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Pros and Cons of Selling Digital Products on Shopify
Digital products like eBooks and music offer low overhead, high profit margins, and instant delivery, making them an ideal eCommerce choice. While there are challenges like competition and piracy, these products are easy to sell and tap into the growing e-learning market. Learn how to optimize your digital product strategy for success.
Digital products are the latest trending items on ecommerce websites. Digital products are intangible items i.e. cannot be touched or felt but can be consumed. Examples of digital products are music, videos, eBooks etc... Digital products are usually in the form of downloadable or streamable files, such as MP3s, PDFs, videos, plug-ins, and templates.
Advantages of selling digital products
- No shipping costs- There is no shipping cost involved as there is no inventory of digital products. As soon as a customer buys a digital product, they can download the product in a streamable file format, thereby saving on these overhead costs.
- High profit margins- High profit is the ultimate goal of all entrepreneurs. Digital products have no labor costs, material costs, packaging charges etc. involved. So, because of no or very low costs of goods sold, there is a very high profit margin on these products.
- Create once/Sell often- Once it’s created, you can resell it again and again without having to buy and stock new inventory
- Instant delivery- Orders are automated and are instantly delivered to the customer as soon as they place the order
- Easy to sell- Digital products are flexible to sell. You can offer a free downloadable book to build your email list or offer a paid subscription. There are various formats to sell digital products.
- Tap into the future- E-learning has become increasingly popular, and necessary, in 2020 and it’s only going to increase. Forbes estimates that the industry will be worth $331 billion by 2025.
Disadvantages of selling digital products
- Competition- Sometimes digital products have to compete with the content available freely online. So, it is important to choose your niche properly before selling digital products and then accordingly build your brand and business strategy to compete with the free content products.
- Susceptible to piracy- Internet piracy is a big issue now and digital products are easy prey for piracy. So, it is important to take proper precautions to avoid theft of your digital products.
Lucent Innovation is a full-service Shopify web design and development company. We build ecommerce websites that are ready to sell, scale, and grow.
Contact us for your next project:
844-582-3681
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