With Booking X up on the WordPress repo, it was time to get things ready to sell the all important Add-ons, as that would be the revenue stream for this endeavour. Though there is a plethora of options when it comes to selling digital products these days, we decided to go with the tried and proven Easy Digital Downloads (EDD). The two main reasons for this were; 1. we wanted a self hosted solution. 2. we required a selection of additional features that the EDD Extensions could provide.
The initial installation and setup of EDD was pretty straight forward, with plenty of flexibility for the content and styling. As we are currently using Divi theme (for better or worse), we were grateful that EDD allowed us to customise the the look and feel of display pages and checkout pages etc using the template files, which you can copy into your child theme, and then change away. We did come across an issue when it came to the customers download history section, but the support team were more than happy to help and within a few hours we had a solution and everything was working great.
To get the Booking X Add-on store working how we wanted, we installed the following extensions; Free Downloads, Recurring Payments, Software Licensing and Stripe Payment Gateway. We also tried extensions like frontend submissions, commissions, and Gravity forms, but decided we were adding functionality to the site, that though cool, wasn’t going to add anything to our current business case. We polished the licensing and auto-updating experience for the customer, with the help of Brian Hoggs’ Selling Plugins course, in which Module 3 of was particularly helpful.
We planned on using a self hosted support system, that integrated with EDD, but unfortunately we didn’t like the final result, so we decided to go with Freshdesk. The paid solutions allow you to integrate nicely with the EDD software licensing extension. So it will be interesting how things progress with this.
Overall we’re happy with the decision to use Easy Digital Downloads for the Booking X Add-on Store, for us the best bit was that they gave us ideas on how we can improve Booking X.
Till next time,
D