QA 48 – Do I need a Shopping Cart plugin to sell digital products

In today's Q&A, we are helping Beth Anne figure out how to simply sell digital products on her Wordpress website. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Best way to sell digital products on your Wordpress blog."] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today's question from Beth Anne Aretto E-Junkie Gumroad Easy Digital Downloads Let's dive into this week's question! JOCELYN: Hey guys! Welcomes to today's Q and A mini podcast. I still have no voice so apologies for that. Today's question is from Beth Anne Aretto. I hope I said that right Beth Anne and she says that: I have some digital products I want to sell but I haven't figured out the best plug in or way to do it on my WordPress blog, what would you recommend? SHANE: Alright. There are a lot of different ways to sell digital products online. If you are just selling PDF or something like that probably the easiest solution is something like ejunkie.com or gumroad.com. Those are services that basically let you go in and you can log in to your system. They let you upload your product to their servers and they will basically give you a piece of code that you can copy and paste anywhere on your website and when people click that little button or the sales button it will pop up and it will handle the transactions for you. You usually have to link those to your PayPal account but both of those services have really good instructions on how to do that. It's not really hard. You just go on to PayPal. There is like a big key that you copy and that you paste that in to Gumroad or E-junkie and you are off to the races. I actually use E-junkie with coachxo.com because I don't have a lot of products on that site. If you have something like 10 to 20, maybe less than 10 let's say that—if you have 10 to 20 products, something less than that, E-junkie or Gumroad is all you need. All you have to do is go upload the product, set the price, copy and paste the code into your blog post or over in your sidebar and you are ready to sell and deliver those digital products. So if you want to get started as quick as possible that's what I would do. I would just go and do something simple. Don't worry about setting up a big plug in and doing all that. That will get your product for sale ASAP. But if you get quite a few products or you know you product vine is going to grow or if you need to track that better and you want to like really look at your sales report and see what's happening, you might need an onsite solution and Jocelyn actually uses one for her Elementary Librarian site. JOCELYN: Yeah I have a lot of products on that site and so I decided that I was going to get a plug in and the one that I use on Elementary Librarian is called easy digital downloads. There are actually a charge for it. I am not exactly sure of the price. I want to say it's under $100. There are several different extensions that you can add on to it and basically those are just extra little things that give it different functionality if you want it to do a variety of different tasks. But you can start out the very basic thing. That would be a great place to start. JOCELYN: A plug in like easy digital downloads is good if you want to have just a one-time cost. Products like E-Junkie or Gumroad, the more products you have the more they are going to charge you for their services. I think it's like a monthly fee. Is that right? SHANE: Yeah it is. Yeah JOCELYN: Yeah so if you know that you are going to have a lot more products or you're eventually going to have a lot more and you don't want to pay that monthly fee you may want to go with a plug in type service. I've really like easy digital downloads. It's really easy to use and you basically just upload your files in, you name your products and it will put them in a shopping cart for you. The good thing about the pug in is that there are lots of documentat...