The online marketplace is growing in a significant way, with no signs of slowing down. In the US alone, over $430 Billion is spent online in a year. We live in an accessible world where we can buy and sell quickly, thanks to applications like Easy Digital Downloads. When getting a business started online, you want your e-commerce software to be easy to use - and to cost as little as possible. Thankfully, there are a few free Easy Digital Downloads themes that are simple to install and easy to use.
We, at WowThemes, offer a premium package to have your digital store up and running within 24h without your effort: theme + installation + free updates and support. Simply choose one of our Easy Digital Downloads themes and we’ll take care of the rest.
Free Easy Digital Downloads Themes
It’s always been a struggle finding free programs and themes that are fully functional. Coding is a long and tedious process, and not everyone likes to work for free. Thankfully, there are still a few good kind-hearted coders out there who are offering free Easy Digital Downloads themes for commercial work.
Here’s a list of the best free Easy Digital Downloads themes to help you grow your business online.
1 Lambada
Lambada, by WowThemesNet, is a great theme for anyone looking to scale their business online. The theme is easy to install, and the layout is simple to understand.
The thing I like most about the Lambada theme over other free Easy Digital Downloads themes, is its layout. Its so simply laid out, once you have your online site setup - you can literally leave it alone and focus on promoting your business. You don’t need to worry about responding to support requests on how to find or do something.
Within an item’s page, customers have the option of purchasing different versions of the item. If you’re selling music online, you can offer different download formats (wav, mp3, etc). Photos can be offered in different sizes, ebooks in different formats, and software for different operating systems.
Once you’ve got a foothold on your market, and you’re ready to scale things up; You can upgrade to the paid version of Lambada, that offers many more features and insights on your business.
2 Themedd
Themedd is a modern-styled theme that is offered directly by EDD. This theme is one of the most visually appealing free Easy Digital Downloads themes that are available for download.
On the homepage, there are no featured photos or boxed menus. The theme relies on the images you provide for your downloadable items, and your company logo, to make an impression. The demo provided is very well put together, but it should be noted that having a few conflicting images can quickly make the website hard on the eyes.
The product pages keep with the simplicity of the theme and offer a few item details such as who the author of the content is. One thing I dislike about these pages is that there is no comments section on the products pages.
The author has left added commenting on the blog postings, but nothing on the purchase page. One thing that really helps sales, is positive reviews - and not having those reviews right on the same page is a conversion killer.
3 Vendd
Vendd is one of those themes that looks like it was built in the late 90’s/early 2000’s. Although it’s as basic as it get’s it’s fully functional and one of the few free Easy Digital Downloads themes available.
Sometimes your site doesn’t need to be heavily focused on being visually pleasing to help drive your sales. This is often the case for the sales of business-focused software functions, such as macros for Microsoft Excel.
These kinds of customers don’t want to scan through large images and small text. They want the exact opposite; A lot of detailed text and minimal imagery, so they can quickly find exactly what they’re looking for.
Vendd is one of the few free Easy Digital Downloads themes that offer this unconventional format. It relies heavily on information and offers many ways to get your information through to your customers. Whether it’s through their blog layouts or their detailed “Download Details”.
4 Lattice
Lattice is a barebones theme (In regards to appearance), that is well suited for anyone with a specific niche. The homepage doesn’t offer much for explaining exactly what you’re selling, so it’s important your customers know why they’re there.
Like Themdd, another one of the free Easy Digital Downloads themes available by EDD, it’s very basic. The homepage is simply text-based menus and only offers images and titles as indicators of the product available.
In the demo provided they offer an example of a hip-hop music album store. As I mentioned earlier, you need to have a niche to operate this store. There is no indication of what genre or category the items fall into and no areas for descriptions.
The only type of online business I could see this theme being functional for, without a niche, is photography. You can display your purchasable photos and provide a simple title for each one.
The product pages offer a nice simple layout that allows you to input a large description of the items being sold. There is also an area for reviews to be left on the purchased items. Other than those two main features, the product pages are rather bare.
For example, one thing that is missing from the item description pages, is the ability to input tags for the items. This makes searching for specific items hard for customers to find. You could manually type tags into the item’s description, but doing this wrong can take away from the visual appearance.
5 Checathlon
Checathlon is one of the few free Easy Digital Downloads themes that were built around the conventional website template. When you first visit the page you’re greeted with a homepage that looks like a blog or small business website.
This free Easy Digital Downloads theme was built for the business that has few products to sell. The home’s landing page offers a layout that allows a company description to be seen before the products are available. As you scroll down the page, you find more information that leads you to different pages on the website. These include item descriptions, blog postings, testimonials, and more areas for getting your message through to your customer.
The product description page falls a little short on pushing the sale to the next step. With a website offering a conventional website template, you’d expect more area for providing key points to customers. Instead, you are given an area for a paragraphed description, detailed info, and some featured products at the bottom.
It’s important to keep in mind that we’re only looking at the free Easy Digital Downloads themes available. So overall for a free theme, Checathlon is a good choice for the 1-5 product seller.
6 EDigital
EDigital is one of the more advanced free Easy Digital Downloads themes available. The theme was built for the online seller who already has a presence in the online marketplace. This website theme’s homepage provides a whole host of options to provide information and display products to your customers.
Although this theme is on the list of free Easy Digital Downloads themes, you can expect to spend a fair amount of money or time getting it set up. The homepage is full of excerpts from blogs, testimonials, and products - So without those other pages setup, your website will look uncared for.
Product pages for this theme are lacking in a few areas. There are no areas for product details, your price isn’t displayed immediately to the customer, and the purchase button is at the bottom of the page. These small features can make a big difference from turning a viewer into a customer.
If you have time and/or money to spend, then this website could be for you. Chances are, that if you’re looking at free Easy Digital Downloads themes, you most likely don’t want to spend money until you make money. If you choose to go with this theme; just make sure you’ve got at least 20 different products to sell before getting this theme setup on your website.
7 Shoppette
Shoppette, as the name applies, is a bubbly theme full of bright colours and rounded edges giving it an upbeat feel. The immediate impression is that of a small home-based business that is direct from seller to customer.
This theme’s homepage provides a simple text-based description of the website, and up to 9 products displayed. There is no place to provide a call to action, or any additional website information.
The product descriptions under the image displays, provide enough text space to allow up to 230 characters. This is just enough space to let your customers know what the product is about, and reel them into the product page.
Once you’ve reeled your customers into your product page, they are shown a purchase button and an image - which is great. A couple things that are missing are product information boxes, and I feel the layout could use a related items list.
For the small business looking to sell up to 20 items, this free theme could be the way to go. For those looking to grow larger in the future, I would recommend another one of the free Easy Digital Downloads themes.
8 Quota
Quota is a theme that’s focused on selling photography. I can not see any other product that could possibly be sold using this theme. The homepage has a simple header that is small in size so that the products being sold are instantly displayed.
Product descriptions are non-existent in this theme. Each product listed allows for a title, picture, and a selling price. The grey-scale colours in the theme are a great way to make your images stand out, and stand out they do. Viewing the home page of the site is similar to viewing photos laid upon a white sheet paper with a title and cost written beside them.
When you’re inside of the product page, the theme does a great job at getting your point across. Immediately upon loading the page, you see the image, the purchase button, your shopping cart, and the tags of the image.
For those customer looking for more information, they can scroll down the page a bit more. As they scroll down to view the more detailed information they are shown some related items. This is a great way to make sure your customer finds exactly what they’re looking for
All of the free Easy Digital Downloads themes listed here are a good way to sell your photography online. This specific theme limits you to selling your photography only. If you ever want to start selling your photos on special items, you may have a hard time with conversions using this theme.
9 Singularity
Singularity is one of the few free Easy Digital Download themes that is built to focus on the sale of software and services. The theme is set up as a small business website, where the focus is on the business and not the product offered.
The homepage’s layout does not provide any direct links to purchase any items. It instead focuses on sending customers to a product’s landing page where they can find detailed information. On the products page, they are given the option to purchase the software or service.
Product pages for this template are as basic as they can possibly be. There is a picture, description, and a purchase button. That’s it. There’s no upselling, related products, or information box.
Customer who visit a website using this theme will need to be sold on their product before they visit the product page. The template does offer blank pages where it would be up to you to format your own page, to sell your customer on your service.
Because of this templates large size, you can expect to spend a lot of time or money getting everything set up before you make your first sale. This template is not friendly for beginners and first-time sellers. Any seller considering using this theme should have some background in website development.
10 Basic Shop
Basic Shop is one of the only free Easy Digital Downloads themes that seems to have been built for the affiliate marketer only.
The homepage consists of a slideshow that shows the various items for sale in a single row. Below that slideshow begins the multiple links to the site’s blog posts.
For a website that was built with the affiliate marketer in mind, you’d expect multiple opportunities for direct purchases on the blog posts. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Basic Shop. The layout of the article pages consist of what you would see on your average blog; A featured image, article, categories, tags, and a place to leave a comment. There is nothing more than that. There are no extra opportunities to upsell a product directly on the page, or anywhere to have products related to the post.
As a blogging website with a minor focus on direct product sales, this would be a good theme. For any serious seller who wants to get their customers purchase directly, I would look at other free Easy Digital Downloads themes.
So… what’s the best choice?
In a world of ever-growing online purchases, how your customers interact with your pages is as important as what you sell. You need your website to take care of your customers while you’re out there growing your business.
This is why we, at WowThemes.net, offer a premium package to have your digital store up and running within 24h without your effort: theme + installation + free updates and support. Simply choose one of our Easy Digital Downloads themes and we’ll take care of the rest.
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