16 solutions for designers to sell digital goods

Posted on by Elio Rivero

Many designers keep designing between each freelance work just for the sake of it. Sometimes great stuff comes from the design we create during these gaps and not few of them end up getting their bytes covered with dust. Instead of loosing forever that precious time why don’t we sell them online? We will review a series of sites that allow you to deliver your digital goods on your own site along with hosted solutions that allows you to market the itehostingms on your site while leaving the payment process to a third party.

Payloadz

https://www.payloadz.com/

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This service is remotely hosted and offers a free account with 1Gb and a transaction limit of $50.

E-Junkie

http://www.e-junkie.com/

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E-junkie could be one of the most popular platforms, since it has no limits on transactions or bandwidth and no transaction fee. At only $5 per month it is an affordable solution yet a feature packed one.

Zen Cart

http://www.zen-cart.com/

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Zen Cart is an well known free open source self hosted solution to manage your online store that offers downloading of digital goods right out of the box.

DigiVendor

http://www.idevspot.com/DigiVendor.php

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DigiVendor is a solution to be used with PayPal, as it generates custom purchasing buttons from PayPal using its IPN feature. There’s a one time fee but you can install it on multiple domains.

byteCommerce

http://www.bytecommerce.com/

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byteCommerce is offered in both hosted and self hosted version. The fee for the hosted solution is quite interesting:

for every 20 copies of your product that is sold, the 20th order is directed to us as payment for our services. That’s our commission.

Plimus

http://www.plimus.com/

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A hosted solution that provides a variety of strategies against copy protection, such as Armadillo and Plimloc integration as well as serial numbers from a list provided by seller or a url to a randomly generated serial, also provided by user.

Zipidee

http://www.zipidee.com/

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Born as an alternative to eBay and sites alike, Zipidee is more like a marketplace where you can upload your items for sale.

DigitalGoodsDelivery

http://www.digitalgoodsdelivery.com/

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This system works pretty much like DigiVendor in the sense that it also uses the IPN from PayPal to generate purchasing buttons. Unlike DigiVendor, you can also sell tangible goods but the system will only provide the payment gateway.

Early Impact

http://www.earlyimpact.com/

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This hosted solution does not focus solely on digital downloads but offers a variety of add-ons to further expand your store, such as a module to publish on eBay, recurring billing or e-mail marketing.

Cerizmo

http://cerizmo.com/

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Cerizmo focuses on selling digital goods offering a secure hosting for your files and a fully customizable white label front-end. You can use your own domain or a Cerizmo subdomain. The most basic plan offers $300 limit, 2Gb disk space and unlimited products and bandwidth.

Digital Content Center

http://www.digitalcontentcenter.com/

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Another hosted solution featuring things such as a player for the user to preview audio files before buying or a digital fingerprints for PDF files to stamp the name and data of the purchaser on every page of the PDF.

WordPress eStore plugin

eStore by Ruhul Amin

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The eStore plugin makes it possible to create a complete store solution directly within WordPress. It can be integrated with NextGen Gallery which is a definitely plus and it works with PayPal. This plugin is not free but they are offering the next product as free software.

WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart plugin

Simple PayPal Shopping Cart by Ruhul Amin

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Unlike the previous plugin, this one is provided free of charge although it has more limitations. Despite that, it can also be integrated with NextGen Gallery. It also works with PayPal.

WP Secure Downloads

http://tomuse.com/wordpress/wp-secure-downloads/

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Another paid plugin for WP offering the PayPal payment gateway. For a small amount (separated from the plugin price), you can acquire a pack with an installation plus two support incidents.

WordPress e-Commerce Plugin

http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/

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No list would be complete without the mention of this free plugin for WordPress. It boasts an incredible amount of cool features that you can get separately for a moderate price, such as a drag and drop cart, a product slider, FedEx shipping integration, audio player and the capability of integrating it with NextGen Gallery.

Digital Goods Delivery through PayPal

If you’re only using a PayPal account you can use any of the partners listed by PayPal.

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UpClick has refocused its activities and mission to provide outstanding value for a few select online merchants.

Published by Elio Rivero

Software engineer, designer and photographer.

32 thoughts on “16 solutions for designers to sell digital goods”

  10. Thanks everyone for the input.
    Vunky, dbox looks really sleek and simple. It would be really cool if they provided a WordPress plugin as well as the current Joomla plugin.
    Aaron, I agree. I’m familiat with Ubercart and it is one of the best solutions out there. However, I didn’t included some of the more well known solutions such as Ubercart or Magento, as Jess said, because this round up focused more on small solutions for existing sites. I have
    mentioned Ubercart before in this post related specifically to e-commerce CMS.

  11. Hi All,

    Check out GETONIC – New marketplace for digital goods. Each creator can make his own shop and upload as many creations as he wants. The shop can be placed in your facebook page, your blog, send by email and much more!
    The Buyers can get your work with a single text message from their cell phones – it is that easy!
    Email me directly if you have more questions.
    Omri

  13. […] 16 tools for designers selling digital goods | WordPress | ilovecolors Many designers keep designing between each freelance work just for the sake of it. Sometimes great stuff comes from the design we create during these gaps and not few of them end up getting their bytes covered with dust. Instead of loosing forever that precious time why don’t we sell them online? We will review a series of sites that allow you to deliver your digital goods on your own site along with hosted solutions that allows you to market the items on your site while leaving the payment process to a third party. […]

  15. You are probably tired of listening this but your blog is amazing. I have much to learn. This is my contribution to your post: checkout ecwid.com It’s amazing, it’s free, it’s social commerce, it’s in the cloud. CHeck it out

  17. These are, of course, nice options that don’t need great webdesign knowledges. But what about selling on your own website? Using Joomla and Virtuemart (both free) you can also make some profits selling your digital goods in auto-pilot. Congratulations for your blog!

  20. For those looking to use the PayPal digital goods product on their own site, I recently ran across http://firesage.com/digitalgoods.php. I only wish I had found it before the wasted hours I spent rummaging through the Paypal docs and site.

    They also have a class to provide an encoded download link that can expire after x number of days.

  21. That’s a very nice resource Kristofer, thanks. The fact that the user doesn’t have to leave the site, since the PayPal view is open in an inline dialog, makes it specially interesting.

  22. Interesting indeed. I like the look of that Firesage. It’s 11.99 USD, But I’d say it’s either that or DigiVendor which are the best if you want to sell downloads on your wordpress site. Cheers.

  24. Another alternative is Digital Product Cart, digitalproductcart.com. Free set-up, very user-friendly, simple interface. Also has a very competitive pricing structure with no monthly fees.

  27. Payloadz isn’t free. Yes, a 7 day trial is. And DigiVendor offers multiple website support only for a monthly fee. I have not checked all yet. I want a one-price multiple website solution. That seems still hard to get.

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