Allow Users to Upload Things to Sell Website Coding

Deciding if you should sell digital downloads from your website vs. marketplaces? Admission the pros and cons, plus a comprehensive setup plan, in this how-to guide.

Then yous've got a decent website upwards and running, and at present you want to start monetizing your business by selling digital downloads .

You take a full general idea of what your next steps entail, but equally you research digital product options , you notice yourself inundated with choices.

Hmm… decisions, decisions.

No worries, let's cut through the plethora of possibilities and get you some clarity for your business.

We've put together this step-by-step guide for you on how to create, set, and sell your digital downloads.

But first, hither's some insight for deciding whether to sell digital downloads on your own site or using a market.

Selling on your own site vs. a market

Before we become whatsoever further, allow's clarify what we hateful near marketplaces.

A marketplace is typically a conglomerate ecommerce site where third-party companies tin sell their products or services to consumers. Marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy, and Shopify take care of the transactions and processing.

OK, with that out of the way, here'south a brief summary of the advantages and disadvantages of using either your own website or a market place for selling your digital downloads.

Pros of using your own site to sell digital downloads

#1. Keep your profits

Most third-party marketplaces charge you a pretty penny for list your items on their platform.

Amazon charges $39.99 a month for a professional or $0.99 per transaction nether the individual plan:

Market Etsy charges their sellers $0.xx per listing for up to four months, plus an additional v% per transaction fee, and three% + 25 cents for each payment processing fee:

(In the spirit of honesty, at that place'south generally a fashion to avoid the upcharge if the marketplace has a proprietary payment processing organisation. Nonetheless, that's not a lot of wriggle-room for profits if yous don't utilise their organization)

And market place giant, Shopify , charges $29, $79, and $299 per calendar month for their respective basic, standard, and advanced membership plans.

On elevation of that, they have the post-obit additional payment fees ranging from 0.5% to 2% depending on your programme:

And so past list on your own site, you bask the advantages of using your own charging model (i.e., recurring, discounts, upsells, cross-sells, unmarried payment, or et cetera) and you can avoid the additional miscellaneous fees that marketplaces tend to tack on.

Plus, you won't take to worry about monthly membership fees. The simply fee you lot may have to worry almost is the payment processing fee, which makes finances beautifully elementary with your ain website.

#two. Amend client relationship management

By using your own site, you lot also have the liberty to customize your selling feel, keeping the blueprint, functionality, and nurturing procedure all on your terms.

I.e., yous tin can present beautifully clean, simple, and delightful user experiences to your clients without being confined to the format of monstrous marketplace user interfaces.

As an example, here's what a typical marketplace page for your digital production looks like:

As y'all tin see, the product -- a gardening kit -- looks generic, which makes it hard to stand up out from your competition, and there are numerous link and card choice distractions at the pinnacle that can derail your audition from converting.

Whereas if you host your products through an all-in-one platform like Podia, you lot get a sleek, customizable design with your own subdomain and branding.

Here's the comparative example from Vegetable Gardening Life that presents its offer in a clean, beautiful way, where its products aren't competing with thousands (if not more) of other options, featuring ane principal phone call-to-action (CTA) and zero clutter.

That's not the only advantage of controlling your user experience, though.

When you use your own website, you also have the opportunity to rails and nurture your visitors through their buyer journeys. You can collaborate with them at various touchpoints, find out more than about their buying behaviors, and suit their individual needs.

Typically, there are several digital and physical touchpoints that a customer typically encounters throughout their buyer journey:

So when you host your own homepage and product pages, that means yous can capture your audition's emails and nurture your relationships with them through personalized email sequences.

And how of import is personalized vs. not-personalized email when information technology comes to your conversions? Pretty of import.

By sending personalized messages to your subscribers, open rates tin increase by 11% and click-through rates can increase by 27%.

Which ways you'll want to capitalize on the ability to gather your customer emails so you can enhance both their user experience and human relationship with y'all.

Then owning your information is another large perk, where you take full reigns of your site'south design, functionality, and nurturing procedure. But we have one more pro for you in this category.

#3. Flexibility and independence

Typically, each marketplace has a limiting seller'south subscription plan that only allows you to sell a certain corporeality and type of products within specific rules and parameters.

Just cheque out some Etsy's house rules listed in their seller policy:

And the listing goes on...

Using your own site gives yous the freedom to customize your product offerings every bit you please, whether it'due south the quantity, size, frequency, await and feel, descriptions, terms and conditions, pricing, free updates, bonuses, and et cetera. It's your world.

That said, zilch is without its flaws, and so let'southward take a await at the major downside of selling from your own site now.

Cons of using your own site to sell digital downloads

#i. Technical burden (i.e., you better know how to lawmaking)

This one's more of a caveat than a difficult con: opposite to an all-inclusive platform that uses a subdomain, if you're using site builders like WordPress, you'll likely demand some moderate coding skills or a stellar developer at your side.

Here'due south why:

Because content management systems (CMS) like WordPress are designed for flexibility, their cadre architecture is very basic (aka slightly more robust than a blog).

Which ways yous'll more than probable need to chase for third-political party plugins, codes, extensions, and et cetera to accommodate everything y'all need to sell your digital products.

To make WordPress site do what you desire information technology to do, you'll demand to practise some significant customizing.

Which is why you lot'll discover over 54,000 WordPress plugins with over 1 billion downloads and counting:

Some of the bells and whistles you may want to comprise include: a widget to have payments, log-in expanse, a manner to view and manage your hosted content, a backend tracking system, and so on and so forth.

(Curious about how WordPress stacks upwardly for selling online courses? Check out our earlier article comparing the pros and cons of using WordPress .)

OK, but how exercise marketplaces stand up upwards against out three pros and one con for selling on your own website? Let's take a look.

Pros of using a market to sell digital downloads

#1. Congenital-in traffic

The biggest reason to utilise marketplaces is the amount of traffic you'll have access to past publishing your account. You'll take exposure to millions of users each calendar month, where customers just employ the search query to discover your brand.

Etsy receives over 200 one thousand thousand visits per half dozen months:

While Shopify brings in over 54.four meg visitors every six months:

And Amazon attracts 2.63 billion visits per six months:

Heavily-trafficked marketplaces have the advantage of alluring the mass audience, which means your digital products accept the potential to end up in someone'southward relevant search query.

Across traffic volume, in that location's 1 more market benefit we'd similar to point out.

#2. Built-in brand equity

Fifty-fifty if your own brand isn't well-known, beingness associated with big brand names like Amazon, Etsy, Shopify, and the like tin bring yous some ascendancy.

Take Amazon for example -- 53.four% of people are more willing to purchase from an unknown brand if the detail is listed on Amazon'south marketplace vs. whatsoever other site.

And information technology's no wonder. Their global make value has grown to over $200 billion in 2018 vs. $5.98 billion in 2006.

Traffic and make disinterestedness are the two main pros for using a marketplace. Now for some cons.

Cons of using a marketplace to sell digital downloads

#i. Fees

The biggest glaring drawback of using a marketplace is the fees involved. As I mentioned before, whether it'due south a listing fee or transaction fee, you'll likely need to pay boosted premiums to host your digital products on their platform.

#2. Wait time for payment

Because these marketplaces are typically large operations, y'all'll likely have to look a pregnant amount of time earlier seeing the funds in your depository financial institution business relationship.

For Etsy, the wait time is typically 24-48 hours with the occasional fund processing delay. If yous're using Amazon, wait time ranges between 3-5 business days . And for Shopify sellers, it takes 24-72 hours to process your payment:

#3. Clunky customer experience

The user experience for your prospective customers is likely to be less than perfect, with fragmented pieces -- like your user interface, branding, content hosting, and on-folio commitment -- all "frankensteined" together.

Here'due south what I mean. Let's say your prospective client finds your digital download on Amazon'due south platform. We'll use author James Altucher'due south Choose Yourself ebook every bit an example, where you purchase the ebook on Amazon's generic platform:

For delivery of the production, an Amazon-branded experience occurs where y'all receive an email from Amazon allowing you lot access to your digital download using their application and interface, in this case, the KindleUnlimited:

If y'all want to engage with your audience using your own branding and nurturing process, you'll need to capture your audience by other means to match the personality of your own site, which is likely to be completely different. That's the instance with James' website :

Finally, if your new client wants to return to your make to purchase more, they'll be dislocated virtually where to go as the fundamental hub for relevant info. Practise they go dorsum to Amazon, the Kindle app, or to your website? And who'south e-mail do they reach out to?

These are all segmented pieces of the client experience to consider when using a marketplace.

And there'southward ane last con for you.

#4. Limiting restrictions

Nosotros shared with you lot the various limiting business restrictions that come with marketplaces (i.e., Etsy's long roll of house rules).

In improver to the various terms of an agreement, product and listing restrictions, branding constraints, and et cetera, yous should besides look out for file size limits, which varies across platforms.

File size limit is 20MB for Etsy , 25MB for Gumroad , 2GB on Amazon , and 5GB on Shopify .

Equally an example, here'south a snapshot of Shopify's file size cap:

Every bit opposed to a service that's specifically designed to host your digital downloads. Podia, for example, has no limit on the quantity or file sizes and hosts it all:

When y'all're selling digital downloads (especially if you have several of them), y'all'll probable need to use up a lot of that hosting space. And who wants to pay for more space?

All in all, our take on the decision is this:

The benefits of using your own website and an all-in-one platform to sell digital downloads far outweigh the disadvantages.

And so, how practise y'all do it successfully?

By following these ix elementary steps.

9 steps to sell digital downloads on your own website:

When selling digital appurtenances, at that place are a few essentials y'all'll need to brand all the logistics work. Broken downward into these ix practical steps, this step-past-step will guide you through everything you need to get yous up and running to sell your commencement digital downloads:

Step #1: Determine your digital offerings

First things get-go: Decide on the type of digital products you lot desire to offer your audience.

Determine the goal for each digital offering and enquire yourself why you're offering information technology to your audience in the offset place. What results do y'all want your audience to achieve? What can they gain by investing in your digital download?

Some options for you to consider as far equally formats go include: templates, cheat sheets, ebooks, assessments, tools, guides, and checklists.

To help you get started, here are three great examples of digital downloads and their cost points. You lot can as well grab a comprehensive guide on setting a cost for your digital downloads over here.

#i. The Tiny Product Manual by Marc Eglon, which he sells for $39. He's also got several other ebooks for auction on his main digital download homepage, ranging from $4.99 to $39:

#2. Jacob Morris sells his Personal Values Cess for $19.99 via his own site using a subdomain:

#iii: Chris Albon offers a unique tool to his audience, his Machine Learning Flashcards digital download, which he sells for $12:

These are all helpful pieces of content that your audience can benefit from, but the sky's the limit. The principal takeaway is to focus on providing value and delivering a specific result to your terminate user.

On to our side by side step, which is creating your digital download.

Step #2: Create your digital downloads

In one case you accept a clear understanding of what exactly you want your deliverables to be, time to allow your creative juices flow and arts and crafts your digital products.

If you lot're looking for a done-for-y'all way to create your digital downloads from get-go to finish, you'll want to utilize our digital download generator tool. Within 10 minutes, you tin can fill in some class fields most your download, and it'll pump out a finished production for you.

Podia digital download generator screenshot

To accommodate diverse digital download formats, the generator also tailors your grade fields to friction match either a checklist, numbered listing, or text and images, so there'due south something for everyone.

Once that's finished the next steps are piece of cake-peasy.

Footstep #3: Upload your digital downloads

If yous're using an all-in-one platform, you directly upload your files. All other blueprint elements, such equally functionality and the fashion your items are laid out on the folio, are taken intendance of for yous.

For simplicity's sake, we'll walk you through Podia's dashboard as an example for the entire setup process.

Only create your account, head to your dashboard and click "products" in the top carte du jour, and then "new product."

In the modal window that pops upwardly, select "digital download," give your product a name and description to publish, then click "create & keep."

You can simply click "add files" to upload your digital downloads. If yous have multiple digital downloads and want to categorize them, you lot take the option of adding another section to organize the layout by clicking "add section."

After you click "add files," another modal window pops up where y'all can elevate and driblet your files into the window or click "upload" to pull the file from your drive.

Hither's an instance of what uploaded digital downloads await like from your audience's perspective:

Nice work -- at present your digital downloads are uploaded, hosted, and set up for your audience to admission.

On to the next step.

Footstep #4: Set up your subdomain

The great thing about using a subdomain is you can take a third-party platform manage and host your entire digital products homepage, while still having full control over your content and branding.

To set up your subdomain, simply click on your "settings" menu at the superlative of your Podia dashboard and scroll down mid-way through the page. Hither, you'll meet two options. You tin either:

Enter a subdomain that'll read ___.podia.com as your homepage URL
Or enter a custom domain for one that you already own.

If you prefer the second option and want to accept your own fully-branded domain, you lot tin can utilise your own purchased domain and set upward a CNAME tape with your custom domain name.

For exact steps on how to set your custom domain and details on your registrar of choice, you tin can reference this guide .

Hither'due south what the dashboard looks like for calculation your subdomain info:

Simple as that. Now for your payment system.

Step #five: Set up your payment organization

Information technology's fourth dimension to activate your payment method so you tin start collecting funds for your online products directly from your site. In that location are two chief ways to go about doing this:

Apply an private payment service platform: You'll need to go this route if you're non using an all-in-one platform. Payment processing services like PayPal or Stripe offer you the ability to collect fees, securely and conveniently online. Their services come with a price, notwithstanding, with both PayPal and Stripe collecting ii.9% + 30 cents per transaction.

To ready this upward on your own, using WordPress as an instance, you tin can download either the WordPress PayPal plugin or WordPress Stripe plugin and follow along with their instructions.
Use an spread-out platform to handle your payments: To keep with our setup example using Podia'southward dashboard, the connexion process to PayPal and Stripe is built in. Navigate to "settings" in the top menu and scroll to the lesser of the folio. And then click the push offered for either payment party pick and follow along with the steps to connect to your bank (I'll avoid displaying screenshots of private bank account info here).

The payment setup screen in your dashboard will display "you're all prepare" when the connection is complete:

Now that your bank account is successfully bridged to your digital download page, prepare your pricing past navigating dorsum to the "products" page in the summit main menu, and so click the "pricing" tab. Here you volition find a form field to enter your price:

Equally you can see, yous also take the option of adding a payment plan. And if you scroll downward further on the folio, you'll see two more options for calculation upsells and coupons:

Boom -- your pricing is all fix up and connected to your banking concern business relationship, which means you can immediately start accepting payments for your downloads.

The side by side stride is to put some finishing touches on the layout of your digital downloads page.

Pace #6: Design your sales page

It'south now time to ready the page where your customers access your digital downloads, referred to as your sales folio.

Again, following forth steps using Podia's dashboard, it's as easy as filling out a few form fields, starting with confirming your product proper noun and description, which you completed earlier. This is also where you add together your production image, past dragging and dropping or selecting your image file:

Next, give your homepage a headline to farther entice your visitors to convert.

Tip: Examination out different headlines to better convert your visitors. In some cases, merely irresolute a headline increases conversions by 52.8% .

To add your headline, merely fill up out the kickoff course field:

Below the headline form field, there are two more than features you can add to your sales page: a sales video and FAQs. Here are some fun facts to encourage you to attempt out both:

Including a video on your landing page can increment your conversions past lxxx%
People spend about one-third of their online activity watching video
Having a product FAQ section can heave your conversions 69%

Need some instruction on how to create a decent sales video? We have a guide on how to shoot quality video from your iPhone and a how-to on recording videos for online courses that you lot may discover helpful.

One time you lot have your sales page design elements all locked and loaded, now comes the exciting role of publishing your page for all to enjoy.

Stride #seven: Publish your sales page

To publish your content on Podia's platform, head to your "products" page at the top menu, then click the "edit" button within your digital download box and select "published."

Once you've officially gone live, yous'll know your page is out at that place for all to run across by the purple dot that shows up side by side to "published."

To make sure everything looks the way you want, you lot can preview or view your published page, and voila-- here's a snapshot of the finished page where your audience tin can at present access your digital downloads:

This makes for a make clean and well-branded user feel. Plus, you can avert generic branding, a inclement user experience, and unnecessary distractions of a market place platform.

At present, nosotros have just two final steps for yous.

Step #8: Market your digital download offerings

At this indicate, your digital downloads are all primed and ready to share with your audition.

The topic of marketing lonely deserves its own dedicated guide, but a loftier-level overview of the wonderful things yous can now do with your digital downloads to abound your audience include:

Use it equally a lead magnet - Offering your digital download as a freebie to your audience to expand your subscriber list. (Read more near why and how to give abroad free digital downloads this-a-way.)
Use information technology equally an intro to your services - By offering a scaled-down digital product with a lower price point, yous can innovate new audience members to your business, warm them up to your brand, and then nurture them toward your higher-ticket items.
Bundle your digital downloads - You can parcel several of your digital downloads into bundled offerings to brand more money while improving convenience for the customer.

These are just a few of the formats and ways to apply your digital downloads in your marketing try.

For a full list of marketing strategies (aka methods of alluring your target audition to these formats), check out these xvi fool-proof marketing strategies and these additional 8 marketing strategies for new products .

But once you have some traffic flowing to your digital downloads, don't end there. It'due south time to track your site's activity.

Footstep #9: Runway your traffic and sales

Past keeping a close eye on your metrics, you'll be better equipped to grow your business.

How?

Y'all'll have a better understanding of which items are most popular among your audience -- these are the digital downloads you can double-down on in your marketing effort while tweaking the products that aren't resonating with your audition.

To track how many people have purchased your digital download, start access your digital download editor in Podia's dashboard by navigating to "products" at the top card, so clicking on "edit" over again:

From here, click on the "customers" tab to view all your digital download customers.

This gives you a quick and easy mode to rails how many of your audition members have accessed each digital download.

Another fashion to rail your traffic stats is to integrate your site activity with Google Analytics, which you can practise by heading to your acme "settings" carte du jour, scrolling to the Google Analytics class field, and entering your tracking ID number.

(Need more help setting up Google Analytics with your site? This assist certificate may be beneficial.)

Notice the two additional form fields beneath your Google Analytics field. For those of you with other tracking needs, you can also add custom coding to the website tracking code and conversion tracking code boxes.

And with this final tracking step in place, a big congrats to yous -- you're officially all set up to make some substantial income selling your digital downloads.

Using an all-in-i platform to sell your digital downloads beats marketplaces

Choosing the best road for successfully selling your digital downloads doesn't have to be a daunting process.

To recap:

There are pros and cons to using your own site vs. a marketplace to sell your digital downloads.
Pros of using your own site include keeping your profits, better managing your client relationships, and fugitive limiting business restrictions.
Some cons of using your own site are needing coding help if you use sites similar WordPress vs. an all-in-one platform with a subdomain.
Pros of using a marketplace consist of having access to mass audience traffic and branding.
And finally, some cons of using a market are that you take to share your profits, await for the funds to arrive in your bank account, endure a less-than-platonic customer feel, and bargain with limiting business concern restrictions, including file size.
To successfully set upwards a digital download sales page using your ain site and subdomain, follow these ix simple steps.
Start by figuring out which digital offering to sell. Formats vary from templates and cheat sheets to ebooks and tools.
After creating and uploading your digital download, set up your subdomain, which gives y'all the advantage of both a cohesive client experience and full back up of a third-political party platform that specializes in digital downloads.
And then ready your payment organisation connecting to your banking account and blueprint your sales folio to match your ain branding and personalized messaging.
After y'all publish your content, marketplace your digital download offerings to grow your audition size.
Finally, track your metrics, including your traffic volume and sales, so you tin can double-down on the strategies and products that are most successful.

The ease that comes with setting upwards and selling your entire digital download site using an all-in-one platform is well worth information technology. Plus, without the extra transactional fees involved, it's more than profitable than using a marketplace.

By using the methods above, your digital download sales experience can be seamless for both you, the creator, and your customers. (Don't have an account nevertheless? Y'all tin can get started for complimentary today .)

Happy digital download selling.

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Source: https://www.podia.com/articles/sell-digital-downloads-from-your-website