Easy Digital Downloads

Pippin Williamson launched Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) in 2012 as a focused e-commerce plugin for WordPress specifically for digital products — ebooks, software, PDFs, audio files. Where WooCommerce handled physical and digital products with equal complexity, EDD was laser-focused on the digital product use case with a cleaner UX and a developer-friendly codebase. Pippin built a thriving extensions marketplace, letting third-party developers sell payment gateways, recurring billing, software licensing, and more. The business model was elegant: core plugin free and open source, revenue from extensions and software-as-a-service add-ons. By the mid-2010s EDD and the Pippin's Plugins brand had grown to $100k+/month. Pippin became one of the most prominent figures in the WordPress commercial plugin space. In 2018 he merged his company with other WordPress product businesses to form Sandhills Development, which was later acquired by Awesome Motive in 2022. EDD remains one of the most-used digital commerce tools in the WordPress ecosystem with millions of installs.