I just put up my JavaScript For Kids book for sale as a PDF download last week. Having never done this before, I was expecting a lot of setup hassle and several days of software development work. But it turned out to be very straightforward and extremely painless and I wrote no code to make it happen!
All it took is installing the WooCommerce WordPress Plugin and following the instructions. As part of the installation, it automatically setup Stripe payments for me. Next step was to create a product. That involved exactly the same process as creating a blog post. It took me longer to write the book description than it took me to setup all this.
Then I took a few screenshots of the book PDF and added it to the “product gallery”. I wasn’t very happy with how the gallery looked and I installed a free plugin called WooSwipe to make it look more professional.
To add tabs next to Description Tab, I found this free plugin – Custom Tabs for WooCommerce.
This site uses a dark theme and instead of finding a dark theme plugin for WooCommerce or changing my theme to be the WooCommerce theme, I just manually added some CSS to my theme (which is a modified version of Freak) to make everything look nicer as part of the dark theme.
Since I’m selling an eBook, I marked the product as “Virtual” and “Downloadable” and then added the PDF to the “Downloadable Files” section of the product page. That’s it. And it was all ready to go. The purchase transactions happen entirely within my site. Way more professional than I expected. I thought it would setup something where you get redirected to a third party payment processor. So if you are thinking about setting this up for yourself and know nothing about it at all, go for it. It is easy and painless.