10 E-Commerce Platforms That Can Be Used to Sell Digital Products
Selling a digital product can be a great way to earn money. Often times, you only have to create a product once, and it can be sold as many times as you want. There are several types of digital products that can be sold online, including eBooks, eMagazines, software, music, photography, graphics, videos, patterns, fonts, and templates.
If you have an idea of what you want to sell, but don’t know where to start, we’ve got you covered. We’ve compiled a list of ten different e-commerce platforms that can be used to sell your own digital products.
1) Easy Digital Downloads
Easy Digital Downloads is available as a WordPress plugin. The plugin can be downloaded for free. However, there’s also a custom package and bundle that can be purchased. Easy Digital Downloads is a complete e-commerce solution that offers several features to make it easy to sell digital products.
Easy Digital Downloads offers a shopping cart system that allows customers to purchase multiple digital products at once. It also offers several payment gateways, payment history, multiple price options per product, data export options, and much more.
The fact that Easy Digital Downloads can be used with WordPress is a nice feature. WordPress is open source software used by millions of people to create websites and blogs. WordPress comes with over 45,000 plugins, which can be used to enhance the functionality of a site. The blogging feature of WordPress can also be used to organically attract new visitors to your site by posting helpful or educational information related to your products.
2) SendOwl
SendOwl is another popular e-commerce platform that can be used to sell digital products. SendOwl can be used with WordPress or another content management system, like Shopify. SendOwl offers plenty of features, such as responsive checkout, multi-language checkout, and several different payment options. It also offers an inbuilt affiliate system, an upsell option, cart abandonment recovery, subscription selling capabilities, as well as advanced analytics and reporting.
If you’re not sure about SendOwl and would like to take it for a test drive, they offer a 30-day free trial. Otherwise, there are four plans to choose from – Basic, Standard, Premium, and Business. The plans range from $9 per month to $39 per month.
3) WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a powerful e-commerce plugin that was built to integrate seamlessly with WordPress. WooCommerce allows you to sell physical and digital goods online. One of the best things about WooCommerce is that it’s free.
WooCommerce allows you to offer different variations of a product, and products can be instantly downloaded to customers. Extensions can be added to the plugin to offer advanced features and functionality, such as bookings or monthly subscriptions. In addition, WooCommerce offers several payment and shipping options.
Another nice thing about WooCommerce is that you have complete control over your store. You can change the design or switch to a different hosting company if you want. This is different than a hosted e-commerce platform. With a hosted e-commerce platform, you’re at the mercy of the provider, so to speak. If the provider decided to close up shop, you may lose your site and your data.
4) Gumroad
Gumroad can also be used to sell physical and digital goods. Gumroad offers several payment and shipping options. It also allows customers to sign up for a monthly subscription.
One unique feature about Gumroad is that it offers a streaming video rental option. When customers buy a rental, they have 30 days to stream the video file. Once the customer clicks “play,” their access to the file expires in 72 hours. Gumroad allows different file types to be streamed, including MP4, M4V, MOV, MPEG, and more.
The cost of Gumroad starts at $10 per month. It includes unlimited bandwidth and payments are 3.5% + 30¢ per charge.
5) Sellfy
Sellfy can be used to open an online store or you can add Sellfy buttons or product widgets on an existing website or social networking site. Sellfy allows you to choose from different customizable storefront designs so you can get your store up and running in a short amount of time. You also don’t have to worry about hosting since Sellfy is a hosted e-commerce platform.
Sellfy offers a Starter and Professional plan. The Starter plan is $0 per month plus a 5% transaction fee. The Professional plan is $15 per month plus a 2% transaction fee. The Starter plan allows you to sell up to 5 products while the Professional plan allows you to sell an unlimited number of products.
6) E-Junkie
E-junkie is a shopping cart that can be embedded on an existing website, blog, or social media. E-junkie includes a Seller Admin panel where you can add products and receive a snippet of code to add to your existing site or social media. It works well with WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and other sites that support JavaScript. It can also work with sites that don’t support JavaScript. E-junkie supports several payment options, and it ensures that customers safely download your digital products.
E-junkie has a flat monthly subscription fee that ranges from $5 per month to $100 per month, depending on the number of products you plan to sell and the amount of storage space you need. For example, for $5 per month, you can sell 10 products and get 200 MB of storage space. For $100 per month, you can sell an unlimited number of products and get 50 GB of storage space.
7) Shopify & the Digital Downloads App
Digital Downloads is a free app that can be used with Shopify. It allows you to add downloadable files to your store. When a customer makes a purchase, a download link is immediately provided to the customer. The link is also emailed to them once the order is fulfilled. Digital Downloads allows you to have variants of a particular product. It also allows you to mix and match a product to have physical and digital products.
8) Pulley
Pulley is an app that allows you to sell digital products from an existing website or social media. Pulley enables you to sell products of different sizes and file types. When a customer makes a purchase, they are sent a link that can be used to instantly and safely download the purchased product.
Pulley has four different plans based on the number of products you wish to sell. The least expensive plan is $6 per month. The plan includes 100 MB of storage and allows you to sell up to 25 products. The most expensive plan is $49 per month and allows you to sell up to 500 products and have 2.5 GB of storage. All of the plans include a 14-day free trial.
9) Digital Product Delivery (DPD)
DPD is a responsive shopping cart that can be added to an existing website, blog, or social media. You simply upload your digital products to DPD and then copy and paste the cart buttons on your site. One nice feature about DPD is that you can set up multiple stores and manage them from one account. DPD also hosts your products on their servers, so you don’t have to worry about finding a hosting company.
DPD offers flat monthly pricing. There are three different plans based on the number and size of your products. The least expensive plan is $10 per month, which allows you to sell a total of 20 products and you get 1 GB of product space. The next expensive plan is $16 per month. It allows you to sell up to 30 products with 1.5 GB of product space. The most expensive plan is $30 per month. With that plan, you can sell up to 120 products and have 6 GB of product space.
10) FetchApp
FetchApp also allows you to sell digital products from an existing website, blog, or social media. It can be easily integrated with popular sites likes Shopify, WordPress, and BigCommerce.
FetchApp offers a free plan with 5 MB of storage space. They also offer several other paid plans based on the amount of storage space you need. The costs of the plans range from $5 per month to $500 per month. The cheapest plan offers 5 MB of storage and the most expensive plan offers 150 GB of storage space.
As you can see, there are numerous options to choose from. There are several factors to consider when choosing an e-commerce platform. For example, you should consider how many products you plan to sell, the types of products, your budget, whether you want a hosted platform, whether you plan to scale up your business in the next few years, and so on. It’s important to carefully weigh out your goals and needs as well as what each e-commerce platform has to offer before making a decision.
