Best WooCommerce Checkout Plugins for Digital Products
Do you sell digital goods and want to improve your store? Check out our list of the best WooCommerce checkout plugins for digital products.
Before we have a look at the plugins, let’s understand the difference between physical and digital products.
Digital vs Physical Products
Digital products are goods that you sell online and don’t have a physical form such as e-books, themes, music files, software, and any other products that you can download. These goods are an inseparable part of the e-commerce world these days. Due to the advantages of selling digital products, they have become very popular among WooCommerce online stores. But what are the advantages of selling this type of product? Digital goods don’t require any shipping to the customers so there are no logistics involved. This means that shops don’t need to incur costs in logistics and transportation. Additionally, there’s no risk of running out of stock when selling these types of goods.
On the other hand, digital products also have some disadvantages compared to selling physical goods. For one, consumers usually prefer to buy expensive items in stores. Even though it’s becoming more and more common for shoppers to spend more money online, there are still some people, especially older generations, who are reluctant to spend big online. Finally, as selling digital products is very attractive, there’s a lot of competition for nearly every type of product.
Why use checkout plugins for digital products in WooCommerce?
As digital products don’t need shipping, you should adapt the checkout page accordingly. For example, you can get rid of the shipping address (unless you want to get that information for marketing purposes). The checkout process for digital goods requires a different checkout page and that’s why you should use specialized tools for it.
Studies show that long and complicated checkout pages are one of the main reasons for cart abandonment. So, adapting your checkout based on the products you sell will help you increase conversion rates and boost sales.
If you have coding skills you can customize the checkout programmatically. Otherwise, you can check out our list of the best WooCommerce checkout plugins for digital products.
Best WooCommerce Checkout Plugins for Digital Products
The best WooCommerce checkout plugins for digital products are:
- Checkout Manager for WooCommerce (Free and Premium)
- Express Checkout for WooCommerce (Premium)
- Direct Checkout for WooCommerce (Free and Premium)
- WooCommerce Checkout for Digital Goods (Premium)
- Digital Goods for WooCommerce Checkout (Free and Premium)
- YITH WooCommerce Quick Checkout for Digital Goods
Now, let’s have a closer look at what each plugin has to offer.
1. Checkout Manager for WooCommerce
Checkout Manager for WooCommerce is one of the best checkout plugins for digital and virtual products. Apart from being one of the best field editors, this tool allows you to add, edit, and delete any fields on the checkout page. This way, you can customize it for digital goods or any type of product you sell.
Checkout Manager comes with a wide range of features to optimize the checkout, making it an excellent plugin to revamp your whole checkout process. You can create conditional fields to display or hide fields based on the values of parent fields, add fees, let customers upload files during the checkout, and much more.
Main Features
- Ability to remove, edit, and add fields from the checkout
- Customers can upload files during the purchase process
- Add new fees to the checkout
- Core fields in the Billing and Shipping sections can be easily modified
- Create conditional fields
Price
Checkout Manager is a freemium plugin. It has a free version with basic features and 3 pro plans that start at just 20 USD for one site (one-time payment).
2. Express Checkout for WooCommerce
To eliminate redundant shipping and billing details to allow a smooth purchasing process, Express Checkout is one of the best checkout plugins for digital products. This tool helps you get rid of unnecessary fields on the checkout page with ease.
Apart from removing redundant fields, Express Checkout allows you to decide what to display on the checkout page. One of its most powerful features is the ability to customize the checkout based on what the store offers. For example, e-books and audio files may need different fields than plugins and video games. You, as the store owner, have full control over what the required fields are for each type of virtual product.
Main Features
- Ability to remove billing details for free products
- Works with all product types, including bundles and subscriptions
- Works right out of the box without further configuration
- Ability to disable order notes and comments
Price
Express Checkout is a premium plugin that costs 39 USD per year for a single site or 119 USD if you pay once.
3. Direct Checkout for WooCommerce
Direct Checkout for WooCommerce is an excellent plugin that allows you to simplify the checkout. This is a great tool for websites that sell both digital and physical products. It allows you to customize the checkout process and checkout page in a few clicks.
Apart from letting you disable unnecessary fields on the checkout page, Direct Checkout is designed to speed up the checkout process and boost conversion rates. The One-page Checkout feature allows you to include the cart form in the checkout page so that customers can edit the cart and finish their purchase on the same page. All in all, this is a great plugin to improve and optimize your checkout for any type of product.
Main Features
- Highly customizable features
- AJAX add-to-cart on single products
- Ability to redirect shoppers from the product page to the checkout
- One-page checkout
- Quick purchase buttons for single products
Price
There is a free version that you can download from this link and 3 premium plans start at 20 USD (one-time payment).
4. WooCommerce Checkout for Digital Goods
With thousands of sales and outstanding ratings, WooCommerce Checkout for Digital Goods has very good reasons to be in our list of the best checkout plugins for digital products.
Apart from allowing you to remove unnecessary fields, this tool comes with a great feature that distinguishes whether or not there are physical products in the customer’s cart. If there aren’t, it will automatically hide relevant billing details such as address and phone numbers to speed up the process.
Main Features
- Ability to detect physical products in the cart to display or hide fields on the checkout page
- Perfect integration with PayPal checkout
- Easy to use
- No setup needed after installation
Price
WooCommerce Checkout for Digital Goods is a premium tool that’s available in CodeCanyon for 18 USD.
5. Digital Goods for WooCommerce Checkout
Digital Goods for WooCommerce Checkout earns its spot among our list of the best WooCommerce checkout plugins for digital goods because it’s specifically designed for this type of product.
Apart from allowing you to remove fields, this plugin lets you customize or hide unnecessary fields based on products, product categories, and tags taking customization to a whole new level.
Main Features
- Ability to remove unnecessary fields from the checkout
- Fit for multiple types of virtual products including ebooks, audio and video files, images, PDF, Word, Excel documents, and others
- Quick checkout buttons for various pages and products
- Additional fields for customers to fill in after payment
Price
Digital Goods for WooCommerce Checkout is a freemium product. You can check out the free version or go for one of the premium plans that start at 11 USD per year.
6. YITH WooCommerce Quick Checkout for Digital Goods
Considering the importance of a specialized checkout process for digital goods, it’s no surprise that YITH has its own product in the market. WooCommerce Quick Checkout for Digital Goods is an excellent tool designed to improve the checkout for digital and virtual products.
Apart from the ability to remove fields, what makes this tool special is YITH’s approach to developing it. They found out that requiring customers to fill in their details before the purchase may lead to cart abandonment. So this plugin asks shoppers to provide their data after the payment and right before the download process begins.
Main Features
- Ability to decide the number of checkout fields to display
- You can add the checkout process directly to the product page
- Ability to ask for customers details after the payment
- Quick checkout for all digital products
Price
WooCommerce Quick Checkout for Digital Goods is a premium plugin that starts at 69.99 USD for a single site.
First Steps When Using Checkout Plugins for Digital Products
All these plugins are great choices to improve your checkout if you sell digital. However, you should keep several things in mind before you decide which one is best for you.
First, note that some plugins are solely designed for digital goods, while others can be used for both virtual and physical products. The first type usually works out of the box without configuration, while the latter usually requires some work to get up and running, typically manually removing unnecessary fields.
Secondly, most of these tools come with many other features that will help you improve your whole checkout process. To make the most of them, we recommend you check out their features to see which ones can help you the most.
Finally, don’t forget to update your WordPress and WooCommerce versions before using these tools to avoid compatibility issues. We recommend you use at least WordPress 4.5 or higher, and WooCommerce 4.0.x or higher. If you haven’t done it yet, we recommend you update to the latest version WordPress 5.5.1.
Conclusion
All in all, if you sell digital goods, you should have a checkout plugin for digital products in your store. This way, you cut down the number of fields customers have to go through to buy your products, reducing cart abandonment and boosting conversion rates.
We’ve seen that there are two main types of plugins: those for digital/virtual products only, and those for both digital and physical ones. Depending on the types of products you sell, decide which one best fits your business needs.
If you want a plugin for both virtual and physical products, Direct Checkout and Checkout Manager are your best bets. While Checkout Manager is a fully-fledged checkout field editor, Direct Checkout offers great features to improve the checkout. On top of that, they both have free versions so you can try them out without spending a cent.
On the other hand, if you only sell digital goods, Express Checkout for WooCommerce and YITH WooCommerce Quick Checkout for Digital Goods are excellent choices. The latter has more features but it’s quite costly compared to other tools in the list.
Do you know any other checkout tools for digital goods that we should include in our list? Let us know in the comments section below! If you’re looking for plugins to make the most of your checkout, you can check out our collection of the best WooCommerce checkout plugins.
