How to setup automatic user registration with Easy Digital Downloads

Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) gives you the option to add a Registration form on the checkout page, so that users can optionally register an account.

You might want all your EDD customers to be registered users, so you can have the full list of customers as WordPress users on the installation. In this way, they will have an account where they can access their purchase history and re-download their purchases. Another advantage of having your customers as registered WordPress users is that you can use WordPress plugins like Users Insights to analyze your customers activity on your shop.

Easy Digital Downloads however, doesn’t include a built-in option to automatically register the customers and some people might not create a registration on checkout. This can lead to having only a part of the customers as registered users on your WordPress installation.

Fortunately there is an easy solution for this – the EDD team has created an extension that automatically creates a user registration on checkout. The extension is called “EDD Auto Register” and can be downloaded for free from here.

Once activated, the EDD Auto Register extension will automatically create a WordPress user registration when making a purchase. The extension sets a random password to the account and sends an email to notify the user about the account created and the password that can be used to access the account. Additionally, the users are automatically logged in right after the purchase is made, so they can access their purchase history page and download the purchases.

Another advantage of the EDD Auto Register extension is that it keeps the checkout form simple – the entire registration process is performed in background, without having to ask the user to enter registration details, like username and password.