.
Advanced features like shipping label printing, carrier integrations, and a polished checkout experience are available with WooCommerce. However, selling digital goods requires marking products as downloadable, and additional plugins may be needed for file protection and license/key management.
The downside of WooCommerce is that it can be more complex to set up and navigate, especially for digital-only stores. Its interface is more cluttered compared to EDD [1].
Easy Digital Downloads (EDD): Focused on Digital Products
Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) is specifically designed to sell digital products such as e-books, software, music, and downloads. It offers a simple and clean interface focused on digital product storefronts, making it an ideal choice for digital-only stores.
EDD excels in simplicity and faster page loads for digital sales pages. It includes strong built-in reporting and customer management for digital sales, as well as unlimited products and transactions without scaling limitations from the plugin [1][3][5].
However, EDD has a smaller community and fewer third-party plugins/themes compared to WooCommerce. It also lacks support for physical products, making WooCommerce a better fit for lifestyle brands selling physical goods [2].
Making Your Choice
If you need a versatile store handling both digital and physical products, benefiting from a large ecosystem and advanced features, WooCommerce might be the right choice for you. On the other hand, if you specialize in digital products and want a straightforward, focused solution optimized for digital product sales, licensing, and subscriptions, Easy Digital Downloads could be the better option, accepting some trade-offs in breadth and design polish.
Both platforms require managing your own WordPress hosting, so performance and security are your responsibility [1][3][4][5]. WooCommerce supports 1,000+ product catalogs, multi-vendor setups, integration with CRMs, POS systems, and fulfillment services. EDD, on the other hand, has a simpler setup process compared to WooCommerce [6].
Future-Proofing Your Income
Starting an online store today means future-proofing your income. Online shopping is the default method for over 2.6 billion people in 2024 [7]. Both WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads integrate with Yoast SEO, Rank Math, Google Site Kit, newsletter tools like FluentCRM and Mailchimp, and Schema markup for products and reviews.
WooCommerce offers more product-based SEO features like categories, tags, attributes, and rich snippets. It also provides more payment gateway options than EDD. However, EDD focuses on features like built-in download protection, software licensing, and recurring payments [3].
In conclusion, your choice between WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads will depend on the nature of your store and the specific features you require. Both platforms have their strengths and can help you build a successful online store.
[1] https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/woocommerce-vs-easy-digital-downloads-which-is-the-best-ecommerce-plugin-for-wordpress/ [2] https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/easy-digital-downloads-the-best-wordpress-plugin-for-selling-digital-products/ [3] https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/best-wordpress-plugins-for-ecommerce-sites/ [4] https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/15-best-wordpress-plugins-for-optimizing-your-site-speed/ [5] https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/best-wordpress-plugins-for-security-and-malware-protection/ [6] https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/easy-digital-downloads-the-best-wordpress-plugin-for-selling-digital-products/ [7] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267276/number-of-digital-buyers-worldwide/
- For individuals or businesses focusing on digital product sales, such as e-books, software, music, and downloads, Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) with its clean interface and optimized digital product sales, licensing, and subscription management could be a suitable choice for enhancing their lifestyle or self-development offerings.
- For those building a store that encompasses both physical and digital goods, like a general lifestyle brand, WooCommerce, with its versatility, extensive ecosystem of third-party themes and plugins, and support for physical and digital products, could prove to be an ideal technology solution for expanding their reach in the rapidly growing online market.
