For many WordPress business owners, such as plugin and theme sellers, the big news this week was the release of a new version of Recurring Payments for Easy Digital Downloads.
Most people in the WordPress community that are selling themes and plugins do so using the Easy Digital Downloads plugin and specifically the excellent Software Licensing add-on.
The big problem facing many business owners however has been low renewal rates across the board. Although there might be several reasons why this is the case, certainly the lack of recurring license renewals played a big part in the situation.
Put simply, so far if you were on the EDD platform your clients had to realise that the plugins they purchased from you are going to expire, then go back to your site and make another payment. This has to be done every year. It might not sound like a big deal but to many users this is a complete waste of precious time and it can quickly get old when you are trying to renew dozens of themes and plugins.
With the new version of Recurring Payments, you can now set up your licenses to recur automatically, for example every year or every month. This should bring about a significant increase in the number of license renewals, and hence important increases in the revenue levels for many business owners.
This good news comes in just as many of these WordPress business owners are heading to the number one conference for WordPress entrepreneurs. We’re of course referring to Pressnomics, due to be held next week in Phoenix.
I expect there will be a lot of discussion about this new feature and I am looking forward to talking to people who have already implemented recurring licensing systems for their users and learning how to best set up things so that everything is clear for new customers as well as how to deal with existing customers who are not on the recurring license model.
Pippin discusses the rationale behind the latest release of Recurring Payments in the latest episode of his Apply Filters podcast.
Thanks Pippin and the rest of the Easy Digital Downloads team for making this possible, it’s been a long time coming and involved a lot of work and testing, but we’re very happy to finally be able to implement recurring licenses for our clients.
