How to sell digital downloads

The three routes, honestly compared

Almost every way of selling a digital download falls into one of three buckets.

A marketplace (Etsy, Creative Market, Gumroad's discover feed) brings its own visitors. That is the whole value proposition, and it is a real one — but you pay for it with commission you don't set, competitors on the same page, and rules that can change without you.

Your own store (Shopify, WooCommerce, a Squarespace shop) gives you total control over presentation and pricing. It also costs a monthly fee whether or not you sell anything, and it needs traffic you have to supply yourself. A store does not make you findable; it just gives found people somewhere to land.

A payment link sits between the two. Nothing to build, no monthly cost, no marketplace cut — but it brings no audience of its own either. You paste it where your audience already is: a DM, a bio, a story, a Discord, a newsletter.

Which one fits you

The deciding question isn't which is cheapest. It's where your buyers already are.

If people find your product by searching a marketplace, a marketplace is where you should be. If you're driving people to a catalogue of dozens of products and want them browsing, build the store. If you already have attention — followers, a mailing list, a community — and you just need a way to charge for one file, a link is the shortest path between those two things, and the other two options are overhead you'd be paying for a job you're already doing yourself.

What it actually costs

Compare total cost at your real volume, not headline percentages. A €19/month store with "0% commission" costs you €228 a year before a single sale. At €150/month in revenue, a 15% cut costs €270 a year — close. At €40/month in revenue it costs €72, and the subscription is more than three times as expensive. Below roughly €125/month, per-sale pricing wins; above it, and if you're selling consistently every month, a subscription starts to make sense.

Also look past the percentage at what's included: which payment methods your buyers actually use, whether files are protected after download, how fast money reaches your bank, and whether there's a payout minimum. A cheaper rate that can't take your buyer's preferred payment method costs you 100% of that sale.

Getting your first sale out today

Pick one file that solves one specific problem. Price it. Create a link. Put that link in front of the people who already follow you, with a sentence explaining what it does for them. That's the whole thing — see selling digital files without a platform for the detail, or how to create a payment link for the mechanics.

Tax: the part people skip

Selling digital goods to consumers usually means VAT or sales tax obligations, and where the buyer lives can matter as much as where you do. In the EU, digital services to consumers are generally taxed in the buyer's country. Thresholds and schemes differ per country and change, so treat your national tax authority — or an accountant — as the source of truth, not a platform's help page.