If you want a legitimate but quick way to start a business and make money in this era, you wouldn’t go and sell physical products. It takes time to find a manufacturer and create your products. Selling digital products has become many aspiring entrepreneurs’ first choice when it comes to starting a business in this digital age.
Building your own online store to sell your digital products is often the best course of action for a long-term goal. However, sometimes it’s simply quicker, more convenient, and logical to sell your digital products on existing marketplaces.
Finding the right marketplace can make or break your business. Different marketplaces have different features, they attract different audiences, and they specialize in different fields, just like how people go onto different social media platforms for different reasons. Different transaction fees associated with different marketplaces can also heavily impact your sales and profits.
In this post, I’ll walk you through the 5 best digital product marketplaces, highlighting their unique features, fee structures, and ideal use cases so you know which platform is the best for your digital product business. Let’s get started!
Key Factors to Consider When Choosing a Marketplace
Finding the best marketplace for your digital product requires careful consideration. Below are some of the factors to evaluate before choosing a suitable marketplace for your business.
Fee structure
The fee is probably the most important factor you should consider when deciding on a marketplace to sell your digital product. Some marketplaces charge significant commission rates that may leave you with slim profits, so it’s especially important to consider the fees if you don’t expect many sales at first.
Audience alignment
Different marketplaces attract different audiences, and you need to find the one that gathers your ideal customers, as we discussed with social media. The platform may not necessarily be the best for you as a seller, but because it’s where your target customers typically visit when they look for your product, it becomes the key channel that you shouldn’t ignore.
Competition level
The downside of the popular marketplace is the high level of competition. There is a trade-off between competition and visibility when choosing a popular or a less well-known marketplace. You have to weigh the pros and cons and come up with strategies to overcome these challenges, such as using different marketing strategies to drive sales or improving the quality of your digital products to stand out.
Technical requirements
Some high-quality marketplaces have strict requirements for sellers. To be accepted, you’ll need to create excellent products and meet their standards. While getting approved might be challenging, these platforms offer significant opportunities for strong profits because their high standards limit the number of sellers, reducing competition.
5 Best Digital Product Marketplaces
1. Etsy – Best for Templates and Planners
Etsy might be known for handmade goods, but it has become the best and most popular marketplace for selling digital products like templates and planners. Whether it’s social marketing templates, business planners, printable budget planners, or workout templates, Etsy is the first place people go to when they need them. Given this marketplace’s large and engaged audience for templates and planners, your products have a higher chance of being discovered.
What works well:
- Great for printables, planners, templates, and digital art
- Millions of monthly visitors
- Excellent search functionality that helps buyers find your items
- Affordable fees
Drawbacks:
- A large audience means high competition
- Not ideal for software or highly technical digital products
Fees:
- 0.20 USD listing fee for each item listed (renewed every 4 months)
- 6.5% transaction fee for every sale, including the amount you charge for delivery and gift wrapping
- Etsy Plus subscription – 10 USD per month, which gives you 15 listing credits (3 USD) and 5 USD in Etsy Ads credits
Overall, Etsy is affordable and the best marketplace for selling templates and planners. Building your own online store just for selling templates and planners might be overkill, it makes more sense to leverage Etsy’s established platform and access its built-in customer base.
2. Creative Market – Best for Fonts and Graphics
Creative Market is an excellent platform for design-focused digital products. It stands out as a premium marketplace with quality standards that keep prices and profits higher than most platforms. Apart from just giving you a platform to sell, Creative Market also helps you in marketing your product by recommending and highlighting them through their email newsletter and other channels.
What works well:
- High-quality customer base willing to pay premium prices
- Excellent for designs like fonts, graphics, and website themes
- Curated marketplace that limits competition
- Free marketing and promotions through their email newsletter, blog posts, social media, and more
Drawbacks:
- Strict quality standards mean not all products are accepted
- Take 50% commission, which is higher than other marketplaces
- Niche focus limits your potential product categories
Pricing:
- No payment processing fees but take 50% of your sales (varies every shop/product)
- Basic – $9.95/month + 5% off all assets
- Growth – $19.95/month + 10% off all assets
- Freelancer – $29.95/month + 12% off all assets
- Pro – $49.95/month + 15% off all assets
- Studio – $95.95/month + 20% off all assets
Although the high commission makes it less appealing. On the bright side, Creative Market has high standards and is selective about who can sell on their platforms, which means it greatly reduces competition. Additionally, since this is a premium marketplace, you can price your products at higher price points, which means you can earn more from fewer sales compared to general marketplaces.
3. Udemy – Best Online Courses Marketplace
Udemy is an online learning platform that provides courses in almost every field that you can think of, from AI, coding, design, photography, and cooking to music. With over 250,000+ courses to choose from, it constantly attracts millions of visitors monthly, making it a powerful platform to reach a vast and diverse audience for your courses. However, the best thing about Udemy is that there is no fee associated with creating and hosting your courses.
What works well:
- Massive built-in audience of over 40 million learners worldwide
- Zero upfront costs to list your courses on Udemy
- Handles all technical aspects, including hosting and payment processing
- Powerful discovery algorithms that increase your course visibility
Drawbacks:
- High marketplace fee (Udemy takes 63% of sales through their marketplace)
- Intense competition in popular categories
- Restrictions on collecting student email addresses and contact information
- Limited customization of course appearance and branding
Fees:
- 3% transaction fee when sales are made through a coupon or referral link
- 63% transaction fee when sales are made through Udemy advertisement or Udemy marketplace
Personally, I believe that Udemy is an affordable and excellent marketplace to sell your online courses if you can’t be bothered to build a website yourself. Although a 63% revenue share on sales is high, you can substantially reduce this fee to as low as 3% by driving your own traffic to your course. Most other online course platforms require you to find your own students regardless, so making more sales through Udemy simply provides extra income.
4. Shopify App Store – For Apps
There are obviously other marketplace options for selling your app, such as the Google Play Store and the App Store. However, your niche may not be a good fit for those platforms, for example, if you are building an ecommerce platform-specific app, you have other options.
If you are a software developer who is creating ecommerce solutions apps, the Shopify App Store is one of the best marketplaces to sell your apps. This niche platform provides you the opportunity to generate recurring revenue through subscriptions.
What works well:
- High-intent audience of business owners willing to pay for a solution
- Recurring revenue potential through subscription apps
- Lower competition than general app stores
Drawbacks:
- Technical barrier to entry (requires development skills)
- Rigorous review process for new apps
Fees:
- 20% commission on all sales
- Redcude revenue shared plan – 15%(Registration fee of $19USD)
- 0% revenue share on the first $1,000,000 USD in annual gross app revenue earned (for those eligible)
Before starting to develop your app, you should go through the app requirements checklist to make sure that your app can meet the requirements otherwise, you will be forced to revise your app.
5. Amazon KDP – Best for Ebooks
Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is the most popular marketplace for selling ebooks. As Kindle became so popular and backed by the already trusted Amazon brand, it provides a simple path to publishing and selling your ebooks worldwide.
What works well:
- Access to millions of Kindle users worldwide
- Built-in trust factor that comes with the Amazon brand
- Free to publish with no upfront costs
- Kindle Unlimited subscription program offers additional revenue streams
- Professional tools for formatting, cover design, and marketing
- Print-on-demand options for physical book versions of your digital content
Drawbacks:
- Competitive royalty structure
- Limited formatting options compared to selling PDFs directly
- Exclusivity requirements for Kindle Unlimited enrollment
- Less control over customer relationships and email collection
Fees
- 70% Royalty Option – Pricing requirement of $2.99 – $9.99, 70% of your list price without VAT, minus delivery costs, for each eligible ebook sold in specific territories. This option also has other requirements, such as Amazon lowering your ebook’s price to match another eBook. For more information, visit the website.
- 35% Royalty Option – No restrictions on pricing and delivery costs
For beginners, Amazon KDP offers the easiest path to becoming a published author with minimal technical requirements. The built-in audience and discoverability tools mean your work can find readers even without an established platform or marketing budget.
Conclusion
Marketplaces are an excellent option if you don’t plan to build your own website for your digital product at the start of your business. While each platform has its strengths and weaknesses, the best choice ultimately depends on your specific products, technical capabilities, and business goals.
Testing different platforms is a smart way to discover the best marketplaces for your digital product, and I recommend diversifying across several to see which perform best, as most marketplaces cost nothing to list your digital products. Stop hesitating and start selling your digital products today!
