Want to cut right to the case? The best eCommerce platforms for digital downloads right now are BigCommerce and Nexcess.
Digital downloads are one of the most profitable products to sell online. According to Statista, digital buyers are expected to hit 2.14 billion in 2021. 47% of digital products are purchased online. Examples of digital downloads are online courses, eBooks, music, podcast, digital arts, and digitalized services.
Digitalizing every facet of human endeavors has made the digital downloads market a very lucrative one with endless sales opportunities. However, the key to having a successful online digital download store is creating it on a viable e-commerce platform. One with fantastic features which enable you to create an online store that allows fast and easy sales of digital products.
Factors Determining Good Ecommerce Platforms For Digital Downloads
You need to look out for some fundamental points before choosing the best platform to set up your online digital download stores.
1. Financial budget
Firstly, you need to consider if you have the financial capacity to afford your chosen e-commerce platform services. Some e-commerce platforms are free, while others come with various subscription fees and transaction charges. So be sure to know if you can afford an e-commerce platform before choosing it.
2. Support for digital downloads
Take time to investigate if the e-commerce platform supports the sales of digital downloads before choosing it.
Not all e-commerce platforms are suitable for selling all kinds of digital downloads. For instance, some e-commerce platforms don’t have features for creating and selling online courses. So, take your time to evaluate the e-commerce platform perfect for selling your digital download product.
2. Search engine optimization (SEO)
An e-commerce platform with strong SEO tools is vital for the sales of digital products. Most buyers of digital products search Google for online stores to purchase the product. This enables a well-optimized online store to get discovered by more customers. Therefore, don’t select an e-commerce platform that lacks SEO-friendly features.
3. Fast loading speed
It is also expedient to avoid an e-commerce platform that negatively affects your site page speed. For example, some e-commerce platform features might slow down the page speed. It’s recommended to read various reviews to know if the platform you intend to choose doesn’t have the speed issue.
» MORE: What Is The Fastest eCommerce Platform?
4. User-friendly
An ideal e-commerce platform must be user-friendly and mobile responsive. Users, especially beginners, must find it easy to navigate the platform to build a functional website. Also, the platform should have features that make it easy to build a site that is compatible with smartphones and other computer gadgets.
5. Security
Other essential things to look out for in an e-commerce platform are security, customer support efficiency, and product management capabilities. For example, the platform should provide various tools to secure customers’ personal data from hackers.
6. Customer support
The platform should also have a 24/7 responsive customer support center or a large users forum that will help users scale through any challenges encountered in building and marketing an online store.
In this post, we will highlight and elaborately discuss the best e-commerce platforms to set up your digital download online store on.
Below is the list of the best e-commerce platforms for digital download
Top 8 Ecommerce Platforms For Digital Downloads
- BigCommerce – best for extensive integration
- Nexcess WooCommerce Hosting – Best for Performance Monitoring
- Shopify – best for beginners
- MemberPress – best for WordPress
- EDD – best for digital download store
- Sellfy – best for great user experience
- Teachable – best for e-learning courses
- Podia – best for reliable customer support
1. BigCommerce – best for extensive integration
BigCommerce is a reliable e-commerce platform. It provides premium e-commerce solutions for digital download online stores. It fortifies digital product online stores with many features, extensions, plug-ins, and tools needed for optimal functioning.
In addition, it provides a wide range of integration options for marketing and product, inventory, and customer management.
Key Benefits of BigCommerce
- It comes with tools to help you effectively track your sales and manage your digital store. With the analytics, you get to know how well your products are doing in the market
- BigCommerce provides a wide range of payment options which makes sales easy. It accepts payment from many payment gateways
- The plenty of features, tools, themes, extensions, and plug-ins that BigCommerce offers allow you to customize your digital online store.
- It provides you many social channel integration options to get your digital products to people on social media. You can sell your digital products on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Amazon, and eBay.
- Despite these many BigCommerce features, BigCommerce doesn’t compromise your site speed and security. It offers your website optimal ecommerce services that enhancing your business growth.
Drawback of BigCommerce
BigCommerce may appear costly to some people hoping to create an online store for their digital products store. However, without the price constraints, you are good to set up your site on BigCommerce.
2. Nexcess WooCommerce Hosting – Best for Performance Monitoring
Whether you are looking to gain insights on how your sales and downloads are going or trying to stay updated on issues with your store’s setup and software, Nexcess WooCommerce hosting is the perfect solution for you.
Hosting your digital downloads store on Nexcess WooCommerce hosting provides you with a wide range of premium features and tools that guarantee excellent speed, 99.9% uptime, and auto-scaling to handle high traffic.
Key Benefits of Nexcess WooCommerce Hosting
- With the Nexcess Sales Performance Monitor, you can know when your digital store’s sales are increasing or decreasing or experiencing degraded services, which helps you gain critical insights and analyze the health of your store.
- Query loads are reduced by 95%, making your store perform efficiently even under heavy loads or traffic.
- Nexcess offers top-tier customer support with a dedicated team of platform experts ready to assist you at any point.
- You have access to numerous comprehensive plugins, and there’s even a plugin performance monitor to help you stay on top of issues with your site. You also enjoy automatic plugins and core updates.
- Nexcess supports product variations, on-demand performance testing, and product catalogs.
- You can easily segment your customers and customize your store to your taste.
- You are guaranteed better scalability, speed, security, and support.
- You get a 14-day free trial and even a 30-day money-back guarantee on all the available plans.
Drawbacks of Nexcess WooCommerce Hosting
- The too many plugins can become quite overwhelming.
- No free plan
3. Shopify – best for beginners
Shopify is a simplified e-commerce platform with many amazing features, designs, and templates for any online store type. With Shopify, you can get your digital online store running in no time.
However, if you don’t mind the price, Shopify provides you everything you need to run a thriving store. The e-commerce platform provides top-notch security and doesn’t slow down your page speed.
Benefits of Shopify
- Shopify is the easiest ecommerce platform. It is easy to use by beginners. You need no coding or WordPress skills, domain name, or buy hosting to get your digital store running on the platform.
- It comes with built-in SEO and blogs that help your store reach and connects with buyers better. Similarly, it also provides you with various integration options with social media platforms and various payment platforms for improved and better sales.
- Shopify has tons of features, themes, and robust extension and app store to build a beautiful online store and improve its functionality
- Shopify comes with a video tutorial to ease your store set up more and also provide 24/7 support to address any issue you might have.
Drawback of Shopify
Shopify may be expensive to some people, and also it charges a transaction fee if you’re not using Shopify payment.
» MORE: Shopify Plus Pricing
4. MemberPress – best for WordPress
Are you thinking of setting up your digital download online store on WordPress? MemberPress is the best plug-in for you. It is suitable for selling subscription-based digital downloads. MemberPress enables you to also sell membership and your digital products without taking any share.
MemberPress is integrated with WooCommerce to afford you features that will enhance the functionality of your online store. It also allows integration with email marketing services such as ConvertKit and Constant Contact. MemberPress is apt for selling online courses.
Key Benefits of MemberPress
- You can create a members-only page on your download store, making it easy for you to get certain digital products delivered to specific buyers based on their membership plan on your website. So, you can create many membership levels on your site to categories your buyers and ensure easy sales
- You will experience fewer payment options problems with MemberPress because it is linked with popular payment gateways. Such as PayPal, Authorize.net, and Stripe.
- Membership allows you to create a free trial, one-off, or recurring membership plan for your site buyers. Choose the option that best suits you.
- It provides many reports to evaluate your sales performance for proper planning of your business activities.
Drawbacks of MemberPress
It may be difficult to set up your store on MemberPress if you have not adequately gotten yourself acquainted with their feature through their setup tutorials. It’s not an appropriate e-commerce platform for an online store that is not membership-based.
» MORE: Best Email Marketing Software For Bloggers
5. EDD – best for digital download store
Easy Digital Downloads is also a WordPress e-commerce platform, but it is not membership-based, so it allows you to sell your digital download with ease.
It is designed specially to sell digital products; it makes it worthy for your digital download store. EDD is completely free and very easy to use in creating a standard online store sale of digital downloads.
Key benefits of EDD
- As the name implies, it’s very easy to use to create a digital download website. It comes with many features, themes, and add-ons to ease your site creation process
- Easy Digital Downloads is free to use, and it comes with a lot of extensions, paid or free, for the proper building of your site
- It is a simple, lightweight plug-in that won’t overpower your site and slow-down your page speed.
- Also, it comes with fantastic customer management features. It allows users to manually create a customer page and link the data to other profiles. EDD download also indicates your customers’ lifetime value for you to know your customers buying capacity.
- It provides great support for its uses. It has a 24/7 support center, a community of helpful users, as well as getting started videos and tutorials
Drawback of EDD
It is not easy to sell affiliate products on a site built with EDD. Selling external products on Easy Digital Downloads requires the use of a third-party add-on.
» MORE: Enterprise eCommerce Platforms
6. Sellfy – best for great user experience
Sellfy is a great user-friendly e-commerce platform ideal for selling digital download products. It allows you to sell different kinds of digital products in one store. Moreover, it offers the buyer many features and tools for easy and unique digital download store creation.
Key Benefits of Sellfy
- Sellfy comes as an affordable ecommerce platform to users. It offers 14 days free trial. Its starter plan cost as low as $19 per month. Its business and premium plan cost $39 and $85 per month, respectively.
- The ecommerce platform comes with a built-in SEO that enhances your online store’s wide reach.
- Sellfy has multiple language options that foster easy use. Sellfy gets a 5-star rating in ease of use. It’s less complicated and beginners friendly.
- The platform provides users with many marketing and payment integration options. Sellfy enables your online store to receive payment via PayPal, Stripe, and other popular payment gateways. It also allows you to integrate your store with more than 1,000 apps to streamline the sales, marketing, and customer management process.
Drawback of Sellfy
You might experience some difficult integrating sellfy with social media.
» MORE: Best eCommerce Fulfillment Services
7. Teachable – best for e-learning courses
Teachable is an e-commerce platform perfect for an online learning platform. It allows you to set up your online store of e-learning courses. You may not even need a website to use it. It is suitable for you if you are solely into selling e-learning products.
Benefits of Teachable
- It allows you to set up easily and run your online store. You need no tech or WordPress knowledge to create a store on it.
- Interestingly, it comes at no cost; you can create courses, register students, and customize your site to suit your needs at no cost. Teachable admin panel allows you to adjust and modify elements of your course site’s branding, such as adding a logo, uploading background images, and changing font and color.
- It is very flexible. You can use any file type to develop your online courses. And it allows for easy structural arrangements of the course for it to be easy access to users
- It comes with analytics to properly track your students’ activities, allowing you to evaluate their progress efficiently.
Drawback of Teachable
It is specifically developed for e-learning; it can’t be used to sell other online digital products effectively.
» MORE: Best E-Commerce Platforms for New Businesses
8. Podia – best for reliable customer support
Podia is an e-commerce platform specifically made for selling digital products. This platform helps you sell digital downloads products like online courses, music, videos, and even webinars. Though it is new to the digital download market, it is very promising.
Again, it is a viable alternative for existing digital download e-commerce platforms. It is also a membership platform. It allows you to categorize your members. In addition, Podia allows you to build a nicely customized storefront, host, and deliver your digital content with no coding knowledge.
Benefits of Podia
- It is better suited for selling digital downloads; Podia comes with a custom URL. Interestingly, it also allows you to embed the buy button on external websites, making it easy for you to sell your products on other websites.
- It has responsive and reliable customer support. Also, it provides supports in over ten languages.
- Podia allows for email marketing, drip campaign as well as integration with Google analytics and Facebook Pixel for easy marketing. It also allows you to sell external products too in addition to your digital products.
Drawbacks of Podia
It lacks some key integration features to some payment gateway and social media channels.
» MORE: BigCommerce Pricing
Conclusion
Now that you know the best e-commerce platforms for digital download, we hope this article will help you choose the best platform appropriate for your digital download products. Let your choice e-commerce platform be one that will be in tandem with your financial capability and most suitable for your digital products.