This isn’t our usual type of post, but we wanted to mention how this site is possible. It’s built on a very popular platform, called WordPress, that I’m sure many of you are familiar with. However that only really deals with the basic look of the site.
What makes ECHO Education possible as an online store is amazing and FREE tool called Easy Digital Downloads (EDD). It’s what they call a ‘plugin’ but that really doesn’t do it justice. EDD is what manages all our products, creates the product pages, lets you add the ones you want to a shopping cart, and buy them, all as, we hope, a pretty seamless experience.
From behind the scenes it’s made the site possible. While my husband, who manages the technical side of things, is pretty good at computer stuff, we could never have built anything from scratch that does what this site manages. It was him discovering EDD that made ECHO as it now exists, even possible.
The fact it’s free made it very simple to try out. Of course they’re a business too so the way they work is they have lots of clever paid ‘extensions’ that add all kinds of extra functionality to the site, that make your life, and ours, easier. Things like which payment portal we can use, in our case Paypal and Stripe, and most importantly for us, easy ways to give you access to free downloads of our courses.
We’ve got a whole bunch of other extensions running behind the scenes, from adding people to our Mailchimp mailing list, or asking you where you heard about us, or most recently, adding the option for payments for our products to be broken down into recurring billing rather than a single payment, which we know a lot of you have found useful.
If you’re thinking about selling digital products we’d highly recommend them. You can find out more at Easy Digital Downloads https://easydigitaldownloads.com/ and explore all the extensions here.
