Where Should You Sell Digital Products Online in 2023?

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Over the years I have built a lot of online shops. While I haven’t used them all, simply because there are so many – I do think this is a good starting place for you to decide whether you want to host your own, go with a hybrid e-commerce platform or sell on a marketplace.

Selling on a Marketplace: Etsy, eBay, and Amazon

Marketplaces are huge gigantic websites that have multiple sellers and vendors. There are pros and cons to selling on a marketplace, but they are also an easy way to get started, especially if you are not especially technically inclined. Here’s a couple I’ve tried + my thoughts.

Selling on Etsy

I like Etsy, for the most part. It’s easy to set up. You don’t have to worry about remitting sales tax or coding stuff or dealing with too many hassles.

At the same time, the fees are high, there is a lot of competition, and even more copycat sellers.

I don’t think I’d recommend just slapping stuff up on Etsy and hoping it sells because someone might search for something you’re selling, but if you are able to drive traffic to your shop, it’s so simple it’s nice and if you aren’t a high volume seller, the fees aren’t any more expensive than trying to host it yourself.

Selling on eBay

I love eBay, but it’s really only suitable for physical products. Digital products aren’t allowed, but if you are selling anything like ephemera or public domain things you’ve digitized or just clearing out some junk from around the house, it’s awesome.

It’s also a good way to do what I call quiet offline marketing. If I sell someone a book of beautiful vintage images, I can include a card + coupon for my digital resources here at STMX and get to know my customers better so I can serve them in the best possible way.

Selling on Amazon

Like most people, I have a complex relationship with Amazon. There are things I absolutely love and there are things I wish were different.

If you are selling print-on-demand merch and books, I think they have an awesome, easy to use program. The merch account is sort of confusing to set up at first, and you do have to have some sort of “social proof” to get approved, but it’s nice knowing you can easily sell your artwork and designs on products that way. I only wish they had more products, like coffee mugs.

The book quality is fairly good too. I actually bought a couple of proof books just to see what kind of abuse they can withstand and paper quality – turns out they are actually fairly tolerable, and I’m a complete paper snob.

They also have good wholesale/royalty pricing – it’s not insanely expensive for print-on-demand like many other companies can be.

There are other marketplaces – Facebook, Craigslist, etc. etc. etc. – but these top 3 are all good choices.

Should You Use a Marketplace?

If you want a hands off, tech free hassle business + not worry about collecting and remitting sales tax, absolutely yes. The fees may seem high, but wait til you find out what it actually costs to host a site on your own.

Another advantage is there is a trust factor – people know they can buy something on Etsy or eBay or Amazon + they aren’t going to end up totally screwed over. In that regard, you may find your conversions are higher on a marketplace so it’s worth the % in fees even if its not branded for your business.

I would go as far to say that even if you still decide to host your own shop somewhere else, you still might want to consider these marketplaces. It’s a great way to get your products and business in front of other people with little risk and adds some trust to your brand.

Hybrid Hosted E-Commerce Platforms: Shopify, Gumroad, Etc.

Next we’ll dive into some popular ways to sell things online that aren’t necessarily a marketplace, but they also aren’t as intensive as self-hosting and managing your own shop.

My Experience With Shopify

I personally don’t like Shopify, at all, but I know tons of people who do. I think the main reason I don’t like Shopify is because I’m a WordPress developer with 16+ years experience building and hosting my own sites – which means the minute we get into proprietary code like Shopify has, I feel severely limited in what I’m capable of doing and have no control over more advanced techniques or server configuration.

I also feel like Shopify nickel and dimes you to death and all the add-ons can really add up too fast if you’re not careful. For their pricing per month, I really think they should have a lot more free add-ons included. Being at the mercy of third-party add-on developers also makes me nervous.

That being said, you won’t have to worry about annoying things like transactional emails or your digital products not being delivered. That’s a nice peace of mind right there, but you really have to do a lot of sales to justify the costs – otherwise you could be spending $40-$75 more a month than if you just paid the fees on the marketplaces.

If you’re not tech savvy, don’t need a lot of control, don’t mind paying for everything on a subscription model and want a stand-alone shop, it’s a decent solution to consider. Keep in mind though you’re completely on your own for stuff like collecting + remitting sales tax.

Gumroad

Gumroad is totally simple to set up, it’s relatively inexpensive compared to everything else, and you won’t have a ton of headaches.

They don’t deal with sales tax for you, but if you just want to slap up a digital product fast and know it will actually get delivered to your buyers without issue, it’s a great choice. It’s also super affordable.

I sold a ton of stuff on Gumroad for many years and loved it. I made the mistake of moving to Shopify thinking it was “more professional” and actually found my costs tripled while the number of sales plummeted. Who knew?

Self Hosted Open Source: WooCommerce, OpenCart, ZenCart, Etc.

Unless you are a developer, hosting yourself is going to be nothing but problems, most likely.

The first reason for this is because you need to think about transactional emails and deliverability. When I was new to running a shop I had no idea why so many of my customers weren’t getting their products – until I realized my web host wasn’t set up with a mail server or transactional email provider to send those kinds of emails. Yikes!

Hosting is also expensive for self-hosted ecommerce – you need something way more powerful than just basic hosting because you can’t cache aggressively and there’s a lot of things happening under the hood that requires more server resources. (See my list of favorite webhosts here)

While open-source software like Woocommerce is free, add-ons for getting more features are not. It’s beginning to feel a lot like Shopify currently just because you will find yourself paying for multiple yearly subscriptions for various plugins and add-ons.

In this regard, if you don’t have tech skills but still want your own store, Shopify very well could be a better platform.

At the same time, if you are willing to hire a developer or get deep into learning how to build and manage a WooCommerce shop – you’ll find you have complete control and can do whatever you want. There’s no rule that says you have to use add-ons, you can always custom code whatever you need.

I actually used WooCommerce when I first built this site, as well as my very first shop/membership site I built in 2010 – I’m comfortable with writing my own code snippets, custom functions and customizing the front-end. The reason I ditched it here though is because they kept releasing updates that severely changed the way I would code things.

Updates are typically great – but when we’re looking at completely depreciated functions or new setting options that need configured with little warning or notice it’s too much work to stay on top of and I don’t have a team of people to deal with that for me right now.

There are also other open source alternatives to WooCommerce, like OpenCart or ZenCart – and I’d argue they would be better since they are dedicated to ecommerce + not trying to slap it into a CMS – BUT…they have such a small user base that it’s hard to find support, tutorials or documentation.

It’s like if you decided you wanted to use Drupal instead of WordPress to build a blog. Drupal is great and pretty powerful – but my goodness it’s hard to even find good tutorials on using it.

When you self host, whether WP or something else, you also aren’t going to save a ton of money in transactional fees – you still need a payment process and Stripe, PayPal, etc. – they all skim a % off the top, so it’s nominal savings compared to marketplace and hosted platform fees.

The one very good thing I will say is WooCommerce shops always outperformed Shopify on conversions. I don’t know why exactly but I did more sales on my own self-hosted Woocommerce shops than Shopify with no differences in marketing or products or anything like that.

Bottom line

If you have a full-time developer dedicated to WooComerce (even if YOU are that developer) – you’ll have total flexibility + control. It may save you some money in the long run, but also very well may not unless again you’re okay with customizing + coding stuff yourself.

If you’re not totally tech savvy but set on having your own branded shop on your own domain, Shopify will work just fine for you. If you don’t mind sending people to a third party non-branded platform and are selling one-off digital products, I loved Gumroad.

If you want to just get up + selling fast, head to a marketplace. You can always worry about running your own shop later and it will help you at least decide if you enjoy selling stuff online with very little risk or investment.

Have questions? Ask in the comments below, I’m happy to help point you in the right direction!