If you want to sell your own digital products online (music in my case) there are a lot of options to choose from. In fact there are so many that it can be hard to know where to start. In this post I will share the best places I have found for selling digital downloads online.
How do I sell my digital products without paying a fortune?
Luckily there are a some great options for beginners who want to try and sell their own products online. And it does not have to cost you a fortune. Typically you pay a monthly fee and % of each sale.
What you get for this money is a payment gateway set-up, a system to send the customer automatic e-mails and a server where your digital goods can be stored and downloaded. You don’t have to be technical geek to get it all up and running. In many cases it just involves signing up, uploading your media files and pasting some code onto your website.
E-junkie
E-junkie seems like a great company. They have been around for a while and they take a flat monthly subscription fee. How much depends on the number of products and storage space you need. You can easily add a shopping cart button to your existing website and they have a nice WordPress plugin to make things easier if you like me are running your site on WordPress. Starts at $5/mo, 50MB space and 10 products.
ClickBank
ClickBank is very poplar when it comes to selling e-books. They are often chosen because they have a huge number of affiliates promoting products from their marketplace. ClickBank does not offer a shopping cart. If you are going to sell many products at same time (like MP3 music) e-junkie is therefore a better option. Cost is $49.95 sign-up fee, 7.5% plus $1 of the product sales price.
Removed: Payloadz.com – Searches on Google indicates problems with getting paid
This company offers space for your products in they own online store at payloadz.com. Does it generate sales to in payloadz’s own shop? I doubt it but their service seems legit and very easy to setup. You can of cause also sell from your own website. Cost is $14.95/mo, 5% + 49 cents per sale, no space limit. They also offer an affiliate system.
FoxyCart
Very customizable. You can basically set up a shop anyway you want it. The checkout process looks very streamlined. If your serious about setting up your own customized web-shop FoxyCart is diffidently a great option. $19/mo, 100MB space, $20 extra a month if you want 1GB of extra space. But do keep in mind that they do not provide a payment gateway. So you have know how set-up a lot of stuff yourself or pay someone else to do it.
Shopify
Here you get a complete web-shop ready to go. You can even run it on your own domain name and Shopify handles all of the transactions. Costs $26/mo, but do notice if you want to sell digital download products you have to sign-up with fetchApp.com. Their pricing starts at $5/mo for 25MB of space. So the minimum price for this solution is $31/mo.
So who should I choose to sell my digital products though?
It all depends on your situation. If you are just starting out then e-junkie would probably be the best way to get started. If you want to sell a lot of e-books, music tracks, photo’s or other digital media a real web-shop like FoxyCart or Shopify would be the way to go.
My take on making a shopping cart for stock music
Sometime in the future I might end up selling my stock music tracks on my own – instead of selling though the stock media sites and music libraries. This way I would only pay a small amount for each sale and not “loose” about 50%” on every sale. To be able to handle a lot of products (music tracks) I would probably start with E-junkie and see how it goes. If successful in making sales I would switch to Shopify or FoxyCart.
To be able to sell anything does however require a lot of targeted traffic. I would also need a lot more tracks before spending time on setting this up. But sometime in the future you might just see a “Add To Cart” button or a complete web-shop on EagleCinematics. I will of cause tell you all about my experiences if I start selling music directly to my customers.
I wish you the best of luck in selling your own products online.
…and feel free to post your favourite service for selling digital downloads in the comments below.
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Nice Post.
You have provided very important information for those who are willing to sell digital products online.
Thanks for sharing. 🙂
I’m glad that you found the information useful. I have just removed Payloadz from the list. While digging deeper I found that a lot of people seems to have problems with getting paid. ClickBank is now on the list instead 🙂
I tried a place called MyTradeBit and if you think you’re going to get your money after something sells FORGET IT!!!! You have to wait a week and sometimes 2 wks or so they say. I have been waiting since June 22 2012 to get paid and now they are blaming their credit card processor B+S card services. So I am back out searching for some place new that can handle 130 megs (2 files) and not get ripped off by buying more storage and also have buttons so I can put on my webpage……..frustrating to say the least! Stay away from MyTradeBit.com they suck!
Hi Bill, thanks for the heads up. Frustrating when you have to spend time on something that should just be running by itself when set-up.
Have you thought about going with e-junkie? If you use a subscription plan of $18/mo or higher they allow you to store your download files on your own server. I don’t know how much your selling a month, but could be an option. E-junkie has got a really good reputation.
I want to sell a bit of my own original music this fall for a specific purpose on our own website. Already having personal web space, a WordPress website, promotional email list, Paypal account, etc … and with it not being a large ‘library’, we don’t want to go through a hosting site. It’s just something to add to the ‘useful content’ on the site.
We’re ‘stuck’ on what it takes to make it royalty free … granting the permission and making sure that whatever is needed goes with the file (since we’re self recording). Seems everything coming up in searches relates to ‘getting permission’ when we want to know how to ‘give it’ (one payment – royalty free).
Is that something to be embedded with the file in tags or is a separate license text enough?
Maybe I’m making it more difficult than it needs to be?
Thanks for any help you can offer!