The combination of globalization process and the transcendent dominant of the Internet has facilitated a juicy environment for e-commerce development. Obviously, the digital revolution swipes away most traditional systems by introducing a new and more flexible virtual world.The movement of several tangible products such as books, game discs, music albums or gift cards from the stores’ shelves to the smart devices’ storage shows how well-received digital products are in the current market.
More than anyone, businesses understand e-commerce would be the next big thing to focus on. Not only are physical products affected but also services are digitized as well. Tickets, software, banking, and even courses can easily be found on the Internet with a wide range of choices. Everyone is trying to take a foot in a fierce yet profitable market. If you are planning to do so, it’s a great decision. The only problem here’s selling digital products is not a straightforward process.
In this article, you will get the chance to understand digital products better as well as learn some good tips to sell digital products on WordPress using WooCommerce effortlessly.
Let’s find out together!
What are Digital Products?
As we might know a product is an item or a service that you put on sale in exchange for money or barter. Since the Internet has altered commerce, products no need to be touchable or picked up at stores. They are sold online and customers have to pay their real money to purchase but might not be able to hold them in their hands. Those are considered as digital products.
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In fact, intangible products account for a large part of digital products. For instance, songs, audio files, ebooks, applications, or stock photography are those popular digital items on most online stores. Even though you couldn’t grab these products physically, you, instead, download and use them on your computer, or smart devices easily.
7 Tips For Selling Digital Products with WooCommerce
Selling digital products requires you to have an online store to present and advertise your items to targeted customers. Empowering over 30 percent of the Web, WordPress has been a favorite CMS among Internet users. Using WordPress proves the simplest, low budget but powerful way to run a website.
With all the built-in features WordPress already meets most of the requirements of a basic blog or a standard website. On top of that, its plugins ecosystem offers plenty of advanced tools to assist users in performing more complicated tasks. And WooCommerce, a big brother, can’t be missed in the list of dynamic plugins for WordPress e-commerce sites.
Digital products are often known as downloadable items and with the support of WooCommerce, creating one is not so difficult. The first tip is to help you create a downloadable product in WooCommerce without a hitch.
1. Create WooCommerce Downloadable Products
After downloading and activating WooCommerce on your WordPress site, you now need to prepare a page to introduce your product. In your Admin Dashboard, look for Products → Add New.
Step 1: Make Your Products Downloadable
Digital products can be downloaded from any types of devices connected to the Internet. However, WooCommerce is a multifunction tool allowing you to sell both physical and digital products, hence you need to set up your product type properly before putting it on sale.
In the same setting Products page, scroll down to Product Data and tick the Downloadable checkbox.
Some digital products can also be transformed into physical products. Take ebook as an example. Many customers still prefer physical items, so they print your ebook into regular papers for easier reading perhaps.
In case you want to sell both types of products, then don’t worry about the Virtual checkbox. Meanwhile, if you only offer a digital version, make sure the Virtual box is checked.
Step 2: Add Product Data
Under the Downloadable files section, there are some main fields to focus on.
- Downloadable files: Hit the Add file button to upload a product. Fill in the file name and link of the product.
- Download limit: After the purchase, you might restrict the re-downloading to one or three times depending on your desire.
- Download expiry: Set the number of days that you want the products’ downloadable links to be valid. You’d better take your eyes on this field since it’s not a good idea to leave your product links available all the time.
Repeat these steps for other products and you’re almost done with the foundation. Now it’s time to apply the following tips to prepare your products before putting them on the market.
2. Protect Downloadable Products
The seriousness of online piracy and files theft is not ignorable. To avoid your upload products being downloaded and shared with others by unauthorized or even authorized users, you need to have robust protection.
Prevent Direct Access Gold is one reliable plugin that a lot of WordPress experts choose for their websites. The plugin will shield unlimited file types including PDF, MP3, MP4, PNG, JPEG, PPTX, and so on. Once protected, non-members or logged-out users will be redirected to the 404 error page when attempting to see the file without permission.
Even hackers trying to access your file through Google or other search engines won’t be able to approach the protected files. It’s because PDA Gold blocks Google from indexing your files. Your products are secure now.
When you want to permit your customers to approach the products, the plugin assists you in generating private download links. Those links have their expiration and limited uses and are accessed by granted users only.
Prevent Direct Access Gold also works smoothly with WooCommerce, and they bring a perfect combination that all online stores could ask for.
3. Adjust WooCommerce Products Visibility
Most of your products are classified according to categories. As always, there are special treats for everything, and parts of your categories are not exceptions. With categories, you prefer to offer them to specific groups of users. To do that, it would be better to password protect them, and grant access to your desired users.
Password Protect WordPress (PPWP) Pro is a must-have plugin when mentioning content password protection. Simply because this powerful plugin enables you to password protect pages, posts, products created by WooCommerce and categories.
Even though the plugin turns protected categories into private, the rest of your website including your homepage and other main pages maintain being public as normal. You might apply this to premium sales, or special deals that only VIP members, or paid members are welcomed to join.
You can generate multiple passwords to protect a single product or vice versa, one password can unlock multiple pages at the same time. On top of that, the protection follows the hierarchy also. Once the parent product is secured, all the child-pages will automatically inherit the password protection too.
4. Add Watermark to Your Products
If you are offering a stock photography or ebook site, adding watermarks on your products’ demo is a smart choice. Although you set the file size for the demo pictures or PDF files to a poor quality one, some hackers still download the file illegally just to get some from it. Thus, it’s necessary to prove your contribution on your property by watermarks.
Watermark WordPress Files plugin works more than what a watermark tool can provide. The plugin allows you to add watermarks and even embed the PDF document into your content with a powerful PDF viewer feature.
You can add a watermark by using text or an image. Yet, you can choose the font, opacity, position, and color of your watermark. It makes a seem-to-be complicated task simpler than ever.
5. Make Your Products Appear Vividly
With digital products or intangible products, it would be a little tricky to present them to customers. Since you couldn’t have a sample object to snap a photograph and show it online, you need a more strategic way to sway customers.
Put yourself in a customer’s shoes and understand that with intangible products, until the leads hit the “purchase” button, they have no idea what your goods look like. Hence, your job is to convey the value of your product creatively and detailedly.
If you are selling extensions, software, or any computer programming, you may wish to show a short video of its functionality as well as display a few screenshots of how the products will work on different devices. Regarding products like music or sound effects, the demo audio can help to promote them. With ebook files, you should apply the tips that several famous ebook websites are offering: giving away the first few pages of the book as a preview.
It’s believed that pictures speak louder than words. Instead of spending hours preparing long-word posts rambling your products’ uses, you can consider images, video, or audio as handy means to illustrate your products more vividly.
6. Set Up Proper Product Schema for Better SEO
When selling digital products, the first thing you might put more attention on is how your products appear in search engines. Install Schema, a great tool to attach data markups to determine what your product page contains.
The proper schema will help customers have an overview of essential information of products including prices, reviews, and inventory status. Take an example, Best Buy, the big brother in e-commerce, knows how to prove its position in the competition by applying this tactic to boost its sales revenue.
With WooCommerce, there are three schema options for you to select from when creating downloadable products including Standard Products, Application/software, and Music. After picking the suitable one, the appearance of your items in the search results will be changed automatically.
7. Conduct a Competitive Analysis
In a fierce market like e-commerce, it is not too surprising that several online stores are selling the same products or services as yours. Conducting a competitive analysis will help you identify the industry trends, and what advertising campaigns and strategies that your competitors are carrying out to attract potential customers.
Narrow down your competitors to 5 or 10 companies. Google will be a great supporting tool to find out basic information such as name, location, services/products of your competitors.
After that, dig deeper into their websites to discover their strengths and weaknesses. It is also a great chance to compare what you and your competitors are lacking. Maybe all of you are selling the same products or services, but your competitors offer extra tools or brought-together-products that your store doesn’t. Realizing these things earlier and having in-time solutions will help to stop your competitors from swaying your customers to their stores.
Determining yours and your competitors’ position in the market answers to the question of why customers are drawn to a certain company. You can sign up for their email list or follow their social media channels to see the ways they perform communication with customers.
When having an overview of the analysis, you should go back to your strategies, and adjust them to improve your store’s position in the market and forward to success.
Selling WooCommerce Digital Products Ain’t a Complicated Task
It would be a waste if you don’t make use of WooCommerce and other plugins when running a WordPress store website such as Prevent Direct Access Gold, or Watermark WordPress Files to support selling digital products.
With the 7 precious tips above, you at least get the whole very strong fundamental ideas to make sure your store operates seamlessly. By following the step-by-step instruction for creating downloadable product links with WooCommerce and the detailed review of protection plugins to secure your products, even non-savvy users couldn’t take it wrong.
After building a secured, beautiful store, don’t forget to study your competitors. Learning both creative tips and lessons from mistakes of competitors will help you to enhance the development of your business in the long run.
