Look back just a few years ago and your options for selling digital products online were severely limited. Just a few big players dominated the space with outdated platforms, ugly UI and lack of competition. However, there’s been a recent spurt of innovation in the space, dramatically increasing your options for selling digital products online. Let’s take a look:
1. Stripe
Pricing: 2.9% + $0.30
A personal favorite, Stripe is the PayPal of the future. Stripe describes itself as the web and mobile payments for developers, but functions as much more than that would imply. Functioning as a payment processor, merchant account and with a comprehensive API and hosted checkout form Stripe has matured into a full-service payment solution.
The fast moving startup has built out a number of features to help integrate the service, with support for marketplaces, sending transfers to debit cards, massive international currency support (139 and growing) and a hosted checkout form named simply check out:
2. Gumroad
Pricing: 5% + $0.25
You’ll have no doubt come across a product being sold on Gumroad recently, the payments startup has seen huge growth and over $8 million in investments including a stake from PayPal co-founder Max Levchin. Whilst Gumroad charges slightly higher costs per transaction, the value is derived from their hosted checkout form. Exquisitely designed, Gum promises to increase conversion rates, handle billing, social promotion, and digital delivery. A perfect option for those who want a total hands off approach to selling online.
Gumroad is expanding it’s feature set rapidly and already includes support for subscription/recurring billing, name your price, pre-orders, license keys and sales analytics! See this video for the customer user experience:
3. Selz
Pricing: 5% + $0.25
Selz is similar to Gumroad as a hosted checkout taking care of all the hard stuff, but with a different USP. Selz can be embedded anywhere, from Pinterest to Facebook to Twitter allowing you to sell directly through your social network.
Selz gives you the option of a store page on their site or the ability to embed in any web page, made easy with their WordPress Plugin. Other features include PayPal payments, PDF stamping, physical delivery options, email list integrations, upsell receipts, commenting and much more.
4. Chec
Pricing: 3.5% +
Competing on price, Chec is a cheaper alternative to other hosted checkouts. Again all that’s needed is a link or embed code to get their checkout on your site or social platform. Lighter on the feature front, Chec is still building social features and more, but it does provide comprehensive delivery options for both digital and physical products.
My favorite aspect of Chec though is definitely their checkout form, a skeuomorphic credit card representation changes to match your card type when you start inputting your details.
5. Others of note include:
