Following on from last week’s look at ways to sell your stuff from your own site, this week we’re looking at external solutions you can use.
With almost all of these, although they take away many of the tech headaches you will still have to market and drive traffic to your store or page on these sites and platforms.
The upside?
You won’t be responsible for ensuring that your site is up, running smoothly and secure. If you hate tech and can’t even begin to imagine setting up your own store then one or more of these suggestions could be ideal.
The downside is that you don’t own your own online real estate in this instance and any of these solutions could go down or out of business at any time, taking your store with them.
Unlikely but it does happen.
The suggestions I am offering you here are all well-established and reputable solutions which makes that even more unlikely but you may do what I like to do and spread the risk by having both solutions, i.e. your own store and one hosted somewhere else.
Hopefully, this should help you decide what’s best for you.
Let’s start with one of the best known solutions which is Gumroad, originally started to serve artists, authors and writers but a good solution for anyone wanting a simple to set up, solid platform for both digital and physical goods.
It costs nothing to set up a basic account and they take a percentage of each sale in return. What it doesn’t have are more advanced features like upsells and order bumps.
Check it out here:
Then there is Sendowl, which you can try out for nada for 30 days without having to register a card.
Sendowl focuses heavily on conversions and has an optimised checkout process designed to facilitate that.
It’s primarily for digital goods although you can sell tangible ones. Bear in mind you will need a separate site builder to actually set up your store.
Sendowl also allows upsells and is well worth a look. See it here:
FetchApp started as a Shopify extension to sell digital goods and is a very simple solution. There are no cost plans available and no contracts although, again, it may be too basic for some:
Selz is more feature-rich and a good all round solution with 24/7 support, robust analytics and SEO as well as its own page builder.
They also offer a no cost plan and take a percentage of sales. See if it’s for you here:
E-junkie was the very first platform I ever used to sell digital goods and has evolved a lot since although, again, you may find it a bit basic.
On the plus side, it has good security features and offers a 15-day trial.
Check out e-junkie here:
Sellfy is more powerful than e-junkie and simple to use, especially when setting up your store. They offer a 14-day trial and are here:
Digital Product Delivery is another simple but robust solution that offers a 30 day no cost trial.
You can customise your cart, checkout, delivery pages and emails and DPD offers unlimited bandwidth and sales if you decide to take out one of their subscription plans.
Check it out here:
As for the well known Teachable and Thinkific, although both are great they are far better suited to hosting courses than digital downloads and products. I’ll be taking a closer look at those and other course solutions in upcoming newsletters.
It’s International Women’s Day and your TED talk this week features the fabulous Luvvie Ajayi on how to get comfortable with being uncomfortable – an essential life and success skill:
