Selling Digital Products? Automate Delivery, Licences and Renewals
Digital product automation on WordPress means more than sending a download link after payment. It means the entire operational chain, from delivery confirmation through licence expiry warnings, renewal recovery and product update notifications, runs without you touching it. Krom Automation connects Easy Digital Downloads events to that full chain on a visual drag-and-drop canvas, with no external automation service and no per-task fees.
Most guides stop at delivery. The download link fires, the customer gets a file, and that is considered “automated.” But a digital product business running at any real volume generates dozens of operational moments every week that still need a human response: expiring licences nobody warned about, failed renewals that quietly lapse, product updates that existing customers never hear about, and affiliate payouts that require manual checks.
This playbook covers the four workflows that matter most to EDD operators, with the exact trigger and action logic for each. It is written for stores that already handle delivery and want to close the gap between “sale made” and “customer fully served.”
Browse the full feature list to see every trigger and action available before diving in.
What “Fully Automated” Actually Means for a Digital Product Store
A store that only automates delivery is roughly 20% automated. The sale is handled, but the remaining customer lifecycle sits in someone’s inbox. A genuinely automated digital product operation covers five distinct stages.
- Delivery: the file or licence key reaches the customer immediately after payment, with no manual step.
- Onboarding: the customer knows how to use the product within the first 24 hours, not whenever they remember to email you.
- Licence management: expiry warnings go out at 30 days, 7 days and 1 day, without a cron job you wrote yourself.
- Renewal recovery: failed payments trigger a sequence, not a spreadsheet someone checks on Fridays.
- Update notifications: when a new version ships, existing customers hear about it automatically, with the right download link.
Each stage requires a trigger event and one or more actions. The trigger is what the store does, the action is what the automation does in response. Getting these connected is what the rest of this guide covers.
Stage 1: Delivery and Immediate Post-Purchase
EDD handles file delivery natively. The automation layer starts the moment delivery fires, because that event is the most reliable signal you have that a real customer just appeared. A well-built post-purchase workflow runs three things in the first 10 minutes after payment.
- A personalised delivery confirmation that includes the customer’s name, the product purchased and a direct support link, not a generic “thank you for your order” template.
- A CRM tag or list assignment so the customer is immediately segmented by product, not sitting in a generic “all customers” pool.
- A welcome sequence trigger that delays a getting-started email by 2 hours, giving the customer time to actually open the product before you explain it.
The Easy Digital Downloads integration documentation covers the full list of available EDD triggers and how to map them to actions in Krom Automation. For the CRM tagging step, the FluentCRM integration and the ActiveCampaign integration both support contact creation and tag assignment as native actions.
A post-purchase workflow that only confirms delivery is a missed conversation. The 10 minutes after payment is the highest-attention moment a customer gives you.
If you use Mailchimp or ConvertKit as your email platform, the same purchase event can add the buyer to a product-specific sequence without any manual import. Merge tags pull in the customer’s first name, product name and download URL so the email reads like it was written for that person. The merge tags documentation shows every variable available in EDD contexts.
Stage 2: Licence Expiry Warning Sequences
This is the stage that most EDD stores handle manually, or not at all. A licence that expires without a warning email is a licence that probably does not renew. The data on B2B SaaS renewal rates consistently shows that timely pre-expiry communication is the single highest-return retention activity available, because it catches customers before they have already moved on.
A three-touch expiry sequence looks like this:
- 30 days before expiry: a friendly heads-up with the renewal link and the price. No urgency language, no scarcity. Just the information.
- 7 days before expiry: a more direct reminder that mentions what the customer will lose: updates, support, licence activations.
- 1 day before expiry: a final notice. Keep it short. One sentence, one button.
Building this sequence requires a schedule trigger that fires relative to the expiry date stored against the licence record. Krom Automation’s Pro plan includes a schedule trigger that supports one-time firing at a calculated date, which is what date-relative licence sequences need. The delays and scheduling documentation covers how to combine a purchase trigger with delayed actions to build the same sequence without the schedule trigger, which works well for the 7-day and 1-day touches.
The visual email builder in Krom Automation Pro lets you design these emails in a block-based interface rather than writing HTML, which matters for a three-email sequence where each message needs to look slightly different while staying on brand.
Stage 3: Renewal Recovery After a Failed Payment
Failed renewals are not the same as cancellations. A cancellation is a decision.
A failed payment is usually a card that expired, a bank that flagged an unusual charge, or a billing detail that changed. The customer often does not know the renewal failed until their licence stops working.
A renewal recovery sequence covers three scenarios that need different responses.
| Scenario | What probably happened | Right automation response |
|---|---|---|
| Payment failed, licence still active (grace period) | Card declined or expired | Email with a payment update link within 1 hour of failure |
| Payment failed, licence now inactive | Grace period elapsed with no update | Email explaining what stopped working, with a reactivation link |
| Subscription cancelled after multiple failures | Customer did not respond to recovery emails | Tag the contact as churned in CRM, remove from active-customer segments |
The WooCommerce Subscriptions integration covers the trigger events for failed payments and subscription status changes if your store uses WooCommerce alongside EDD. For EDD-native subscription handling, the EDD integration documentation maps the equivalent events.
A failed payment email sent within one hour recovers significantly more revenue than the same email sent the next morning. Timing is the mechanism, not the copy.
The conditions and branching documentation explains how to build the Yes/No logic that separates a first failed payment from a second or third attempt, so each customer receives the right message rather than a generic dunning template.
Stage 4: Product Update Notifications
Existing customers who do not hear about updates either stay on old versions, which creates support load, or they discover the update themselves and feel underserved. Neither outcome helps retention. An update notification workflow solves both.
The trigger for this workflow is a post being published or updated, where the post type is your changelog or release notes post type. The action sends a segmented email to every customer tagged as an active buyer of that specific product. Using merge tags, the email can pull in the version number, the headline changes and a direct download link.
- Audience precision matters here. A customer who owns Product A should not receive the changelog for Product B. CRM tags applied at purchase make this segmentation free rather than manual.
- Timing matters too. A 30-minute delay between the post publishing and the email firing gives you a window to catch a typo before 2,000 people read it.
- Track the opens. Customers who consistently open update emails are your most engaged cohort. Tag them. They are the right people to survey, beta test with, or upsell.
If you post updates to social media at the same time, the social media automation integration can fire from the same trigger event, so the announcement goes to email, Facebook, X and LinkedIn in a single workflow with no extra steps.
The Hidden Operations Nobody Automates
Most automation content covers the obvious workflows. The ones below are where serious operators lose hours every month, and where automation saves the most without requiring complex logic.
Affiliate Payout Notifications
If you run an affiliate programme alongside your digital product store, every product sale that comes through an affiliate should trigger an affiliate notification. Not a manual email, an automatic one that confirms the referral was recorded and when the payout cycle runs.
The AffiliateWP integration connects affiliate registration, referral creation and payout events to any action Krom Automation supports. The full affiliate automation guide covers how to structure this end to end.
Customer Segmentation After Refund
A refund is data. A customer who refunded Product A and still owns Product B is a retention risk, not a lost cause.
The right automation response is to tag them in your CRM as “refunded” for that specific product, remove them from product-specific upsell sequences, and optionally trigger a survey asking what went wrong. None of that happens automatically unless you build the workflow.
Team Notifications for High-Value Sales
When a customer buys a lifetime licence or an enterprise plan, someone on your team should know within minutes. An HTTP Request action can post to a Slack channel or send a Telegram message.
The messaging integrations documentation covers Slack, Discord, Twilio and Telegram setup. For a store doing five or more high-value sales per week, this replaces a daily manual check of the orders dashboard.
Google Sheets as a Simple Sales Log
Not every team wants a full CRM. For small operations, appending each sale to a Google Sheet gives a running record of customers, products and amounts without managing a database. The Google Sheets integration supports row appending on any trigger event, including EDD purchases.
What This Costs Compared to Doing It Manually
The honest version of this calculation includes the time cost of manual operations, not just the licence fee.
| Task | Manual time per month (50 sales) | Automated time per month | Hours saved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Delivery confirmation emails | 2 hours | 0 hours | 2 hours |
| Licence expiry warnings (3 touches) | 4 to 6 hours | 0 hours | 4 to 6 hours |
| Failed renewal follow-up | 1 to 2 hours | 0 hours | 1 to 2 hours |
| CRM tagging and segmentation | 2 to 3 hours | 0 hours | 2 to 3 hours |
| Update notification emails | 1 hour per release | 0 hours | 1 hour per release |
At 50 sales per month and one product release per month, the manual version costs roughly 10 to 14 hours. At a freelance rate of $60 to $80 per hour, that is $600 to $1,120 per month in labour or opportunity cost. Krom Automation Pro starts at $119 per year for a single site, which is less than the cost of two hours of manual admin.
Krom Automation Pricing for Digital Product Stores
Every Krom Automation Pro plan includes every Pro feature. The only difference between plans is the number of sites covered.
- Basic: $119/year or $299 lifetime, 1 site
- Standard: $199/year or $499 lifetime, 5 site activations
- Enterprise: $369/year or $799 lifetime, unlimited sites
The free version includes 16 triggers, 21 actions and 20 ready-made workflow templates, with no trial period and no run caps. It covers delivery confirmation and basic post-purchase emails without any paid upgrade.
The licence expiry sequences, renewal recovery logic and schedule trigger require Pro. You can download the free plugin from the WordPress.org plugin directory and build the first two workflows before spending anything.
All Pro plans carry a 14-day money-back guarantee. Compare all three plans before deciding.
What Krom Automation Does Not Do
Stating this clearly is more useful than omitting it. Krom Automation is WordPress-native.
Every trigger and every action touches your WordPress site in some way. If you need automation between two external services that have no WordPress involvement, a tool like Zapier or Make is the right fit for that specific job.
Delay timing depends on WordPress Cron. On a very low-traffic site where no request arrives for several hours, WP-Cron fires late.
Configuring a real server cron solves this, and the documentation covers how. For a digital product store with regular traffic, this is not a practical issue.
AI actions, which can auto-generate email content or moderate customer feedback, require your own API key from OpenAI, Google or Groq. wpRigel does not charge per AI call and does not mark up tokens. You pay your chosen provider directly at their standard rates.
Self-hosted automation means your customer data, execution logs and API keys never leave your own database. For a digital product business, that is not a minor point.
Also from wpRigel
Pollify is a Gutenberg-native poll, survey and quiz plugin. Polls are built as real blocks inside the editor, so there are no shortcodes to paste and no separate interface to learn. It is a practical tool for collecting post-purchase feedback directly on product pages or inside member areas, without installing a separate survey platform.
Commandify is a command palette for the WordPress admin. Press Cmd or Ctrl plus K to jump anywhere, search any content type, and run admin actions without clicking through menus. It is the only WordPress command palette with real WooCommerce order, product and customer commands built in, which makes it genuinely useful for store operators rather than just developers.
FAQ
Can Krom Automation connect to Easy Digital Downloads without extra plugins?
Yes. Krom Automation includes a native EDD integration that exposes EDD purchase events as triggers and maps customer data as merge tags.
No bridge plugin is needed. The EDD integration documentation lists every available trigger and action in that context.
Does the free version handle post-purchase emails for digital products?
Yes. The free version includes the Send Email action and supports merge tags for customer name, product name and other purchase data.
You can build a delivery confirmation and a basic welcome email without upgrading. The licence expiry sequence and schedule trigger require Pro.
How do I segment customers by product purchased for update notifications?
Apply a CRM tag at the point of purchase using the EDD trigger and a tag action in FluentCRM, ActiveCampaign or your email platform. When an update releases, use a conditional branch in the workflow to send only to contacts with that product tag. The conditions and branching documentation explains how to set up the logic.
Can I automate both WooCommerce and EDD on the same site?
Yes. Krom Automation treats WooCommerce and EDD as separate trigger sources.
You can have workflows responding to WooCommerce order events and separate workflows responding to EDD purchase events on the same installation. There is no conflict between them.
What happens if an automated workflow fails partway through?
Krom Automation logs every execution at the per-step level. If a workflow fails, you receive an email notification and the system retries with configurable backoff. The execution log shows exactly which step failed and what the error was, so you can fix the cause rather than guess.
Is there a way to test a workflow before it fires against real customers?
Yes. The workflow simulator runs a dry-run pass through any workflow with zero side effects.
No emails send, no CRM records update and no actions fire against live data. It is the right way to check logic before enabling a sequence that will reach paying customers.
See full pricing details and choose a plan that fits the number of sites you run.