Why did I migrate from Easy Digital Downloads to WooCommerce ?
I ‘m a webdesigner in love with digitalart. I’m still selling in a comfortable way my images (photos, illustrations, vintage stuff, 3D renderings) at micro-stock and stock agencies.
But my goal is to sell also by myself. As I can buildup websites, I launched AntikStock to sell a niche of mine: my illustrations restored and elaborated from the huge antique book collection of my property.
At a first glance Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) would really look the easy way to sell downloadable goods. But a rather disturbing (arithmetical!) issue (*) popping up changed my point of view and induced me to look seriously for alternatives and compare performances.
While comparing I found out that WooCommerce offers not only a quite solid E-commerce platform for virtual downloadable goods, but also much more interesting features free of charge.
A few examples: :
- to duplicate a product to sell with WooCommerce is free, on EDD you have to pay 29usd/year only for this simple feature!
- to comply with the EU VAT rules is free of charge, no way can EDD compete for free
- cross-sells and upsells are included, no need to pay for the corresponding EDD options anymore.
I could go on further, I would just add that I completed seamlessy my migration owning an elegant new shop with many more features totally free of charge and – the cherry on top – with a beautiful free image zoom.
(*) As you may know, selling digitally downloadable goods in EU imposes a set of pretty complicated rules made by bureaucrats for bureaucrats, but we can cope with them. EDD behaves okay at checkout time unless you introduce a discount. If you do that a sum of round-up errors appears in the VAT calculation; as quite surprisingly the net amount in this case is not shown, the error goes easily unnoticed – until a diligent official remarks such a few cents mismatch and then things are likely to turn interesting. Of course I reported it, but EDD didn’t seem to take the matter seriously.
