🍋 Lemon Drop #05: Easy-peasy digital downloads for WordPress

Today, we’re excited to announce the official Lemon Squeezy WordPress plugin.

By using the Lemon Squeezy WordPress plugin, you’ll unlock the ability to sell digital products with ease on any WordPress-powered site.

Additionally, the power to provide auto-updates to WordPress themes and plugins — the biggest feature request by far — will all be handled for you too.

Download the Lemon Squeezy WordPress Plugin →

When we first announced Lemon Squeezy, we promised to turn the sour lemons from 2020 into some of the juiciest, best-tasting lemonade you’ve ever tasted.

And we like to think we’ve kept up on our promise.

We’re still consistently shipping new features (see drops #01, #02, #03, #04), and we’re more dedicated than ever to the mission of providing you with everything you need to sell online stitched into a single, simple platform.

Anywho, here’s what’s in today’s Lemon Drop.

• What is V1 of the plugin?
• Why use Lemon Squeezy rather than Easy Digital Downloads or WooCommerce?
• The Lemon Squeezy team and WordPress
• What’s next for the plugin?
• Docs

Let’s jump in.

WordPress infused with Lemons

Ok, ok, enough with the puns.

As mentioned, this is V1 of the Lemon Squeezy WordPress plugin and a starting point. From here, we’ll be listening to your feedback, and we’re excited to see where we can take this together.

Here are some of the highlights of V1.

Gutenberg Ready

The Lemon Squeezy WordPress plugin leverages the inbuilt power of the core button block. You can add “buy buttons” for your products on posts, pages, and custom post types.

Buy button text can be customized, and you can choose to link directly to a secure hosted checkout page or show a checkout overlay (a pop-up modal) right on your website for seamless integration.

Auto-Updates for Themes & Plugins

When distributing premium WordPress products, providing customers with updates, new features, and bug fixes is crucial to success. Historically, this has been very difficult to do, but we’ve made it easy-peasy.

With Lemon Squeezy, auto-updates are taken care of, which means one less worry for you. The Lemon Squeezy team has worked hard to bring this advanced feature to our platform, making the entire process a breeze.

With Lemon Squeezy, you can sell your WordPress products, ship updates to paying customers and grow a thriving WordPress business with one single platform.

Seamless OAuth Connection

Connecting your Lemon Squeezy store with the Lemon Squeezy WordPress plugin is super simple. Click connect, authorize your store and voilà, you’re ready to go. The Lemon Squeezy WordPress plugin will automatically load your products into your WordPress site for quick access.

Why use Lemon Squeezy rather than Easy Digital Downloads or WooCommerce?

Glad you asked.

Although these are powerful WordPress plugins, they both can be cumbersome to use, leaving WordPress creators to manage plugin updates, security, payments, taxes, customer accounts, extensions, and GDPR laws.

It can also be challenging to manage customers, products, and orders via the often-crowded WordPress admin.

Lemon Squeezy handles everything, so you don’t have to.

With Lemon Squeezy, you can launch your store, create and market products, manage customers and subscribers, and more (check out all of the Lemon Squeezy features), all within a beautifully-designed interface tailor-made for creators.

When you’re ready to sell on your WordPress site, install the Lemon Squeezy WordPress plugin and add your products to any post, page, or content area to start generating sales.

It’s easy-peasy, Lemon Squeezy.

Lemon Squeezy at a glance:

• Lemon Squeezy is your merchant of record. There’s no need to worry about setting up merchant accounts, payment gateways, taxes, VAT, etc. It’s all handled for you.
• Bank payouts (79 countries) and PayPal Payouts. More about Getting Paid.
• Checkout pages (hosted and overlay modals)
• Customer Management (view, edit, delete, refund, and more)
• Discount Codes (flat rate, %, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, start and end dates, limits, etc.)
• Sell downloads, subscriptions, license keys and more.
• Offer free downloads (aka Lead Magnets)
• Accept Credit Cards via Stripe and PayPal.
• Currency Support across 95 Countries.
• EU VAT and Tax Handling
• Pay what you want pricing
• Reporting and Sales Insights
• 3rd Party Email Intgrations (MailChimp and ConvertKit)
• API & Webhook Access
• Custom Domains
• And much more
  

The Lemon Squeezy Team is rooted in WordPress

Today’s Lemon Drop hits close to home for the entire Lemon Squeezy team. We like to think we’re the perfect people to bring a fresh approach to selling digital downloads with WordPress.

Every member of the collective (known as Make Lemonade) has contributed to the WordPress ecosystem and community. The team needs no introduction, especially for the WP OG’s out there, but it’s good to remember from where you came.

• Orman Clark (Co-Founder) — Orman’s WordPress themes quickly set the standard for the Envato marketplaces. In less than 2 years, he sold over $1M worth of WordPress themes and even has his very own Orman Clark day. He went on to build Dunked.com, a platform used by over 100,000 creative’s looking to build an online portfolio.
• Gilbert Pellegrom (Co-Founder) — His most notable WordPress creation is the Nivo Slider (over 5M downloads). On top of that, he’s built countless other products under his Dev7studios brand and led engineering for SpinupWP and Dunked.
• Jason Schuller (Co-Founder) — As the creator of one of the first stand-alone WordPress theme shops, Press75, Jason injected a whole new flavor into the WordPress ecosystem. He went on to create ThemeGarden, RIVYT, WP Landing Kit, and more.
• JR Farr (Co-Founder) — JR started using WordPress in 2006 before Pages even existed. He built and sold one of the largest WordPress marketplaces, MOJO Marketplace, after growing it to over 6M+ users, with full integrations into some of the largest web hosting companies like Bluehost, HostGator, and others.

And our experience doesn’t stop there. Mike McAlister (LiftoffCourse, Array Themes, Atomic Blocks), James Kemp (IconicWP), and Patrick Posner (Simply Static) have all made strides in the WordPress space.

Today, we’ve all teamed up as Make Lemonade, and we’re focused on making Lemon Squeezy the platform to sell digital products.

What’s next in V1.1?

We’re still in the early planning stages for the next release of the plugin. The current roadmap introduces the ability to “Restrict Content” by leveraging more features from Lemon Squeezy.

If you would like to influence the roadmap of the Lemon Squeezy WordPress plugin, please don’t hesitate to reach out via Twitter (@lmsqueezy) or email us ([email protected])

Ready to get started?

Let’s get you set up on Lemon Squeezy so you can start selling your products!

1. Sign up for your free Lemon Squeezy account (free 14-day trial).
2. Set up your store details and create your first products. We’ll walk you through the whole process during onboarding.
3. Add the Lemon Squeezy WordPress plugin to any WordPress website and start adding products and making sales.

Still have questions?

We recently updated our support docs to walk you through how to install, activate, and use all the WordPress plugin features. For more information about using the Lemon Squeezy WordPress plugin, check out our docs.

Stay fresh. 🍋

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