How to Sell Digital Products with Elementor (Without Extra Plugin)

As a digital creator creating with WordPress, you have many options to earn money. If you are a writer, for instance, you can write an e-book and sell it on your website. If you use Elementor on your WordPress website, you can sell your e-book (or any digital product) without installing an extra plugin. In this post, we will show you how to use Elementor to sell your digital products.

Elementor introduced the PayPal Button widget in version 3.2 which was released in March 2021. With the widget, you can accept payments for products (digital or physical products), accept donation, and apply subscription method.

Months later along with the release of version 3.7, Elementor introduced another handy widget to accept payments: Stripe Button. The widget allows you to accept payments for digital products.

PayPal, as you know, is a global payment service widely used by digital businesses and creators worldwide. While Stripe is a payment gateway that allows businesses and creators to accept payments via debet card or credit card. Stripe supports popular card brands like Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, and JCB. As you know, these cards are accepted globally. In other words, you can sell your products globally using the widget.

For the best results, you can provide two payment methods by taking advantage of both the PayPal Button and Stripe Button widgets.

Some Advantages of Selling Digital Products on Your Own Website

Selling digital products is extremely easy in today’s era. Gumroad, for instance, allows you to sell a digital product regardless of the form. From e-book, digital template (PSD, Elementor template, etc.,), images, and so on. If you are an illustrator or web designer, you can also sell your works on Creative Market, Freepik, to ThemeForest.

The problem with selling your digital products on those platforms is that you have no full control over your business. It’s almost impossible to build a sustainable, long-term business by relying on a marketplace platform. Let alone developing a brand.

Every traffic you get for your product pages will only make their brands get bigger. On the worst case, they might use the user transaction history to promote products from other sellers that sell products similar to yours.

When you sell your products on your own website, you have a full control over business. No third-party have access to your consumers’ data or their transaction history. Most importantly, you work for your own business, not others.

Steps to Sell Digital Products in Elementor

1. Specify the Payment Options You Want to Accept

In general, there are two payment options accepted by digital businesses: PayPal and credit/debet card. You can use the PayPal Button widget to accept payments via PayPal. While to accept payments via cards, you can use the Stripe Button widget.

The PayPal Button widget requires no complex setup. You can use both the Personal version and the Business version of PayPal.

Meanwhile, the Stripe Button widget requires integration setup before you can use it. You need to enter both the Test Secret key and Live Secret key. You can go to Elementor -> Settings on your WordPress dashboard to set up the Stripe integration. On the Integrations tab, scroll down to the Stripe section to enter they keys.

Don’t forget to click the Save Changes button to apply the changes.

Step 2: Prepare the Digital File

You can use Elementor to sell any digital product. But of course, you need to prepare the digital file first before you can sell it.

If you want to sell a digital file that has a large size (e.g., a video), you can consider using a third-party file hosting service such as Dropbox and Google Drive.

We strongly recommend you place your file in a folder then create a ZIP file of the folder. Most web browsers (except Safari) will automatically download a ZIP file when the URL of the associated file is accessed via the address bar. This will ease your job in providing the digital file after your customers completed the payment.

Step 3: Create the Landing Page and Setup the Payment Widgets

Once your file is ready, you can start creating the landing page to sell it. On your landing page, you can add the payment widgets (PayPal Button or Stripe Button).

For this tutorial, we have created a landing page designed to sell an e-book. You can download the template by clicking the button below.

Import the template once you downloaded it. The template has two PayPal Button widgets. One on the top section and the other one on the bottom section. Click one of the PayPal Button widgets to edit it and go to the settings panel to setup the payment. If you prefer to create your own page, you can simply add the PayPal Button widget to your page.

As you can see, there are three settings blocks under the Content tab on the settings panel: Pricing & Payments, Button, and Additional Options.

– Pricing & Payments

You can open this settings block to set the price of your product, add your PayPal account, enter the SKU, set the tax (if you charge it), and so on. One thing. Make sure to set the Transaction Type to Checkout since you want to use the widget to sell product.

– Button

This block is aimed at customizing the content of the button (text and icon). You can also set the alignment of the button from this block.

– Additional Options

Ideally, you allow your customers to download the digital file you offer after they completed the payment. There are two approaches you can choose: by redirecting them to another page (make sure to provide the download button on the page) and directly download the file. We will use the second approach in this example.

You can open the Additional Options settings block to add the URL of the file. Simply paste URL to the Redirect After Success field.

Until here, the payment setup is complete. Other setting options are optional. You can then open the Style tab on the settings panel to style up the button.

If you want to add Stripe payment option, you can simply drag the Stripe Button widget to the canvas area. The setup steps are the same as PayPal.

Once you are done editing the page, you can publish/or update it. Next, you can promote your page wherever you want. Whether on social media, email newsletter, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and so on.

The Bottom Line

Elementor is a great plugin for digital creators. Not only it allows you to create pages, but you can also use Elementor to earn money by selling your works on your own website. As we mentioned above, selling your digital products on your own website gives you many advantages. The most important part is that you will have a full control over your business. Also, you don’t need to share your earnings with a third-party.

You can make use of the PayPal Button and Stripe Button widgets to sell your digital products directly on your Elementor-powered WordPress site. No need to install an extra payment plugin.