Digital products can’t be held, tasted, or touched, but everyone consumes them—from music to videos, ebooks to online courses, and more.
Many entrepreneurs build entire businesses around these intangible goods, due to their popularity and ease of distribution, or launch digital products to sell complementary to the physical items or services they offer.
What makes learning how to sell digital products especially appealing, however, is they can be created once and sold repeatedly to different customers without having to replenish inventory, making them ideal for creatives, bloggers, educators, and freelancers looking for passive ways to make money online that require less effort to maintain.
This guide will walk you through how to sell digital products online—including the top digital products examples, how to create your own, and marketing tips to sell online successfully.
How to sell digital products in 4 steps
1. Find or create a digital product
Find a digital product to sell, whether you resell existing products or create your own. Digital products include music, fonts, Photoshop presets, courses, or online services.
2. Build an online store
Get up and running in a few hours. Pick from a catalog of website templates, populate with your logo, copy, and images, and you’re ready to get selling.
3. Use an app to make selling easy
Some apps make delivery of digital products even easier. Browse the Shopify App Store to find apps that plug into your store and do everything from hosting course content to delivering PDF purchases.
4. Market your digital products
Find your customers where they are. If you’re selling fonts or design templates, build an audience of designers and creators on the social platforms they use most. Consider influencer marketing, social ads, or lead magnets.
What are digital products?
A digital product is an intangible asset or piece of media that can be sold and distributed repeatedly online without the need to replenish inventory. These products often come in the form of downloadable or streamable digital files, such as MP3s, PDFs, videos, plug-ins, and templates.
Why sell digital products versus physical goods?
Selling digital products has many advantages that makes it uniquely attractive to entrepreneurs:
- Low overhead costs.You don’t have to hold inventory or incur any shipping charges.
- High profit margins. There’s no recurring cost of goods, so you retain the majority of your sales in profits.
- Potential to automate. Orders can be delivered instantly, letting you be relatively hands-off with fulfillment.
- Flexible products. You can offer free products to build your email list, monthly paid subscriptions for access to exclusive digital content, or licenses to use your digital products. You have a lot of options as to how you incorporate digital products into your business.
- E-learning is the future of education. You have a massive opportunity to expand your business and impact with e-learning, an industry expected to be worth $374 billion by 2026.
But online digital products also come with specific challenges you’ll need to watch out for:
- You’re competing with free content. With digital goods, consumers can probably find free alternatives to what you’re selling. You’ll have to think carefully about the niche you target, the types of digital products you sell, and how to write your product descriptions. You’ll also want to offer high-quality products and know how to build your brand in order to compete.
- You’re susceptible to piracy/theft. You need to take precautions and reduce these risks by employing the right tools to protect your products.
- There are some restrictions on how to sell digital products. For example, you must sell physical products through the Facebook and Instagram sales channel according to their commerce policy.
Most of these challenges can be overcome, however, if you employ the right tools when designing your digital product business.
Learn more: Trending Products to Sell
6 best digital products to sell online
- Educational products
- Licenses to use your digital assets
- Membership sites
- Digital templates and tools
- Music or art
- Services
For a little inspiration when creating these products, explore the top types of digital products listed below.
1. Educational products
Online courses are best suited for in-depth content. They require some effort up front, from creating a presentation to recording a video walk-through. When creating courses, start with learner outcomes: what do you want the learner to know or be able to do at the end of your course?
You can include quizzes, knowledge checks, and interactive activities within your courses to help break-up learning content and make your e-course more engaging. Consider learning and implementing a teaching model like ADDIE.
If you consider yourself an expert on a particular topic, digital products are a great way to package that information and sell it to others looking to learn.
If there’s an abundance of free blog posts or tutorials on YouTube about what you’d like to teach, you can compete by delivering content that promises not education but transformation. In other words, don’t sell the product—sell the customer’s own potential after buying your product.
You can leverage an existing reputation as an expert to garner attention for your downloadable products to sell online or, if you’re starting from scratch, you can create and give away free content to generate interest and leads for your paid digital products.
2. Licenses to use your digital assets
From stock photos to video footage, from music and sound effects, there’s a global ecosystem of licensable digital assets uploaded by creatives for other creatives to use in their work.
By offering licenses to individuals and businesses, you can charge for the use of your photos, videos, music, software, and similar top digital products in your own store and through online marketplaces, such as stock photo sites. In exchange for exposure, some of these marketplaces can take up to 50% in commission for every sale. However, if you want to build your own destination for digital products to sell, you can use Sendowl to power this type of business with unique auto-generated license keys.
When coming up with assets to create, it helps to work backward from the needs of your intended audience. Start by thinking about what kind of assets they’d want to use in order to create products that are actually in demand (and thus easier to sell).
Also, be sure to protect your digital products with watermarks and other security measures, especially if you’re selling photos.
3. Membership sites
Instead of focusing on how to sell digital products individually, you can bundle them together and lock them behind a paid subscription to generate recurring revenue.
This approach to selling digital products is ideal if you plan to maintain a growing library of premium content and nurture a community of passionate members. In some cases, paid digital subscriptions can even create an opportunity to directly monetize your existing content marketing efforts.
Since this content is behind a gate that only paying subscribers can access through their customer account, you can also host exclusive content that can be streamed rather than downloaded.
You can build this type of business idea by using Charge Rabbit for recurring subscription billing and Sky Pilot as your digital delivery system.
4. Digital templates and tools
Digital products can also come in the form of intangible tools that equip professionals to do tasks that either fall outside of their skill set or take up a lot of time. You can sell digital solutions to the common pain points and needs of a specific audience.
Some examples of how to sell digital products online this way include:
- Digital marketing strategy templates for entrepreneurs
- Résumé templates for job-seekers
- Mobile apps for businesses
- Graphic design templates for brochures, flyers, posters, etc.
- Adobe Photoshop filters and plugins for media editors
- Icons, fonts, or UX Kits for web designers
If you already have a freelance business, it might be worth considering how you can turn your skills and services into digital products to create passive streams of revenue.
5. Music or art
If you’re a musician or an artist, chances are you’ve explored ways you can monetize your talents or the audience you’re building. While print on demand t-shirts or custom prints are always an option, there are also plenty of digital product examples for selling art and music.
A musician can sell ringtones of their best songs alongside their merch. Or a cartoonist could turn their art into printables, phone wallpapers, or print-on-demand products. A filmmaker can sell their movies online. Since you don’t have to hold any inventory with online digital products, you can experiment with different formats to see what your audience wants without much risk.
6. Services
Services tend to pair well with a variety of types of digital products because services are essentially their opposite—with services, your “inventory” is limited to the number of working hours you can accommodate.
Plus, customers often receive digital products as part of their “purchase” with many services. A designer will deliver logos. A personal trainer might deliver a workout plan. Leaning into this, you can position certain services as packages containing valuable digital products.
For example, you could offer a consultation for a fee, along with a personalized report or Excel spreadsheet, and then upsell your customers on your other services or products. Or you could offer a free downloadable product to generate leads for your email marketing list, a tactic that many online businesses employ today.
If there are common tasks you complete as part of your service business that are easy for you but valuable to your customer, you can consider productizing them to create revenue streams that require less of your time and effort to maintain.
Shopify is the easiest and most reputable way to create an ecommerce store for online digital products. You don’t need any tech skills or a big budget, and you can choose from over 100 templates with built-in features to get set up quickly—all for a small $29 monthly fee. There are also over 4,000 free Shopify apps you can use for managing your store and selling more digital products online.
Resources:
- How to Start an Online Store
- Starting Up Starts Here: The Shopify Store Launch Checklist
Free Webinar:
How to Find and Source a Winning Product to Sell
In less than 40 minutes, let us walk you through how to find product ideas, how to validate them, and how to sell them once you have an idea you want to pursue.
8 apps for selling digital products on Shopify
- Digital Downloads
- SendOwl
- Courses
- Single Music
- Thinkific
- FetchApp
- Sky Pilot
- BookThatApp
There are a number of sales and marketing tools you’ll want to consider for selling digital products, depending on your needs:
- Digital Downloads. This free app by Shopify offers a simple way to sell digital products on your own website. Upon purchase, customers can download their file immediately and receive a link in their email.
- SendOwl. For more complex digital product businesses, SendOwl comes with a variety of features and useful automation, like expiring links and auto-generated license keys, to power your products.
- Courses. This Shopify app lets you create lessons, tutorials, webinars, and manuals and sell them online. You can create beautiful online education portals, embed pre-recorded videos, and even livestream lesson content. Customers can track their progress and earn certificates for their completion.
- Single Music. If you’re a musician selling music, Single was made with you in mind. Not only does it bridge the gap between physical and digital music sales, it also lets you easily include clips on your product page for customers to sample.
- Thinkific. This app lets you monetize your expertise and grow your audience by adding online courses to your Shopify store. You can upload and drag and drop content to create a course curriculum. A free plan is available, allowing you to create up to three courses.
- FetchApp. FetchApp is another digital download delivery app that offers fewer features than SendOwl but has a free plan available (5 MB of storage) and gives you the ability to attach multiple files to a single product.
- Sky Pilot or Bold Memberships. These apps are ideal for building a membership program. You can sell files and exclusive video streams to customers. Customers can then access all of their previously purchased files through their own customer accounts.
- BookThatApp, Tipo, or Sesami. These three apps are perfect for businesses that offer one-to-one or small group interactions and need an appointment booking solution to schedule consultations or coaching sessions with customers. All three apps have a free plan available.
Beyond these digital product delivery systems, there are other Shopify apps to power and protect your digital goods, such as:
- Recurring Order & Subscription. This is an app for weekly or monthly subscriptions. Use it to automate recurring orders, invoices, and digital subscriptions for online memberships or programs.
- Pasilobus Armor. If you want extra protection for visual products like stock photos, this app offers most of the security measures you may need, from watermarks to source code protection.
- Disable Right-Click. When your content is your product, this app helps you protect it from theft. You can lock images and text so they can’t be saved or copied without your permission.
Depending on your needs, these apps and more can be used together to help you incorporate digital products into your Shopify store and execute any of the digital products examples below.
Sales and marketing tips for selling digital products
Whether you’re a brand-new business owner or adding online digital products to your existing store, keep these tips in mind:
- Create a great product. The first criteria for creating digital products is to add value to your customers’ life. Since you’re competing with free content on the web, invest in building a product people can’t find anywhere else.
- Promote a lead magnet. Regardless of how much your product costs, create a light version of it for free. A free product can help you build an email list you can sell to in the future. It also opens the door for upselling and retargeting potential customers with different promotions. Free builds trust between your business and potential customers.
- Start an affiliate program. Affiliates are a huge source of traffic and sales for creators selling digital products. Find influencers who are established and trusted in your industry and offer them a commission for each sale they make. You can create different percentages for different affiliates, so if someone has a massive audience, you can give them a higher commission rate to promote more and attract customers.
- Collect pre-orders. A great way to get early sales is by giving a discounted “early bird” price. If you’re releasing a new digital product, you can offer a 50% discount for the first 100 buyers, then 25% for the next 100 buyers, and then release the product at full price after the 25% discount runs out. You can only launch the 50% discount to your existing audience to reward their loyalty, get feedback, and drive pre-launch sales.
- Offer a money-back guarantee. If you’re hesitant about offering a warranty on your products, it makes sense. Some people could buy and use your product then ask for their money back. But it’s all a part of running an online business. The rewards of higher conversion rates outweigh the small percentage of people who may abuse the policy. A money-back guarantee shows potential buyers you’re putting your money where your mouth is, and putting the risk on you, not them.
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Creating the best digital products for your business
Without the need to hold inventory or the overhead associated with selling physical products, all types of digital products can be profitable online business ideas.
There are countless ways you can create the best digital content to sell and resell and incorporate them into your business. With a little ingenuity and upfront investment of time, you can serve up irresistible value that can more than pay for itself over time.
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Digital products FAQ
What are some examples of digital products?
- Online courses and webinars
- Kindle books
- Audiobooks
- Software programs
- Web elements like Shopify or WordPress themes
- Printables
- Membership sites
- Workbooks
- PowerPoint templates
How do you create a digital product?
- Brainstorm digital product ideas.
- Research buyer pain points.
- Validate ideas through keyword and trend research.
- Produce your digital products.
- Create a Shopify store.
- Build an audience and market your digital products.
What digital products are in demand?
- Educational products like ebooks and online courses
- Exclusive membership communities
- Digital templates and tools
- Repurposed music or art
- Productized services
- Licenses to use digital assets
What kind of digital products sell best?
The best-selling digital products include graphic design, templates, downloadable prints, music and audio, stock photography, and print on demand products like custom t-shirts, notebooks, and mugs.