Do you own an online store and want to boost your sales? Here is where you can find great tactics to improve your online shop and enhance the customer experience.
One of the best ways to retain customers is to keep your checkout process simple. As it helps you reduce your cart abandonment rates and increase sales.
This article will show you how to customize your WooCommerce checkout page for digital products. But first, let’s understand the reasons why it is so important.
Why Customize WooCommerce Checkout for Digital Goods
Digital assets appear as intangible goods that you sell on your online websites, such as video files, e-books, and software. That means you do not need to worry about shipping and inventory, which is great.
But one of the biggest factors affecting your digital product sales is the cart abandonment rate. This is the proportion of digital products abandoned by customers, before finishing the checkout process.
Research shows that approximately 70-85% of all carts are abandoned, such a big number. But don’t worry. There is a way to help you deal with that.
Optimizing the checkout process is the best way to minimize the cart abandonment rate. In other words, to keep your customers, you need to make your checkout page simple. Avoid asking for unnecessary information. Less checkout time means less time for customers to change their purchasing decisions.
However, WordPress does not support customizing your WooCommerce checkout fields by default. You need a third-party plugin like Flexible Checkout Fields to skip unnecessary checkout fields and set your own field order.
2 Steps to Customize WooCommerce Checkout for Digital Goods
Before getting started, let’s have a look at what the WooCommerce checkout page looks like. Default WooCommerce checkout page asks customers for a lot of complicated but unnecessary information such as company name, street address, postcode/ZIP, etc. 
It wastes customers’ time, and not everyone is patient enough to fill out all the fields. Therefore, this is one of the biggest reasons why your cart abandonment rates are high.
The 2 steps below will make it easier for you to deal with that problem.
Step 1: Download and Install Plugin
- Go to Plugins → Add New in your WordPress admin dashboard
- Search for the Flexible Checkout Fields plugin in the keyword box
- Press on the Activate button to activate the plugin
Step 2: Configure your plugin settings
This is the most important step to set up your fields.
- Go to WooCommerce → Checkout Fields in your WordPress admin menu
- Now you can add, remove, or set your field order with ease.
To add fields, go to Settings → Billing/Shipping/Order. In the Add New Field dialog box, you can select your Field Type. There are 12 field types for you to select: Single Line Text, Paragraph Text, Checkbox, Radio Button, Drop Down, Multi-Select, Date, Time, Color Picker, Headline, HTML, and File Upload.
Enter the field’s label and change the name of your new fields (optional). Then, click on Add Field to add the new field to the Edit Section dialog box.
To show and hide fields, check Enable Field to show a field or uncheck Enable Field to hide a field.
To reorder fields, drag & drop the built-in fields or your custom fields to the position you want in the Edit Section dialog box.
Now, remember to save your changes.
Protect Your Digital Products
After checking out, your customers will receive a link to download the product they have just bought. Before sending them to your customers, you should think of ways to protect your product’s download links.
This is extremely important and indispensable. Because anyone who gets your original file link will be able to access and download your files.
Then the PDA Gold plugin will be your perfect choice to protect digital files. It allows you to restrict access to your download links. Additionally, it helps you block Google and other search engines from indexing your files. That means only those who have permission can find and access your links.
Once you have downloaded and activated the PDA Gold plugin successfully, do the following steps to protect your files:
- Head to Prevent Direct Access Gold section in your WordPress Admin menu
- Enable the Force Downloads option under the setting page
- Go to the Media section on your WordPress Admin dashboard
- Choose List View
- Click on Protect in the Prevent Direct Access column to protect your media files
Your files are protected now. PDA will auto-generate private download links for you to share with customers.
After that, you need to copy that private link and put it in the File URL field on your WooCommerce downloadable product page.
Next, you can set the number of download limits and expiry times. To illustrate, if you limit your private link to 12 downloads, your customers will not be able to download it on the 13th click. Likewise, you can limit downloads for a certain number of days.
Remember to select the Redirect only option under your WooCommerce settings page so as to make sure the PDA Gold plugin operates properly.
Get Ready to See Your Sales Increase!
It is apparent that customizing your WooCommerce checkout page will bring numerous advantages to your online store. A too long and complicated checkout process will discourage customers from completing it. You need a solution like Flexible Checkout Fields to edit the checkout page, retain potential customers, and reduce cart abandonment rates.
And most importantly, don’t forget to prevent your digital product’s download links from piracy. PDA Gold comes as the quickest and simplest way to help you achieve that.
Download our PDA Gold plugin to maximize your product security as well as your sales now.
