Easy Digital Downloads Payment Gateways

Easy Digital Downloads offers tons of flexibility with regard to accepting payments in your digital goods store. There are over 70 payment processing options for sale to integrate your payment processor with Easy Digital Downloads.

If you don’t already use a particular payment processor, I highly recommend Stripe, which is what I use myself. We have an article on selecting a payment processor that might be helpful as well.

We’ll provide an overview of some of the top Easy Digital Downloads payment gateways choices in this article as well a comparison chart below.

As a note, some of these payment gateways require an SSL certificate, but I’d recommend using one on your site regardless. An SSL certificate not only protects payment data, but also protects all login information for your site.

As most plugins do, Easy Digital Downloads includes PayPal Standard within the core plugin. This allows you to accept credit card and PayPal balance payments via your PayPal business account. Customers are directed to PayPal to complete the purchase, then a notification is sent back to your site from PayPal to signify that the purchase has been completed.

There are also a couple of free payment integrations available for Easy Digital Downloads. You can process payments with Mijireh by using the free Mijireh extension or process payments via Bitcoin as well.

EDD also has a Recurring Payments extension that allows you to accept subscription payments in your store. For example, let’s say that you have a music club that provides downloads each month for members. You can use this extension to automatically bill your members each week, month, year, etc.

The Easy Digital Downloads payment gateways that support recurring payments are Stripe, PayPal Standard (included with EDD), and Paymill.

So now let’s start with the top Easy Digital Downloads payment gateways for your digital goods shop.

As I stated previously, my favorite processor is Stripe, and Easy Digital Downloads has a Stripe integration available for $49. You can also purchase a Stripe Extension bundle for $80, which includes some other cool extensions like a MailChimp integration and email templates.

Stripe is available for merchants in the US, UK, EU, Canada, and Australia at present, but they’re constantly expanding their options.

There are several different PayPal services available for merchants, and we’ve got a comparison available if you’re not sure which one to use. Each of these PayPal integrations is available for $49.

The EDD PayPal Express / Pro extension allows you to take payments via PayPal Pro (on-site) or PayPal Express (off-site) in your EDD-powered store. This extension can be used by merchants in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia. You can also get this plugin as part of the PayPal extension bundle for $80, which is similar to the Stripe bundle.

A PayPal Advanced integration is available as well, which uses a secure iframed checkout form. This means that your payment form looks like it’s on your site, but is actually hosted by PayPal instead so that payment details are sent directly to PayPal’s servers. PayPal Advanced is available for merchants in the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

If you already have a merchant account and just want a payment gateway, Authorize.net is a popular choice. Easy Digital Downloads integrates with Authorize.net AIM for $49 to process payments directly on your site. Authorize.net AIM is available for merchants in the US, Canada, UK, EU, or Australia.

You can also purchase this as part of the Authorize.net extension bundle $80 just like you can with Stripe or PayPal Pro / Express.

Not sure if Authorize.net AIM is right for you? We have an Authorize.net comparison that goes over each Authorize.net version available to merchants.

Braintree is a good alternative to Stripe that I’ve had great experiences with. You can integrate EDD and Braintree with the Braintree add-on for $49 to accept payments directly on-site.

Braintree is currently available to merchants in the US, Canada, EU, and Australia, but they’re expanding as well. Braintree also runs a cool program for US-based merchants called “Ignition”. If you sign up with Braintree, your first $50,000 in transactions will be free of processing fees.

The First Data extension is available for $49 to integrate the First Data global payment gateway with your EDD site. First Data is a good choice for international merchants, as they support merchant accounts Worldwide.

You’ll be accepting payments on-site with this payment integration.

You can integrate 2Checkout with Easy Digital Downloads using the 2Checkout extension, which is also $49. 2Checkout allows merchants to accept credit cards, debit cards, and PayPal balances.

Payment forms are hosted off-site at 2Checkout rather than on your site, and 2Checkout supports merchant accounts worldwide (except for a few countries).

Want to accept manual payments? There’s a check gateway available for $29. You can set this up to allow check or manual payments for your store. For example, you could use this to provide instructions on bank transfers or to manually send invoices after an order has been received (which is great if you’re using EDD to sell services).

This gateway is flexible enough to be used how you’d like, and will work for any EDD merchant.

We’ve got the comparison chart below for help in deciding which Easy Digital Downloads payment gateway is for you, or you can view this via Google Docs. Note that since this doc is public, you can copy it into your own spreadsheet if you’d like to add to it.

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