Sell Digital Products Online

You can sell digital products online through three distinct routes: hosted marketplaces that handle everything for you, hosted storefronts that give you a branded shop on someone else’s platform, and self-hosted WordPress stores where you own the entire experience. Each approach has a different cost structure, a different level of control, and a different long-term outcome for your business.

The hosted platforms that dominate Google’s first page, like Gumroad, Payhip, and Sellfy, make starting easy. You upload a file, set a price, and they take care of checkout and delivery. But they also take a cut of every sale you make, sometimes as high as 10% to 30%. Over a year of steady sales, those percentages add up to thousands of dollars you’ll never see again.

What most comparison articles don’t mention is the third option: selling digital products directly from your own WordPress site with a plugin like DigiCommerce. You pay a flat annual fee, keep 100% of your revenue (minus standard Stripe or PayPal processing), and own every piece of customer data. This page breaks down all three approaches with real numbers so you can pick the one that actually fits your business.

Every digital product seller faces the same choice, even if most don’t realize there’s a third option on the table. The first route is a hosted marketplace. Services like Gumroad and Etsy give you a storefront inside their ecosystem. Buyers browse the marketplace, discover your products, and purchase through the platform’s checkout. You don’t need a website, and setup takes minutes. The trade-off is that you’re renting space on someone else’s property, and the platform controls the rules, the fees, and the relationship with your customers.

The second route is a hosted storefront. Platforms like Payhip, Sellfy, and Podia let you create a standalone store on their servers. You get your own branded page (sometimes with a custom domain), and buyers go directly to your store rather than browsing a marketplace. This gives you more control over branding and pricing, but you’re still paying monthly fees and per-sale commissions. If the platform changes its pricing or shuts down a feature you depend on, you have to adapt or migrate.

The third route is a self-hosted WordPress store. You install WordPress on your own hosting, add an ecommerce plugin like DigiCommerce, and sell products from a site you fully control. There’s no marketplace and no middleman. Your customers land on your domain, buy through your checkout, and their payment goes straight to your Stripe or PayPal account. You pay a flat annual fee for the plugin and zero commission on sales. The setup takes more work upfront than signing up for Gumroad, but the long-term economics are dramatically different.

Most “best platforms to sell digital products” articles only cover the first two categories. They compare Gumroad against Payhip against Sellfy against Podia, but they skip the self-hosted option entirely. That’s a problem if you’re trying to make an informed decision, because the cost difference between a hosted platform and a self-hosted WordPress store compounds significantly over time.

The sticker price of a hosted platform is almost never the full cost. Gumroad charges 10% plus $0.50 on every direct sale, and it takes 30% on purchases made through its built-in marketplace. There’s no monthly fee, which sounds appealing until you realize that 10% of $50,000 in annual revenue is $5,000, and that number grows every year as your sales grow. The platform earns more when you earn more, permanently.

Payhip uses a tiered model. The free plan charges 5% on every sale. The Plus plan costs $29 per month and drops the commission to 2%. The Pro plan costs $99 per month and removes the commission entirely. All plans also pass through Stripe or PayPal processing fees (around 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction), which every platform charges regardless. On the Pro plan, you’re spending $1,188 per year before you sell a single product.

Sellfy starts at $29 per month for its Starter plan and goes up to $159 per month for the Business tier. Podia charges $39 per month on its Mover plan, with a 5% transaction fee on the free plan. Teachable starts at $39 per month. SamCart charges $79 per month for its basic plan. These monthly fees apply whether you sell one product or a thousand, and they stack on top of payment processing costs.

Here’s what those fees look like at different revenue levels over a full year. For someone doing $25,000 in annual digital product sales, Gumroad’s 10% commission costs $2,500. Payhip’s free-tier 5% costs $1,250. Sellfy’s $29 per month plan costs $348 in subscription fees alone. A self-hosted WordPress site with DigiCommerce costs $129 per year for the plugin, plus your hosting (roughly $50 to $150 per year for quality WordPress hosting). That’s $179 to $279 total, with zero commission on any sale.

At $100,000 in annual revenue, the gap widens. Gumroad takes $10,000. Payhip’s free plan takes $5,000. Even Payhip’s Pro plan at $99 per month still costs $1,188 in subscription fees. DigiCommerce still costs $129. The math isn’t subtle: once your revenue grows past a few thousand dollars, the self-hosted approach saves you real money every single month. For a deeper breakdown of WordPress-specific plugin pricing, see our plugin pricing comparison.

Commission-free sales are the most obvious reason, but they’re not the only one. When you sell from your own WordPress site, you own the entire customer relationship. Every email address, every purchase record, every interaction lives in your database, not on a third party’s servers. If you decide to switch email providers, change your checkout flow, or run a custom promotion, you don’t need to check whether the platform supports it. You just do it.

Search engine visibility is another advantage that hosted platforms can’t match. When someone buys from your Gumroad store, the page that ranks on Google is gumroad.com, not your brand. With WordPress, every product page, blog post, and landing page builds authority for your own domain. Over time, that organic traffic becomes a free acquisition channel that compounds, which is something no hosted platform can offer because you’re always building their domain authority instead of yours.

Customization goes much deeper on WordPress than on any hosted platform. With DigiBlocks, you can design product pages, sales pages, and checkout flows that match your brand exactly. You’re not limited to a template gallery or a drag-and-drop editor with fixed layouts. If you want a custom upsell flow, a members-only resource library, or a unique pricing page, you can build it. On Gumroad or Payhip, you work within whatever design options they provide.

Data portability matters more than most sellers realize when they’re starting out. If Gumroad changes its fee structure (it has before, raising rates from a flat 5% to 10% in 2023), you have to either accept the increase or migrate your entire catalog and customer list to a new platform. With WordPress, your products, your content, and your customer data live on servers you control. Switching hosting providers or even changing your ecommerce plugin doesn’t mean rebuilding from scratch.

The honest trade-off is setup effort. Signing up for Gumroad takes five minutes. Setting up a WordPress site with hosting, a theme like DigiFlash, and DigiCommerce takes a few hours. But that’s a one-time investment, and the ongoing savings in fees, the SEO benefits, and the full ownership of your business make those few hours worth it many times over.

The process has gotten much simpler than it was even two years ago. You don’t need to be a developer, and you don’t need to touch any code. Start by choosing a WordPress host. Providers like Cloudways, SiteGround, and Hostinger offer one-click WordPress installation, and decent plans run between $5 and $15 per month. Pick a host with good uptime, solid support, and servers located near your primary audience.

Once WordPress is installed, you need a theme. DigiFlash is a block theme built for speed, with perfect Lighthouse scores out of the box and over 60 block patterns you can customize. It works natively with the WordPress Full Site Editor, so you can adjust layouts, colors, and typography without writing CSS. If you prefer a classic approach, DigiFusion works with traditional page builders.

For selling digital products, install DigiCommerce. It handles product listings, checkout, payment processing (through Stripe and PayPal), digital file delivery, license key generation, and customer management. You create a product, upload the files your buyers will download, set a price, and the plugin handles everything from the “Buy Now” button to the delivery email. There’s also built-in support for subscriptions, discount codes, and an affiliate program if you want others to promote your products. Our complete WordPress selling guide walks through every step in detail.

Product pages on WordPress give you complete freedom. With DigiBlocks, you can build detailed product pages with custom headings, images, feature lists, testimonials, and comparison sections, all inside the native Gutenberg editor. Unlike the constrained product page templates on hosted platforms, you decide exactly what your visitors see and in what order.

Privacy compliance is built in as well. If you’re selling to customers in the EU, California, or Brazil, DigiConsent handles cookie consent banners for GDPR, CCPA, and LGPD without requiring a separate subscription to a consent management service. On hosted platforms, you’re typically responsible for adding your own cookie consent solution, which often means paying yet another monthly fee.

The short answer is anything that can be delivered as a file or accessed through a login. Ebooks and PDF guides are the most common starting point. You upload the file, set the price, and DigiCommerce delivers it automatically after purchase. There’s no file size limit imposed by the plugin, and buyers get secure, time-limited download links rather than a static URL that could be shared.

Online courses work well on WordPress too. DigiCommerce supports drip content delivery and membership access, so you can sell a course as a one-time purchase or a subscription. Compared to dedicated course platforms like Teachable ($39 per month minimum) or Podia ($39 per month), running courses on your own WordPress site with DigiCommerce costs a fraction of the price and gives you full control over the student experience.

Software and code are another strong category. DigiCommerce includes license key generation and management, so you can sell WordPress plugins, desktop apps, or code libraries with automatic license activation and renewal. This is one area where most hosted platforms fall short because Gumroad and Payhip offer basic file delivery but not license infrastructure.

Templates and design assets, including Canva templates, Figma files, stock photos, fonts, Lightroom presets, and audio files, are all straightforward to sell through WordPress. The same checkout and delivery system that handles ebooks handles any downloadable file. And because you control the product page design, you can showcase visual products with high-quality previews, galleries, and before-and-after comparisons that hosted platform templates don’t support as well.

Subscriptions and memberships round out the options. You can sell access to a resource library, a monthly template pack, or a premium community. DigiCommerce processes recurring payments through Stripe, sends renewal reminders, and automatically revokes access when a subscription lapses. This is the same functionality that platforms like MemberPress ($179 per year) or Restrict Content Pro charge separately for.

Hosted platforms made sense when WordPress ecommerce was complicated and expensive. That hasn’t been true for years. Today, you can have a professional digital product store running on your own domain in an afternoon, with zero commission on every sale, full ownership of your customer data, and product pages that rank on Google under your brand.

If you’re just testing an idea and want to upload a single file without thinking about hosting, a free Gumroad or Payhip account is a reasonable place to start. But the moment your digital products bring in consistent revenue, those per-sale percentages become an expensive subscription to someone else’s platform.

DigiCommerce and the full DigiBundle (DigiFlash, DigiBlocks, DigiConsent, and DigiFusion included) start at $129 per year for a single site. That’s less than two months of Payhip Pro, less than what Gumroad takes from $1,300 in sales, and less than one month of Teachable. The rest of your revenue stays where it belongs: in your account.