Easy Digital Downloads Limit One Per Customer

If you are using Easy Digital Downloads, there may be times where you need to limit the purchase of a particular download on your site. There are plugins like the Purchase Limit extension, which allows you to globally limit the purchase of certain products. But what if you need to have Easy Digital Downloads limit one per customer?

As far as I know, there isn’t a plugin that lets you do this. But it isn’t that difficult to set up either.

Set up the checkout error message

We need to be able to let the customer know why they won’t be able to check out if they have a certain download in their cart.

add_action( 'edd_before_purchase_form', 'sd_set_purchase_limit_error' );
function sd_set_purchase_limit_error(){
	$user_id 		= get_current_user_id(); // Get the current customer's ID
	$downloads 		= edd_get_users_purchased_products( $user_id ); // Get all of the products the customer has purchased in the past
	$can_checkout 		= true; // Allow checkout for now
	$in_cart 		= edd_item_in_cart( '57' ); // Check to see if our download is in the customer's cart. Change 57 to your download's ID.
 
	if ( $in_cart == true ){ // If the item isn't in the customer's cart we don't need to go any further.
		if ( ! empty( $downloads ) ){ // If the customer hasn't purchased anything before we don't need to go any further.
			foreach ( $downloads as $download ){ // Loop through each product the customer has purchased before.
				switch ( $download->ID ) {
					case '57': // If the customer has purchased the product we want to limit one per customer set an error message. Again change 57 to your product's ID.
						edd_set_error( 'already_purchased', apply_filters( 'edd_pc_error_message', __( 'You have already purchased the one-per-customer plugin. There is a limit of one per customer. You can log out and purchase with a different account, or remove it from your cart with the link above.' ) ) );
						break;
 
					default:
						edd_unset_error( 'already_purchased' );
						break;
				}
			}
 
			edd_print_errors(); // Display the errors on the checkout page.
		}
	}
}

Actually prevent checkout

So far all we have done is display an error message if the customer has purchased the download before. This won’t actually prevent them from going through the checkout process though.

Next, we need to use the edd_can_checkout filter to let the checkout process know that the customer can’t checkout while this product is still in their cart.

add_filter( 'edd_can_checkout', 'sd_limit_purchase' );
function sd_limit_purchase(){
	$user_id 		= get_current_user_id(); // Get the current customer's ID
	$downloads 		= edd_get_users_purchased_products( $user_id );// Get all of the products the customer has purchased in the past
	$can_checkout 		= true; // Allow checkout for now
	$in_cart 		= edd_item_in_cart( '57' ); // Check to see if our download is in the customer's cart. Change 57 to your download's ID.
 
	if ( $in_cart == true ){ // If the item isn't in the customer's cart we don't need to go any further.
		if ( ! empty( $downloads ) ){ // If the customer hasn't purchased anything before we don't need to go any further.
			foreach ( $downloads as $download ){ // Loop through each product the customer has purchased before.
				switch ( $download->ID ) {
					case '57': // If the customer has purchased the product we want to limit one per customer set an error message. Again change 57 to your product's ID.
						$can_checkout = false;
						break;
 
					default:
						$can_checkout = true;
						break;
				}
			}
		}
	}
	return $can_checkout;
}

And that’s it!

Now if your customer has purchased a certain product before that you want to have Easy Digital Downloads limit one per customer, they will see an error message and the checkout fields will be removed from the checkout page.

add_action( 'edd_before_purchase_form', 'sd_set_purchase_limit_error' ); function sd_set_purchase_limit_error(){ $user_id = get_current_user_id(); // Get the current customer's ID $downloads = edd_get_users_purchased_products( $user_id ); // Get all of the products the customer has purchased in the past $can_checkout = true; // Allow checkout for now $download_ids = array( 1,2,3 ); //Whatever the IDs are that you want to check for foreach ( $download_ids as $download_id ){ $in_cart = edd_item_in_cart( $download_id ); // Check to see if our download is in the customer's cart. Change 57 to your download's ID. if ( $in_cart == true ){ // If the item isn't in the customer's cart we don't need to go any further. if ( ! empty( $downloads ) ){ // If the customer hasn't purchased anything before we don't need to go any further. foreach ( $downloads as $download ){ // Loop through each product the customer has purchased before. switch ( $download->ID ) { case '1': case '2': case '3': // If the customer has purchased the product(s) we want to limit one per customer set an error message. edd_set_error( 'already_purchased', apply_filters( 'edd_pc_error_message', __( 'You have already purchased the one-per-customer plugin. There is a limit of one per customer. You can log out and purchase with a different account, or remove it from your cart with the link above.' ) ) ); break; default: edd_unset_error( 'already_purchased' ); break; } } edd_print_errors(); // Display the errors on the checkout page. } } } }

Comments

Matt Whtieley says

February 27, 2018 at 8:19 am

Great little tutorial. I was able to modify this to use it globally to limit all downloads to one per person for a specific client case. This is the only tutorial on the web addressing this which is crazy. Thanks again!

Matt

- Scott DeLuzio says
  
  February 27, 2018 at 9:06 am
  
  Thanks Matt! I’m glad it helped.
  
- Adrianne says
  
  May 11, 2018 at 3:19 pm
  
  Matt – I’m intrigued to know how you did this as all of my files are single purchase as well and it would be so much easier to have it set globally.
  
  Also Scott – I modified the code slightly to block checkout and leave the nag message simultaneously. I also added a variable for the name of the download so the customer knew exactly which download to remove before moving on.
  
  - Adrianne says
    
    May 12, 2018 at 1:02 pm
    
    Guess gist embedding doesn’t work in comments, but that’s okay because it turned out my first version was blocked everyone from checking out, not just duplicates (oops). I have corrected it and now it only blocks repeats (YAY)
    
    https://gist.github.com/adriannees/900242b5f19d9e1123a1708232595184
    
  - Matt Whiteley says
    
    July 23, 2018 at 11:05 am
    
    Hey Adrianne – sorry for the delay here. This is what I use:
    
    https://gist.github.com/mwhiteley16/460d3978d8c60177bdbded943bbfcc26

Alberto says

March 20, 2018 at 6:17 am

Thankyou very much, but I have a question can we use multiple downloads id instead of the example 57?

Scott DeLuzio says

March 21, 2018 at 10:02 am

You would need to put together an array of the download IDs that you want to check and loop through that. The example below should work, although I haven’t tested it.

morteza says

July 18, 2018 at 10:22 am

Hi
Thank you for your awesome post.
It seems new updates of this plugin doesn’t support EDD frontend submissions & Email tags….

There are several images and words about that features in this page (http://wpweb.co.in/documents/edd-purchase-limit/), but only in this page! and this plugin not support FES and Email tags for me.
Do you have any idea?

Regard

- Scott DeLuzio says
  
  October 1, 2018 at 1:56 pm
  
  Sorry, I haven’t tested this with FES or Email Tags.
  
Joel Acevedo says

September 29, 2018 at 7:41 am

Hi,

Thank you very much for this, I’m curious if it would be possible to check all the downloads under a specific category, so every time I add a new download to that category I don’t have to edit this code?

Thanks in advance.

- Scott DeLuzio says
  
  October 1, 2018 at 11:23 am
  
  This is a somewhat tricky one. Currently Easy Digital Downloads uses custom post types for their downloads. That makes it fairly simple to use WP_QUERY to list all posts from the custom post type “download” in the taxonomy (category) you want. You can then loop through each post (download) that is returned, and feed the download ID to the code provided above.
  With that said, EDD version 3.0 is coming out (no official release date has been announced yet). From what I understand, that version will be moving away from using custom post types and will instead have downloads in their own database table. While this will improve performance, it will make the WP_QUERY I mentioned not work anymore. I don’t know exactly how it will work in v3.0 so I can’t say for sure what code you would need…yet.
  
Harvinder Singh says

December 10, 2018 at 2:07 pm

nice article, I have one more question,

how can I set a limit so that customer can add only one product at a time in a cart?
For example, if someone clicks on product A and after that go back and then click on product B, then plugin must show product B and remove the product A from cart automatically.

thanks

- Scott DeLuzio says
  
  December 10, 2018 at 2:48 pm
  
  Hey Harvinder,
  Great question! I haven’t personally used this, but it looks like there is a filter that will do the trick for you. Check out this post https://amdrew.com/restrict-cart-one-download-easy-digital-downloads/