Developing a Software License Manager Program for WordPress

Selling digital products has been in the business for quite a long time now. Zero shipping charges, no inventory management, and extremely fast delivery make it one of the most hassle-free business models. Moreover, you can sell, like everything with the ability to reproduce new copies much easily. From a mere art form to tutorials to a full-fledged software product, you can sell everything over the internet.

As of now, several products are already listed under similar digital products where the vendors can deliver the ordered products in a few seconds. The users are required to pay for the product and the merchants offer user access to the said digital product. Zero manufacturing defects and a lossless transportation channel makes this a favorite for several startups and affiliates.

B2B brands are immediately ready to turn into distributors allowing the original producers to reach out to a broader market and sell better.

However, on the other side of the coin, in the absence of any physical product, it is equally important to limit the services merchants offer to their end customers to run a continuous revenue cycle. The merchants lack the right facilities to control the functioning of their product and push limits at the desired points. With digital products replacing physical products in the business, many more things start taking place.

• Limited service offered by a physical product vs subscription validity of the digital product
• Limited stock quantity for the resellers vs setting counters for the affiliate
• Shipping charges levied for cross-border selling vs online charges

There are more based on the services you offer. To keep the business running and keeping a count on a product that is definitely not countable on fingers, businesses create licenses where every full-fledged copy is sold with a unique license ID.  We need a software License key management software that can be easily handled by the sellers with ease.

The WordPress development team at The Brihaspati Infotech recently developed a similar software license manager WordPress plugin that can readily help the WordPress site owners have complete control over the licenses and their ownership. The site owners can generate licenses, renew them, and track them with more ease now, right from their WordPress site.

License management as a service

Licensing is the best a seller can do to his product to keep a count of the total sales and the success of the product. License management allows you to control the usage of your digital product, users owning it, resolving end-to-end issues, and re-marketing your products. Above all, they often don’t have to install everything at the user’s end manually.

The entire process is carried out via a cloud management system that stores the product and readily utilizes the License for allowing complete access to the end-users. Licensing is often offered in several ways, the most popular among them being:

1. Free license: It works like a freemium where the end-user is allowed to use the application for free with limited usage.

2. Unlimited plan: A complete software being delivered with unlimited access to the resources.

3. Subscription-based plan: Lies between the free License and Unlimited plan where the user pays for limited access to the application with more resources than the Freemium and lesser than the unlimited plan

Based on the business model, Licenses can vary with the resources they avail in terms of features, their numbers, or even time. Here’s the pricing plan of popular Anti-virus software, Norton, with the maximum allowed systems, price, and Storage space offered by each plan.

Being said that there are numerous package plans and limitations offered by each, it is important to track everything in detail and analyze the users who are about to lose the services.

That is the time, our client needed us.

Need for developing a Wordpress plugin for license key system

Our client owns a website for selling AutoCAD entities for intuitive professional designs. The business model includes selling of AutoCAD resources from high-end model designing applications. Now that the WordPress store is supposed to sell licenses, it is expected to deliver the following basic functions at least:

1. Send a download link to the user
2. Set a counter on the number of downloads

The WordPress plugin store has some handy tools to meet both the requirements. In fact, there are tools that are supported with more plugins paving the way for the development of an effective Digital product selling.

Keeping that in mind, we used the Easy Digital Downloads plugin.

About Easy Digital Downloads

Easy Digital Downloads is a known name for the effective management of digital product selling. The Wordpress plugin intended for the license system is preloaded with features for limited Digital downloads and effective management of the licenses. To extend its abilities at marketing and analyzing sales, the plugin store offers sufficient extensions making it an ideal choice for the merchants.

However, our client faced some issues at keeping a track of the users, their plans, and the expiry dates on the same screen.

That is where we extended our helping hand. We developed a custom license generation manager plugin for WordPress.

Creating Custom Pricing rules with Software license manager plugin for WordPress

One of the best parts about our custom license generation manager plugin for WordPress is, its ability to offer flexible pricing rules. The admin can create pricing rules of their choice, they can set prices and conditions like Variable pricing and download limits to every pricing plan.

Extending with Enable variable pricing option, the admins can set conditions for a change in license prices. They can optionally push it for a default condition for the said plan.

Moreover, the admin can set Download limits to every subscription plan manually.

For example, in the following image, the admin has set 0 in the said field to allow unlimited downloads for the plugin. It can be set to a fixed number to limit the downloads.

Tracking multiple order details

Customers usually ask for multiple licenses pertaining to different needs. Tracking the same customer for every new purchase is a difficult task. To resolve this problem, we assorted all the orders according to customers. As a result, all the admin can readily track all the orders placed by the said customer and their exact status:

Managing customer details with Software Licensing WordPress Plugin

Users know that by default, the EDD plugin offers limited information to the user details. For effective management, we customized more fields in the order details. The admin can clearly track the following data with ease:

• License owner name
• Country
• Contact person
• Email Address

The admin can further edit the order details when in need. He can add a new computer name and can generate a new License expiry date manually.

Moving on with more functionalities, the admin can manually edit the license details along with the ability to change ownerships. They can update the payment date and the status of payment with ease.

Add special offers to the customer with custom license key generation plugin

Special customers deserve favors. With our software license manager WordPress plugin, vendors can offer customized services to selected customers. For example, we have added this feature to allow unlimited downloads to customers. Checking the box allows the aid customers to make unlimited downloads in the same subscription plan.

Tracking sales with WordPress plugin for license system

The custom-designed plugin is enabled with sales tracking abilities. As a result, the admin can readily track the sales created in the set duration. For the same, we integrated an efficient sales analyzer plugin.

With that, the merchant can keep a check on all the features they require to analyze and meet their day-to-day requirements on the same admin panel.

Our experience with custom WordPress Plugin development

The WordPress Development team at The Brihaspati Infotech is experienced at developing WordPress plugins with custom needs. We have talked about a custom plugin for Map poster printing where the admin can create and print custom map posters with ease.

If your business also requires a custom plugin to streamline your working model, you can hire WordPress developers from us

Final words

Licensing is a high money-generating business where owners can earn sitting at any corner of the world. All they need is an efficient website to handle the licensing and limit the downloads.

The software license manager plugin for WordPress is designed to achieve more than it is displayed here. It is a future-oriented plugin that can be scaled as per requirements.

For further details about the WordPress plugin for the license key system, contact us or drop us an email.