Anyone can have an online store these days. Thanks to ecommerce platforms, selling digital products like online courses, WordPress themes, and ebooks has never been easier.

But which ecommerce platform should you use to sell digital downloads?

It’s true that there are so many to choose from and as you’d expect, each one has its advantages and disadvantages. But don’t worry. We’re here to help.

In this post, we’re sharing the best platforms to sell digital products so you can have a better idea of which one is a better fit for your online business.

The best platforms to sell digital downloads

TL;DR:

Sellfy is the easiest ecommerce platform to use. We highly recommend it to beginners or to anyone who wants to get up and running as quickly as possible.

What if you want to sell courses as well as digital downloads? Payhip is a content creator’s dream. Sell courses, downloads, subscriptions, webinars, and more.

If you want to sell digital products online, consider using the following platforms.

1. Sellfy

Sellfy homepage

Sellfy is perfect for those who want a simple yet powerful platform to sell digital products.

Not only is Sellfy easy to set up, but you can also sell both physical and digital products. It even has a print-on-demand feature that lets you offer shirts, hoodies, hats, and mugs. It will print products as soon as orders come in then send them to your customers. You don’t even have to lift a finger.

But going back to selling digital products, you can offer all sorts of digital content from ebooks to music files. There’s even an option to sell videos on demand. Customers can stream content from your site for a fee. And there’s no risk of piracy since Sellfy has an infrastructure in place to prevent that.

Sellfy claims that you can build a digital store in under five minutes. Landing pages are all customizable. You can insert your logo, play with color schemes, and organize the layout. You can even connect your domain name if you want stronger branding. All product pages are optimized for mobile devices.

Other built-in features include marketing tools (discount codes, upselling, pixel tracking, email marketing) and payment options. It can accept payments via Stripe (for credit card transactions) and PayPal.

Pricing (Billed Bi-Annually): Starter ($19/month), Business ($39/month), Premium ($89/month).

Sellfy offers a 30-day money back guarantee.

Learn more in our Sellfy review.

2. Payhip

Payhip Homepage

Payhip focuses on helping users who want to sell digital downloads easily. You can use this platform to sell ebooks, software, and online learning resources. And not only can you sell files, but you can also sell subscriptions through Payhip.

Payhip transactions aren’t just secure, but they’re also convenient for your customers. You can sell digital products from anywhere — your ecommerce store, blog, or even your social media pages.

Customers who buy your digital products will be able to download them immediately. And for their convenience, Payhip will even send emails to customers where they’ll find the download page.

You can offer coupons to your customers and create mailing lists. Keeping in touch with customers is also easy through email updates. There’s an affiliate system if you want to incentivize customers to promote your digital downloads.

And best of all, Payhip can digitally stamp PDF documents with your customer’s name to discourage them from illegally sharing your files.

Payhip offers solutions for those of you who sell software. They can issue software keys so that your product remains protected. There’s also an option to limit downloads of your digital products so customers can’t abuse the system.

Pricing: Free ($0), Plus ($29/month), Pro ($99/month)

3. SendOwl

SendOwl Homepage

SendOwl is the best ecommerce platform when it comes to selling digital goods from websites and social media. All thanks to its simplicity.

Do you want to sell digital products from your blog? SendOwl lets you start and customize an online store that you can then add to your blog in minutes. You can also create social links that let you sell online using Facebook and other social media sites.

If you’re knowledgeable in using API, you can develop your own ecommerce solution.

The purchase and checkout process is also great. Customers can add items to their shopping cart and continue shopping at a leisurely pace. It also has flexible payment options. And even better, SendOwl can support multi-language and multi-currency transactions.

SendOwl can handle all of your transactions. And if you want to add physical products to the mix, it can handle that type of sales too. You can do memberships, subscriptions, and drip content.

You can even create codes and license keys for your customers.

Other features include affiliate marketing, promo codes, 1-click upsells, email marketing, and cart abandonment emails.

There’s also built-in analytics to help you keep track of your online store’s progress.

Pricing (Standard Plans): Standard ($15/month), Premium ($24/month), Business ($39/month)

4. Podia

Podia Homepage

Podia is a platform for selling digital goods like online courses, webinars, memberships, and downloads. In a sense, Podia is a full-service ecommerce platform. You can create a website where you can sell digital goods. There’s support for email and affiliate marketing. Plus, you can add a live chat widget to engage potential customers.

One of the reasons why Podia is one of the best ecommerce platforms to sell online courses is that it allows you to upload unlimited files and videos. It also allows you to set up different payment plans, do upsells, and offer quizzes.

You can also do pre-selling to see if there’s any interest in your course topic. And if you want to, you can deliver content in stages (drip courses) so that all your students learn at the same pace.

There are also no transaction fees though you’d still need to pay Stripe and PayPal’s processing fees. On the plus side, you do get instant payouts. That means you don’t have to wait to get your money.

And if you want a recurring source of income, you can create memberships. There are plenty of ways you can customize memberships including free trials, monthly or yearly billing, membership levels, and more.

Pricing (Billed Annually): Mover ($390/year), Shaker ($790/year), Earthquaker ($1,790/year). Free plan available with transaction fees.

5. Squarespace

Squarespace Homepage

Squarespace is a website builder that helps budding entrepreneurs sell digital and physical products. It’s famous for its drag-and-drop functionality that lets people without coding experience come up with professional-quality designs that work on both desktop and mobile devices.

It’s a pretty straightforward platform. You just pick from one of the templates available and customize it to insert your own branding. This platform has all sorts of templates — from blogs to portfolios. But there are templates that are specifically designed for online stores.

It has all the tools you’ll need. However, if you need to add more features, you can look into the third-party extensions that SquareSpace offers. Squarespace is probably your best bet if you don’t have an existing website.

And you don’t have to stick to a digital product. You can sell services using Squarespace. There’s even a tool that lets customers set appointments through the platform. But it can also handle subscriptions and other digital goods.

Squarespace has built-in tax compliance tools, discount codes, and payment tools like Afterpay (for those in the US, Australia, and New Zealand).

Pricing (Billed Annually): Personal ($12/month), Business ($18/month), Commerce ($26/month), Advanced Commerce ($40/month)

6. DPD (Digital Product Delivery)

DPD Homepage

DPD is a great solution for those that want to sell digital products like ebooks, graphic novels, and other related materials.

Selling multiple products is not a problem for DPD. All you need to do is upload all of your files on the platform. Then you can copy-paste DPD’s cart buttons. When customers buy your products, all of the payments get processed by DPD’s payment partners. And you keep all of the sales.

Because DPD hosts all of your files, you don’t have to worry about backups and product delivery. Your job ends after you upload the digital products.

It offers multiple payment methods including Stripe, PayPal, Moolah, Sage Pay, and Authorize.net.

There are also third-party integrations available like MailChimp, AWeber, Sendy, GetResponse, Google Analytics, Campaign Monitor, Zapier, Kit, and Commission Junction.

It even gets better since DPD allows you to manage multiple online stores from one account. This lets you manage different accounts or businesses from one central location. How convenient, right?

This platform also offers digital stamping, product updates, and key codes for digital products.

Pricing: How much you pay depends on how much storage space you need. The more storage you need, the higher the price. You can configure the storage space needed to get custom pricing. The base plan is $10/month which gives you 1GB of storage space.

7. Gumroad

Gumroad Homepage

Gumroad isn’t unlike the other ecommerce platforms on this list. It too can be a platform to sell digital products and services online. But what makes it stand out from the most popular ecommerce platforms is that it targets online creators.

In a way, it’s more of a platform for other creators to discover your works.

If you’d like to share your animations, tutorials, apps, music, stories, comics, and other related digital assets (and get paid in the process), then Gumroad is the platform for you.

When you sign up for Gumroad, you’ll have an ecommerce platform where you can start selling online courses or other digital products. You can personalize it using CSS.

There’s a built-in analytics tool so you can keep track of your views and sales. If you’re unsure how, Gumroad has different resources available to you.

As with other ecommerce platforms, you can offer codes and generate license keys. You can offer multiple versions of a product at Gumroad though. For example, a customer has the option of downloading a PDF, ePub, or the Mobi version of an ebook.

And you can set which currency to sell your products in. This is a good way of increasing conversions. Gumroad also lets users rent your product. For example, customers have 72 hours to watch a video within 30 days of purchase.

Pricing: 10% per sale + processing fees.

8. Thinkific

Thinkific Homepage

Thinkific is the best ecommerce platform (or at least one of them) for creating and selling online courses.

Building an online course is easy since all you have to do is drag-and-drop elements. It doesn’t require any coding skills. It supports a variety of course content including, videos, text, downloads, quizzes, and Google Docs.

You can make private and hidden courses, have multiple instructors, create memberships, and add prerequisite lessons.

As for designing your site, it uses the same drag-and-drop feature so you don’t have to worry about ruining the HTML and CSS code though you can certainly edit using code if you’re comfortable with it. Thinkific will handle everything. All you need to do is to customize the pages the way you want them to look.

You have the option of using your own domain name. And there are lots of marketing tools available to help you get the word out.

Pricing (Billed Annually): Free ($0), Basic ($49/month), Start ($99/month) and Grow ($199/month). Yearly discounts available.

Read our Thinkific review.

9. MemberPress

MemberPress Homepage

MemberPress is a WordPress plugin that allows you to sell memberships to customers. Not only does this plugin get users to subscribe to your membership, but it also gives you the power to manage them.

You can configure what members have access to including posts, videos, pages, feeds, categories, and files.

It works great with other WordPress plugins and can integrate with Kit, Stripe, ActiveCampaign, HelpScout, MailChimp, PayPal, and more.

Pricing: Basic ($179/year), Plus ($299/year), Pro ($449/year)

10. Easy Digital Downloads

Easy Digital Downloads Homepage

Easy Digital Downloads is also a WordPress plugin — but unlike the previous entry, this can help you sell digital products.

Whether you want to sell ebooks, PDF files, music, or any other top of digital product – you can sell it with this plugin.

It has a bunch of features that give you better control over your online store. It offers payment flexibility, discount codes, unlimited file downloads, a full shopping cart, activity tracking, and more.

And it also has third-party integrations that include MailChimp, Dropbox, Stripe, PayPal, AWeber, Zapier, AWS, and Slack.

Pricing: Personal Pass $99/year), Extended Pass ($199/year), Professional Pass ($299/year), All-Access Pass ($499/year)

11. BigCommerce

BigCommerce Homepage

BigCommerce — in our opinion — one of the best full ecommerce platforms. You can use it to sell digital products or physical products.

What’s great about this all-in-one platform is that it has most of the things you need to start selling digital products online. You can design a website with jaw-dropping designs. It has integration features, meaning you can use third-party apps to add more features to your ecommerce site.

Big Commerce is also designed to scale. So if you find that your business is doing better than you expected, you can continue finding new audiences and converting users without worry. There’s even built-in mobile optimization so building landing pages without having to worry about phone and tablet users.

And good news for WordPress users — BigCommerce also works on the biggest content management system in the world.

If you factor in some of the other features including coupons and discounts, digital wallets, SEO, and cross-channel commerce, you have yourself a pretty powerful platform to sell digital goods and services.

What else can you ask for?

Pricing: $39/month (save 25% with an annual subscription). 15-day free trial available.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best platform to sell digital products?

It all depends on what your online business needs. But if you don’t have an existing site, you’d want to find an all-in-one ecommerce platform that has little to no transaction fees and has readily available templates that you could use to jumpstart your website.

Where can I sell my digital products?

The best place to sell digital products is on your own website because you’ll have better control over your SEO and you’d get 100% of your profits. But if you’re new to ecommerce, it’s better for you to subscribe to an ecommerce platform so you don’t have to worry about the backend operations.

What is the best way to sell digital products?

We’d suggest that you try lead generation. If you’re able to sign up leads for your business, you could send them targeted ads through social media or email marketing. You can also try finding an ecommerce platform with a built-in marketplace.

What digital products can you sell online?

Here are a few product ideas that you’ll have little trouble selling online:

  • Ebooks (fiction/non-fiction)
  • Recipes
  • Email templates
  • Magazines
  • Podcast episodes
  • Songs
  • Beats
  • Sound effects
  • Stock photos
  • Sheet music
  • Tracks
  • Movies (that you have rights to)
  • Stock video
  • Documentaries
  • Wallpapers
  • Fonts
  • Logo designs
  • Infographics
  • Animations
  • Lightroom presets
  • Photoshop brushes
  • LUTs (Lookup Tables)
  • Apps
  • Games
  • Browser extensions
  • WordPress themes
  • Guides
  • Online courses
  • Tutorials
  • Certifications

Wrapping it up

That concludes our roundup of the best platforms to sell digital products.

There is no “one glove fits all” solution here. The best platform depends on your needs.

So take a moment to think about the types of products you want to sell, the features that matter to your business, and your budget.

You’ll also want to consider how you plan to bill customers. For example, will you charge customers a one off fee for your product, or will you use the subscription business model?

If the latter, you’ll need to consider a platform that supports subscription-based billing. Fortunately, platforms like Sellfy and Podia already include this feature.

But don’t forget that exactly what you can sell is important too. Not just for what you want to sell now, but also what you want to sell in the future.

For example, might you need to sell video on demand or POD merch? Sellfy can cover both of those. But if you want to sell online courses, Podia may be a better fit.

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