Websites are an important way for businesses to market their products, services, and brands. To sell digital products on your website, you need hosting. For e-commerce features, you typically need a premium plan. However, not everyone has the time, resources, or money to create and maintain a website. However, we recommend several free e-commerce sites that provide free hosting. So, you can sell your digital products directly to customers without needing your own website.
It’s important to know how payments work when you sell digital stuff. There are many ways that you can receive payment for selling digital products, including through PayPal, Stripe, a bank account, and Payoneer. You don’t know how to connect your website to a payment platform. Users install free WordPress plugins and set up payments, but sometimes the payment process doesn’t work. This frustration leads users to switch to e-commerce platforms dedicated to selling digital products.
Similar to hosting, websites also require themes. These platforms offer free eCommerce themes with fully functional product and checkout pages, enabling secure online transactions. In this post, we list 11 free eCommerce platforms that you can use to sell digital products without hosting a website.
1- Gumroad Review
Gumroad was created in 2011. It’s a platform where you can sell your products. Signing up for Gumroad is free, and there are no monthly fees. You only pay 10% on each sale. If you aren’t selling anything, you don’t have to pay anything. The platform is simple to use, and it pays through PayPal.
Gumroad’s main goal is to help creators market and sell their products online. Gumroad tracks sales and sends you an email when you receive payment. It offers a variety of tools to sell your digital content, like e-books, T-shirt designs, music, and graphics. If you are an artist, writer, musician, or business owner, they have a solution for you. Moreover, you can create memberships and sell courses. Within one year of purchase, customers have the option to give products a rating of 1 to 5 stars and leave reviews. Ratings appear on product cards and individual pages.
You can connect Gumroad to Printful. So, Gumroad automatically sends your orders to Printful for shipping. Gumroad provides advanced capabilities, including the ability to set up products with license keys. Use the custom domain feature to get a branded web address instead of a free Gumroad subdomain.
Use the Gumroad page editor to construct a unique storefront and personalize your digital store. You can upload your work and customize sales pages according to your needs. You can also decide the price of your products. If your digital product costs more than $0.99, you can upload files up to 16 GB. However, if you price it at $0, you can upload files up to 250 MB. In addition to digital products, you can also sell physical goods on Gumroad.
2- Launchcart Review
Launch Cart is one of the best places to start selling digital products. The free account allows you to add up to 50 products and includes a free subdomain with an SSL certificate. Use Launch Cart’s templates to build and customize your website easily. It’s the most feature-packed eCommerce platform online. Launchcart also has a positive rating on Trustpilot and Capterra.
Utilize Launch Cart’s customer management to easily find and handle all customer information and purchases. For every sale, payments go directly into your PayPal and Payoneer bank accounts. Additionally, make your own tax rules to collect taxes as needed and stay legal with Launch Cart. Launchcart provides four types of selling features.
- Digital Files: If you have digital files such as artwork, zip files, and other rich media files, you can easily upload them to Launchcart and sell them. It’s simple, fast, and secure.
- Physical Goods: Whether you’re selling jewelry, electronics, books, or any other physical product, you can create a storefront on LaunchCart to sell your items.
- Print-on-Demand: Launchcart is a platform that connects individuals, communities, and brands to create and sell custom t-shirts and other print-on-demand products. It offers over 300+ ready-to-sell products and allows artists to design and sell their own merchandise. If you don’t have any pod designs, you can look for them on the Launchcart design marketplace.
- Dropshipping: With Launch Cart dropshipping, you sell products, and orders go to fulfillment companies like Printful for direct shipping to customers.
Boost Sales
Boost sales using the built-in marketing features in Launch Cart. Increase store sales with coupon codes, abandoned cart recovery emails, and thank-you page upsells. Additionally, sell products during live video streams, providing a special link to purchase and including a countdown timer for urgency. Generate promotional bars to display on your Launch Cart online store. Keep customers informed with back-in-stock notifications, and customize the checkout process with the checkout page editor.
3- Payhip Review
Payhip launched in early 2011 with the goal of making it easier for the average person to sell digital products online. You can also sell memberships, online courses, ebooks, and physical products with Payhip. Also, sell your digital files for one-time or recurring payments. Moreover, Payhip’s online store builder features a blogging platform and supports multiple languages for your store. You can receive payments through Paypal and Stripe.
On Payhip, you can sell your skills by offering coaching sessions as a freelancer. They provide a platform and a powerful sales tool that enable you to embed products on your existing website. It integrates beautifully with your WordPress website, making it easy to build and launch with just a few clicks.
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It enables users to create their own affiliate programs. You can create promotional coupons, limit their use, and set an expiration date. Easily connect your Payhip store to AWeber, GetResponse, MailChimp, and other email services for marketing.
Payhip Free Plan
Payhip offers all the premium features in the free plan and allows users to upload unlimited products. The only restriction on the free plan is a 5% transaction fee. The Pro plan has no transaction fee.
4- Podia Review
Podia is an online platform that makes it easy for you to create and manage your own digital store. It’s a great choice for anyone with a passion for selling and coaching through blogging. Beginners can sell their own products without the hassle of managing e-commerce platforms like Woocommerce, Shopify, or Prestashop.
Podia is an all-in-one website builder. You can easily create a professional website, build courses, host memberships, and sell digital products. Additionally, you can manage your webinars through Podia, allowing your audience to pay and register directly on your Podia site.
The templates that it offers will help you customize your online store, set prices, and select a pre-made checkout page to start selling. Podia provides hosting with unlimited bandwidth. It is a startup that aims to make it easier than ever for freelance professionals, artists, musicians, and other creators to sell their products and services online.
Free Podia Plan
The free plan isn’t ideal for startups due to its limited options and 10% transaction fees. Premium plans offer lower fees for online sales. There are no transaction fees for the Shaker plan. Course certificates and third-party code, such as embedding videos from YouTube, are available in the premium plan. Embedded checkout and affiliate marketing features are only accessible on the Shaker plan.
5- Sendowl Review
Sendowl is the premium e-commerce platform for developers, product managers, and entrepreneurs. Their interface is easy to use, and they have a fast way of creating a digital product and selling it online. You don’t need a website to create a store. Regardless of whether you receive 10 orders or 100,000 orders, Sendowl handles your store hosting.
The user can create their own shop landing page, and then they can add different products to it. Sendowl also enables you to accept payments from various sources, including credit cards and PayPal. SendOwl features include a modern, responsive checkout that works on any device, on-site checkout, and payment links.
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Users can add products to their own website using Sendowl’s embeddable code. Sendowl allows you to create custom codes and license keys for your software. Additionally, you can create time-restricted download links and set download limits. Whether you want to sell a digital product, physical items, memberships, subscriptions, or drip content, Sendowl is a great option.
Sendowl Free Plan
Sendowl isn’t entirely free; however, it does offer a 7-day free trial, and all plans offer $1/month fees for the first 2 months. With a 5% fee per sale, Sendowl provides a starter plan that includes unlimited usage, templates, and almost all premium features. The growth plan is one of its most popular packages, which charges a $0.47 fee per sale. If you can’t afford SendOwl and are looking for alternatives, I recommend using Payhip. With a 5% per-sale fee, Payhip offers 100% free access to all premium features.
6- Thinkific Review
Thinkific is a platform that offers an all-in-one platform for creating, selling, and delivering online courses. The tools are easy to use and affordable, especially for teachers at all levels. It’s a good option for creating your own self-study courses.
The course creator can create a custom theme for the course and customize the colors, font, and images. The platform is highly customizable, so you can make it your own. They also offer a variety of ways to engage with their content, including live webinars and e-mail newsletters. Make quizzes, assignments, exams, and certificates easy to check and reward students’ progress. Additionally, there’s a white-labeled mobile app available for accessing courses.
Thinkific offers customers the choice to pay for your product in different ways, like a one-time fee, payment plan, or subscription. Plus, attract students by offering free trials. Thinkific eliminates the need to buy hosting. They ensure 99.6% uptime and provide 24/7 monitoring to keep your site running smoothly.
Thinkific Free Plan
You can sign up for a free account and enroll as many students as you want, all for free. There are some limitations on the free plan, but you will still be able to create courses and share them with your students.
7- Fetchapp Review
FetchApp enables users to sell products directly to customers without the need to set up their own eCommerce website. You can sell digital items like eBooks, music, videos, themes, plugins, games, and apps, all delivered digitally.
Users can also create bundles, such as linking a single file to multiple products. FetchApp automatically generates download links and promptly sends them via email. You can see all the details about each order in the FetchApp dashboard.
Fetchapp has partnered with Paypal for payment processing, allowing for simple and secure transactions. It also has a responsive user interface, which makes it really easy to use. You can quickly import products from Shopify and use the FetchApp API to add custom features. Upload files up to 5 GB each and allow previous buyers to download updates. Amazon S3 securely stores your files, while reliable MySQL databases store your data.
FetchApp Free Plan
FetchApp has a free plan that comes with 5 MB of storage and 25 orders per day. The best part is their budget-friendly pricing, starting at just $10 per month with unlimited bandwidth.
8- Ko-fi Review
Ko-fi is a social fundraising platform that enables creators such as musicians, bloggers, and artists to receive donations. Each donation is called a “ko-fi.” Creators on Ko-fi can sell digital goods for a one-time payment. Create a consistent monthly income by allowing supporters to join as exclusive members at various pricing levels. This benefits both creators and customers. It’s easy to open a shop and add products to your shop page, with no listing fees or website setup required. You receive payments in your PayPal account.
Ko-fi Gold vs. Free Plan
Ko-fi doesn’t charge any platform fees for donations, but if you open a shop on the Ko-fi free plan, you’ll need to pay a 5% platform fee for each transaction. Only Gold members can receive payments without any platform fees, but the Ko-fi Gold plan costs $6 per month. Users get extra features with Ko-fi Gold, like a gold badge, setting donation prices, changing the ‘coffee’ idea, a shorter username, and adding analytics.
9- BuyMeaCoffee Review
BuyMeaCoffee started in 2003 and connects donors with artists, influencers, and writers. BuyMeaCoffee is a site similar to Ko-fi. In addition to accepting donations, it allows users to sell digital products online and create membership sites. After signing up, users can upload any type of digital file to the site and set their own price.
BuyMeACoffee is a good way to raise money for projects like recording an album or publishing a book. BuyMeACoffee provides embed code for adding a responsive BuyMeACoffee button to your site. Send unlimited emails to your fans for free, directly from the BuyMeaCoffee dashboard.
Users can quickly receive payouts through Payoneer, bank transfers, and Wise. The only drawback to BuyMeCoffee is that users cannot withdraw funds from their PayPal accounts. It allows people to pay for products using their credit cards, debit cards, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. Buymeacoffee doesn’t have monthly fees, but it charges a 5% transaction fee for each sale.
10- Templatemonster Seller Account
TemplateMonster is a digital marketplace for web designers and developers. The marketplace includes over 100,000 templates, themes, plugins, and graphics items. On TemplateMonster, you can find a wide range of templates for Joomla, WordPress, Shopify, PrestaShop, and other popular CMS platforms.
TemplateMonster attracts large audiences, making it easier for web developers to showcase their themes. It allows web developers to sell their products exclusively and set the price for their products. If you’re looking to stand out and grow your business, you may want to consider adding your products to a TemplateMonster partner’s MonsterONE subscription.
Free Author Account on TemplateMonster
In order to sell a product on the TemplateMonster marketplace, you need to create a free author account. When you log in, you’ll be able to add new products and edit the existing ones. You can sell exclusive themes with a 65% commission and non-exclusive themes with a 40% commission. To ensure high quality, TemplateMonster manually reviews all products before publishing them on their marketplace.
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11- Envato Seller Account
Envato is a leading marketplace for buying and selling digital assets. Whether you’re looking for a website theme, WordPress plugin, or code script, you’ll find it at Envato Market. You can create as many products as you want and sell them on the Envato site. Envato provides a free seller account for everyone, so you can start selling your products and earn up to a 55% commission.
Conclusion
As digital products continue to grow in popularity, many people are looking for a platform to sell their digital products without having to create a website. With these 11 platforms, you can start your own business today by selling digital products without needing a website. We hope that these platforms were able to help you in some way, and please comment if you need any more information. Thank you for reading.
Author: Asif
Asif is a freelance writer who shares his knowledge and experience on how to build and run a successful online business. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, you will find valuable tips and resources on his blog » NewOfferSee Digital Time »
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