All I wanted was to sell simple digital products using WooCommerce – my page templates. It should be easy for the buyer so they purchase in just 3 steps

1. Click on ‘Buy Now’
2. Fill in contact & payment details
3. Finish purchase and download item

Not too much to ask in 2023, I thought. I was wrong.

I spent some time to get it to work the way I wanted. I’m sharing every step needed to simplify your WooCommerce setup in this article so you can do the same.

Why is this recommended?

This flow is streamlined for higher conversions / sales. People love simple. WooCommerce out of the box is built for bigger, complicated full fledged e-commerce shops

What we’ll setup?

• We’ll setup something similar to the screenshots below.
• I won’t focus on getting the exact look and feel.
• The focus will be on the flow / user experience. Zero fancy stuff.

What You Need

1. A website that runs on WordPress and WooCommerce
2. 10 mins time

Optionally, you can use Elementor Pro which I use to customize the look and feel of the product page and the checkout page.

How To Add A Digital Product In WooCommerce

Simply add a new product in WooCommerce (Products > Add New) and configure the following settings as shown in the screenshots below.

Detailed Steps To Streamline The Buying Experience

Here’s what we will do to simplify your WooCommerce setup

1. Skip the cart page
2. Disable product reviews
3. Disable stock management / inventory management
4. Disable the cart functionality (and limit only one product at a time)

Skip the cart page

Under WooCommerce > Settings > Products > General, make sure the redirect to the cart page after successful addition is checked.

Under WooCommerce > Settings > Products > Page Setup, make sure both cart page and checkout page are pointing to your Checkout page.

Disable product reviews

This one is simple and optional. I enable this to just keep it clean.

I hope the screenshot below is self-explanatory.

Disable stock / inventory management

Self-explanatory screenshot below – uncheck enable stock management.

Disable the cart functionality

This is the only complicated step.

Even if we skip the cart page, there is still a possibility of adding multiple items to the cart in the background. Then we end up having products on the checkout page that we cannot remove.

Step 1: So to avoid that, first enable the following setting in all your products (screenshot below)

Step 2: This step requires you to have a child theme installed. If you don’t know what it is, I suggest you read this post. But most paid themes should provide one for download. You’ll have to simply install it alongside your actual theme. You can use a free plugin like Child Theme Configurator to generate one quickly.

Next you’ll need to copy-paste a few lines of code. First copy the code below.

It does two things:

1. Disables the annoying zoom functionality that comes with WooCommerce
2. Empties the cart, before adding a new item to it. This ensures the cart cannot have more than one item ever.

// before addto cart, only allow 1 item in a cart
add_filter( 'woocommerce_add_to_cart_validation', 'woo_custom_add_to_cart_before' );
 
function woo_custom_add_to_cart_before( $cart_item_data ) {
 
    global $woocommerce;
    $woocommerce->cart->empty_cart();
 
    // Do nothing with the data and return
    return true;
}

add_filter( 'woocommerce_single_product_zoom_enabled', '__return_false' );

Next go to Appearance > Theme File Editor > functions.php and paste the code as shown in the screenshot below.

Conclusion

If you followed the steps above, you should now have a streamlined, simple buying experience on your WooCommerce store that helps increase conversions / sales. Feel free to contact me with your questions.

References

1. https://trends.builtwith.com/shop