Where to sell digital products: marketplaces against your own store

We make Drry, which is one of the options in the last section, so we are not a neutral party. The comparison below is written to survive that: nothing here depends on a number we chose, the trade-offs against us are stated in the same voice as the ones for us, and where a competitor's exact fee matters we point you at their own pricing page rather than quoting a figure that may have moved since we last read it.

Almost every "where to sell digital products" list is a ranked pile of platforms with a feature grid attached. The grid is not the decision. There are really only two kinds of place to sell, they differ on one axis, and once you can see that axis the shortlist picks itself.

The only trade that matters

A marketplace brings you buyers. Somebody typed "budget spreadsheet template" into Etsy and your listing was there. You did not earn that visit and you did not pay for an ad to get it. That is a genuine service and it is worth real money, especially at the start when the alternative is selling to nobody.

It charges for that service twice. Once in a cut of every sale, for as long as you keep selling. And once, less visibly, by keeping the buyer: the person who bought from you is the marketplace's customer, not yours, so the second thing you make has to find them all over again.

Your own store is the exact inverse. It sends you nobody at all. You bring every visitor yourself, from a newsletter, a video, a post, a link in a bio. In exchange you keep far more of each sale and you get the buyer's email address, which means the second product is something you sell to people who already paid you once.

Option one: a marketplace

Etsy is the big one for digital downloads, and for most sellers it is the only large marketplace genuinely open to them. Check eligibility before you check fees: Amazon, eBay and the TikTok Shop each gate or restrict downloadable files rather than listing them freely. eBay's own policy states that only pre-approved sellers can use the digital or download item specifics at all. The specific fee schedules move often enough that any number printed in an article like this goes stale, so check the current listing, transaction and payment-processing lines on the marketplace's own fee page before you model a margin. What does not move is the shape: you pay per sale, forever, and the cut is taken from a price a marketplace shopper is willing to pay, which tends to be lower than what the same file sells for to your own audience.

Marketplaces are the right call when:

• You have no audience yet, and honestly assessing that is the whole exercise. A 100% margin on zero sales is zero.
• Your product is something people actively search for by name, like a planner, a Notion template, a Lightroom preset or a crochet pattern.
• You want to test whether a thing sells at all before building anything around it.

They are the wrong call when:

• You already have a list, a following or a client base. You would be paying a finder's fee on buyers you found yourself.
• The product is the start of a relationship rather than the end of one. A course, a membership or a coaching programme all need the follow-up email that a marketplace does not give you.
• You are building something you want to still own in three years. The rules, the fees and the search ranking are all somebody else's to change.

Option two: a creator storefront

The middle ground is a hosted storefront: you get a checkout and a file host without building a site, and you keep the buyer's email. Gumroad, Payhip, Whop and Stan Store all live here, and they differ mostly in how they charge. Some take a percentage of every sale with no monthly fee, which reads as free and costs more than a flat monthly plan once you are actually selling. Others charge monthly and take less or nothing per sale.

Work out your own crossover before picking. Divide the monthly cost of a flat plan by the percentage the fee-based option takes, and that is roughly the monthly revenue where the flat plan starts winning. If a flat plan is $29 and the alternative takes 10%, you are ahead on the flat plan from about $290 a month, and further ahead every month after that. We keep dated, sourced fee readings for several of these on our comparison pages, including where a platform's own documentation is ambiguous about whether card processing sits inside the headline percentage or on top of it.

Option three: sell from the thing you already run

If the digital product is one piece of a larger thing, a coaching practice, a course, a community, then a separate storefront is a second place to maintain and a second list to reconcile. Selling the file from the same place that holds the members means one audience, one login for the buyer and one set of numbers.

This is what Drry does, and it is the section where you should discount us accordingly. Digital products sit next to your courses and community rather than in a separate shop, the platform fee is 0% on every plan including the free one, and buyers pay into your own Stripe account. The honest limitation is the one at the top of this guide: like every own-store option, it sends you no traffic whatsoever. If you have no audience yet, start on a marketplace and come back.

The sequence most people should actually run

Framing this as a single choice is the mistake. The options are stages, and nothing stops you running two at once.

• Validate on a marketplace. List one product where the buyers already are. You are buying data about whether anyone wants it, and the cut is the price of that data.
• Capture what the marketplace will let you. Put something inside the file itself that gives the buyer a reason to come to you directly: a bonus, an update, a follow-up. This is the single highest-leverage thing most sellers skip.
• Open your own store once you have a list. Move the margin over, keep the marketplace listing running for discovery, and stop paying a finder's fee on people who already know your name.
• Sell the second thing to the first buyers. This is the point of the whole exercise. One product is a transaction; the list is the business.