Best 10 Best Platforms for Digital Products and Services in 2021
By LitExtension
Introduction
Starting an online business has never been easier! eCommerce, with its massive power, enables you to sell not only physical commodities but also a wide range of digital products and services, such as digital downloads, subscriptions, and more.
People nowadays, however, are spoiled for choice when it comes to online selling in light of a stack of eCommerce platforms and marketplaces in the industry.
With that being said, in this article, I’ll identify the top 10 best platforms for digital products and services to help you choose a suitable solution for your business.
Plus, if you are considering a move from your current eCommerce platform to a more robust one, LitExtension — #1 Shopping Cart Migration Solution can give you a helping hand. With 160,000+ stores migrated and over 60,000 customers worldwide, LitExtension will offer you a seamless, quick and safe data migration.
Without further ado, let’s get the ball rolling!
What Are Digital Goods and Services?
According to Wikipedia, digital goods and services are intangible products and services that exist in digital form. To put it another way, items or services which are purchased online but don’t have any physical existence could be considered digital goods and services.
Here are examples of popular digital goods and services:
- eBooks
- Downloadable Music
- Podcast
- Software and tools
- Graphics & Illustrations
- Online Courses
- Digital subscriptions
- Membership
- Online Consultancy
In fact, copyright infringement and taxation are two legal concerns that arise frequently in the realm of digital goods and services. The most difficult question to answer is how to protect your own assets from unauthorized copying and pasting. Besides, although digital goods and services, such as eBooks or e-learning, aren’t new technology, tax rules for them are in constant flux.
Despite of the aforementioned reservations, digital products and services have many advantages that make them uniquely appealing to sell, such as low overhead costs, high-profit margins, and the potential to automate.
Here are some mind-blowing stats you shouldn’t ignore:
- The number of digital buyers worldwide in 2021 is over 2.14 billion people.
- The e-book market reached $18.13 billion in 2020 and is expected to value at $23.12 billion by 2026.
- The global photographic services market valued at $32.92 billion in 2020.
- The market size of the Photography industry, measured by revenue, is $11.5 billion in 2021.
As can be seen, selling digital products and services could undoubtedly pay dividends. Therefore, if you are planning to open an online store to sell these kinds of items, please keep scrolling to see the top 10 best platforms for digital products and services.
Keep an eye out!
10 Best Platforms for Digital Products and Services in 2021
In essence, EasyDigitalDownloads (EDD) is a CRM within your WordPress dashboard that allows you to sell through your WordPress blog. With this plugin, you can easily add the “Buy now” and “Add to cart” buttons directly to your WordPress site.
Customers can build an account page on EDD, which allows them to have a more personalized buying experience. Besides, the customers also have full access to the shopping cart system to purchase multiple ranges of downloads at once.
Pricing:
There are four annual pricing plans to select from, starting at $99 for the Personal Pass. The Extended Pass, Professional Pass, and All-Access Pass charge you $199, $299, and $499 respectively. If you want to further extend the power of EDD, you can also acquire official EDD extensions or 3rd-party extensions for a fee.
In terms of payment flexibility, EDD accepts credit card payments using Stripe as well as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal. Besides, you can also set up recurring payments or additional payment gateways.
Outstanding Features:
- Discount codes for your customers
- In-depth analytics to track and monitor the activities of the customers
- Affiliate system with AffiliateWP
- Seamless integration with your favorite tools (Dropbox, Stripe, MailChimp, and more).
- Restrictions and authorizations for the customers.
- No limitations for distributing digital products.
Sellfy is a popular and affordable solution, which is best suited for selling digital downloads and subscriptions. This platform enables you to offer all sorts of digital content, such as e-books & PDFs, online events & promotions, digital art, or online memberships.
Without much hassle, you can easily create an online store in minutes to sell digital goods and services or sell from your existing websites using an embedded “Buy now” button.
To get started with Sellfy, you’ll have a 14-day free trial. Then, you can choose from different paid packages, starting at $19 per month and $228 per year.
Outstanding Features:
- Highly customizable
- Multiple payment options
- Optimized for mobile devices
- Shopping cart support
- In-depth analytics
- Multiple store languages
- No transactions fees
Gumroad is essentially an All-in-One solution for all types of creators from artists, writers, to educators, podcasters, and more. Thanks to its simplicity, ease of use, and security, Gumroad lets everything unfold naturally. You can create your own site or integrate Gumroad into your own website utilizing the embeddable Gumroad widget.
What’s more, Gumroad allows you to sell multiple versions of a product, and generate license keys for your software. With integrations with things like Google Analytics, you can get access to powerful data and universal analytics.
The great thing about Gumroad is that it charges you no monthly or yearly fee but a small cut on each transaction made online. For instance, if your sales reach $10.000, you’ll have to pay 5% of your revenue for Gumroad.
Outstanding Features:
- A simple yet effective landing page form
- Email list integration with Gumroad
- Powerful analytics
- Simple and clean checkout pages
- Make subscription plans available for memberships
SendOwl is a platform specifically designed for selling digital goods, services, subscriptions, memberships, and more. With a clean and easy-to-use interface, it is an end-to-end solution that offers everything to start right away, from selling, delivering, marketing, to analytics.
SendOwl, like other systems, may be integrated with any website, such as Shopify and WordPress. As a result, if you already have an online presence, SendOwl is a good choice.
You can start your SendOwl experience with a free trial that lasts for 30 days. After that, the pricing plan starts at $15 per month for the Standard package, $24 for the Premium option, and $39 for the Business one.
Outstanding Features:
- Extensive marketplace for add-ons and extensions
- Discount codes and promotional offers for your end-users
- Advanced reporting and in-depth analytics
- Affiliate program metrics
- Modern & responsive checkout
- Multiple payment options (including Bitcoin)
- Multi-language & multi-currency
- Built-in marketing tools, such as email marketing integrations, or 1-click upsells.
Trusted by over 130.000 sellers worldwide, Payhip is also a fantastic platform for selling digital downloads & memberships which enables you to sell all types of digital products, such as your eBooks, or software.
Furthermore, many powerful marketing features are also included with your pricing package. Using Payhip makes it easy to grow your business in light of global affiliate systems, social discounts, mailing lists… In addition, it’s also incredibly easy to embed the checkout and shopping cart to sell on your own blog, website, or sell your digital downloads directly on social media.
If you want to sell memberships, Payhip allows you to sell multiple plans and have your site optimized for speed & conversion with no coding required.
With no credit card required, Payhip offers you a Free Forever plan which charges you only a 5% transaction fee. There’s also a Plus option for $29 per month and a 2% transaction fee.
If you don’t want to pay an additional fee per transaction, you can opt for the Pro pricing plan at $99 per month.
Outstanding Features:
- Discounts or coupons to your products
- Promotional campaigns
- License keys for software
- Responsive checkout pages
- Pay what you want pricing
- Marketing tools integration
- Built-in affiliate program
Teachable is specifically catered to e-learning — the new education industry. Already, more than 100.000 creators use Teachable to create a powerful empire for online education, making it one of the most popular and accessible platforms available on the market. As a one-stop-shop solution for selling online courses and learning subscriptions, Teachable offers you a completely brandable teaching experience to promote and sell unlimited courses and coaching services.
Additionally, Teachable enables in-depth website customization options. This platform also allows you to easily integrate a wide range of tools and use a custom domain to easily link your existing website to Teachable. Besides, Teachable accepts payment in 130+ currencies, which is essential to extend your business internationally.
You can get started on Teachable with a Free plan, which charges you nothing but a $1 and 10% transaction fee. Besides, Teachable offers 2 paid options: monthly and annually.
With a yearly pricing plan, the Basic starts at $29, or you can upgrade to Pro at $99 per month or Business at $249 per month. If you opt for a monthly plan, the fee is a little bit higher, starting from $39 per month. In addition, whether you pay monthly or yearly, the Basic will charge you a 5% transaction fee.
Outstanding features:
- Multiple types of teaching media support
- Quizzes and course completion certificates
- Student feedback and support integrations
- Built-in affiliate program
- Endless marketing integrations
- Analytics to track sales and student insights
- Different payment options for your student.
Learndash is pre-configured for out-of-the-box use that focuses heavily on the benefits of e-learning. Although Learndash is far from the cheapest platform in the industry, it is one of the most powerful course-creation systems out there. However, digital downloads aren’t as easy to sell through Learndash.
With a drag & drop course builder and dynamic content delivery, you can easily create impressive online courses. It also supports all necessary functions of e-learning such as badges & certificates, discussion forums, or leaderboards. It’s easy to bulk marketing & sales with one-time purchases, subscriptions, memberships, or course bundles.
Fortunately, Learndash is launching a back-to-school sale with the Basic package that starts at $159 per month. Normally, you have to pay $199 per month for the Basic, $299 for the Plus, and $369 for the Pro.
Outstanding Features:
- Detailed reports on enrollment, progress, and performance.
- Group and assignment management
- Easily use any theme and page builder
- Highly customizable
- Multisite enabled
- Various types of media support, such as videos, audio, SWF files, HTML5, SCORM, xAPI
As a front-runner of the eCommerce game, Shopify is a full-fledged option enabling merchants to sell everything, from physical products to digital goods and services. Offering a powerful range of eCommerce features, Shopify simplifies eCommerce, powering approximately 3.500.000 live websites.
Since Shopify is a hosted solution, you can roll out a merchandise store quickly without the need to undergo the tedious task of coding. Besides, Shopify also offers users useful sales tools & features, such as multi-channel integration, product management, abandoned cart recovery as well as dropshipping.
Having difficulties building a Shopify store? This tutorial video will show you how to create a Shopify website from scratch:
With Shopify, everything can begin with a 14-day free trial. Then, Shopify offers 5 different pricing plans:
- Shopify Lite: $9 per month
- Basic Shopify: $29 per month
- Shopify: $79 per month
- Advanced Shopify: $299 per month
- Shopify Plus: custom pricing
Besides, if you don’t use Shopify Payments, Shopify will charge you an additional transaction fee depending on which pricing plan you opt for.
Outstanding Features:
- Endless free and premium themes
- Mobile commerce support
- Subscription and membership creation
- Digital download delivery
- A variety of advanced plugins and extensions are available.
- Extensive payment options
- Stand-out design functionality and flexibility
- Thorough, round-the-clock customer support
- Multi-currency selling
Magento is an open-source platform owned by Adobe, empowering thousands of retailers and brands worldwide. Magento offers users two versions to fit the requirements of their eCommerce business: Magento OpenSource and Magento Commerce. As one of the most innovative and flexible platforms, Magento supports selling not only physical items but also digital, and downloadable products or services.
Owing to its open-source nature, Magento gains a reputation for strong scalability and high customizability. This platform also comes with a slew of strong built-in capabilities, particularly for eCommerce, such as inventory management, sales channels, shipping & tax, and analysis.
Magento Open Source is available for download and installation at no cost. However, it’s not free to implement because you will have to pay for web hosting, domain names, add-ons, an SSL certificate…, which can cost you around $15,000.
Magento Commerce, on the other hand, is ideally suited for large businesses, with pricing depending on annual average gross sales income. For example, if your sales reach more than $1million, Magento charges you $22,000 per year.
Outstanding Features:
- Highly scalable
- Extensive payment gateway integration options
- Built-in multilingual support.
- Mobiles and tablets optimization
- Built-in SEO features
- An active global user community
BigCartel is a web-based, fully-hosted eCommerce platform, which is currently home to over 80,000 live websites. It is a nifty and easy-to-use platform for artists and makers, such as painters, photographers, or crafters, who are looking for a way to sell individual items, including digital goods.
Big Cartel is the right fit for start-ups or small businesses. It gives you more control over your online store than Etsy but is less powerful in terms of eCommerce features than Shopify.
Actually, Big Cartel has three different pricing tiers depending on how many things you list. Aside from the free plan, Big Cartel offers paid options ranging from $9.99 to $19.99 each month.
Outstanding Features:
- Clean navigation and user-friendly prompts
- Inventory tracking
- Order management.
- Mobile app
- Built with SEO in mind
- Free themes
Which Are the Best Platforms for Digital Products and Services?
On the whole, EasyDigitalDownloads or Sellfy is a great option to sell digital products and services.
Meanwhile, if you are seeking a splendid platform to sell online courses, Learndash or Teachable could be just the thing that you need.
Or else, you can opt for an All-in-One platform like Shopify to save time or go with an open-source solution like Magento to get full control over your website.
Conclusion
If you’re on the fence about which is the best platform for digital products and services, you can choose a test-and-learn approach to find out the right answer before taking the plunge.
If you are already running an online store but want to migrate to another platform, LitExtension — #1 Shopping Cart Migration Solution is always at your service. At LitExtension, we offer an advanced automated tool that will transfer all your data securely and flawlessly from your current eCommerce platform to a more robust one. Up to now, we have successfully migrated 160,000+ stores with over 60,000 customers worldwide.
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Thank you for reading and good luck with your business!
