Making Your First Sale with Freemius Checkout / Buy Button
Once the SDK integration process has been completed, your plugin or theme users can purchase the paid version of your product in 3 places:
- Directly from the WP Admin
- Hosted Freemius Checkout pages
- A Buy Button that can easily be integrated into any website.
Upgrading in the WP Admin
Your free plugin will automatically include a pricing table and purchase button so that your customers can purchase directly from the WP-Admin (we call this In-Dashboard Upgrading).
The prices and features included on this pricing table automatically sync with the pricing and features your designate in the PLANS section of the Developer Dashboard.
Pro Tip: If you don’t want to display one of your plans in the WP Admin pricing table, you can choose to “hide” them using the “Is Hidden” switch in the PLANS section. This, along with custom Buy Buttons for each plan, allows you to experiment with different pricing options really easily.
Hosted Freemius Checkout Pages
Next to each plan, you’ll notice buttons that say “Checkout Link”
These buttons link directly to hosted Freemius Checkout pages for Sandbox / Testing payments and Production / Live payments.
These hosted Checkout pages are really useful for a number of reasons:
- If you want to link directly to the hosted checkout pages from WordPress.org instead of linking to your website’s pricing page.
- If you want to share checkout links with specific affiliates (which requires a unique parameter added to the checkout link).
- If you want to send direct license upgrade links to customers you can easily create a link with the relevant license key and the target update plan and billing cycle.
- For testing and viewing your Checkout page to see how it works and how your pricing plans are laid out.
Buy Button
To integrate the Buy Button on any website, simply grab the auto-generated HTML / JavaScript code for any pricing plan from the GET CHECKOUT CODE buttons.
A pop-up will display that allows you to easily copy the code and embed it anywhere you want.
Pro Tip: The checkout code snippet is just generic HTML / JavaScript so it can be used on ANY site. That means you don’t even need to be running a WordPress website to sell your products. You can share this code with any external partner who is willing to put a buy button for your product on their site.
One major advantage of the Buy Button is that it’s super-easy to create a fully functional eCommerce website for any plugin or theme.
Perhaps your product is expanding rapidly and you want a dedicated presence for it. Simply build your new site using whatever web technologies you wish and drop-in your checkout code. Done! You now have licensing, payments, subscriptions, and much more available for your product sales.
Other existing eCommerce solutions for selling WordPress products, like WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads, rely on you running WordPress and their associated plugins on your site. Not only that, all your important data is stored in your WordPress site’s database, making it difficult and time-consuming to separate out a specific plugin or theme to a separate site.
Freemius is very flexible in this regard and frees you from any such constraints.
See the official Checkout / Buy Button documentation for more details, and how you can customise the checkout links even more (e.g. automatically apply coupon codes or attach the checkout to specific affiliates).
