Last Updated on September 4, 2024
eBay
Selling digital products on eBay is unconventional, in that you have to deliver your content on CD physically in the mail, and sending download links is frowned upon by eBay.
So you have the disadvantage of having to post the CD in the mail to individual buyers for very low sale prices, or you would set up a “fulfil on demand” arrangement with a CD fulfilment company.
For many online product creators it is too complicated and they simply sell their product as a MRR (Master Reseal Rights) digital product for established eBay Store Owners to sell on their behalf.
Many product creators have every intention of selling “cheap” versions on eBay to drive more traffic to their higher priced items sold from their website, this is known as a “Sales Funnel”.
If you want to sell your digital products directly to eBay customers then you will have to open an account with eBay to sell your digital products from.
As of 1 May 2013 you can either sell it as an individual (which allows up to 30 free listings per month) and you only pay a percentage of the sale price if it sells or alternatively you may want to sell a lot of digital products and open an eBay store.
As of 1 May 2013 there will be three store choices to choose from, a Basic Store for $19.95 per month, a Featured Store for $49.95 per month and an Anchor Store for $499.95 per month. All three stores are designed for high turnover of goods, and eBay prefer “buy it now” listings, so they make their “auction” listings more costly to do, in order to deter eBay Store sellers from using it.
Digiresults
There are actually a few affiliate marketplaces like Digiresults around including ClicktoSell.com, DigitalDeliveryApp.com and Paydotcom.com. These smaller marketplaces also have advantages over the later sites like Clickbank, but still struggle to get you an efficient affiliate team. Again, you need to invite your own affiliates and joint venture partners to regularly sell from sites like Digiresults.
The benefits of sites like Digiresults include lower fees, safer downloads, more control to product creators and instant payment with Paypal.
Digiresults also has smaller fees than Clickbank, and you can integrate your sales campaign with Clickbank and PayDotCom.
Another other benefit of Digiresults is they can sell your digital products and your physical product range, so it can offer many of your product range in one marketplace for convenience.
There are no sign up fees, and also there is more control to the product creator paying affiliates and issuing refunds. Whereas in Clickbank, they handle paying affiliates and issues refunds, and this has made many product creators unhappy in the past.
The same problem exists that the affiliate membership is lower with sites like Digiresults, but it is worth a look if you are looking for an alternative to Clickbank and eJunkie.
Amazon
Amazon is a huge marketplace for online product creators due to their digital bookstore known as the “Amazon Kindle Store”.
The Kindle Store is the largest online bookstore at the moment, and many people believe it accounts for 80% of online ebook sales. It is hard to verify these figures as it is against Amazon’s policy to publish actual sales figures and turnover.
Amazon also have the audio bookstore (known as Audible.com) where you can sell your audio books for a reasonable profit as well as your Kindle book. In fact, if you have both an audio and kindle book with the same title they will combine the two into one sales page for purchasers to see as available in audio or Kindle format.
There are many advantages and disadvantages to selling your digital products on Amazon. Some advantages are the amount of traffic Amazon now receive whereby people will see your digital products for sale when they type in your keywords to the search box. But Amazon also ranks very well for Google SERP, and you can promote an Amazon book (even your own) as an affiliate of Amazon.
The Amazon affiliate program pays relatively poor and has high minimums to achieve before you are paid. Also, the cookies placed on a buyers computer when they use your affiliate link to buy only lasts 24hours, after that, the cookies won’t credit your account with the sale.
If you can get a digital product onto Amazon, consider it as part of a major sales funnel as a Lead Gen product, rather than the product that you are hoping will fund your retirement plan, because it probably won’t.
Clickbank
Clickbank was established 1998 and is still growing strong with over 100,000 affiliates. Clickbank has had its issues over the years, but now takes their reputation very seriously to ensure that all their affiliates and product creators are professional and behave ethically with customer transactions.
When you list a product with Clickbank to sell they will actually check your sales page to ensure it complies with FTC rules and their guidelines. They are trying to weed out any “get rich quick” schemes, to improve the customer experience.
There is a listing fee (around $50 per product) as well as a commission payment for each sale (around 8%). On top of that, of course there is your affiliate’s commission (you determine the percentage) but the better the commission the more likely it will be promoted. Currently the maximum you can pay an affiliate is 75% of the sale price.
Clickbank is preferred by affiliates because Clickbank keeps the money from the sales, not the product creator, therefore they feel more confident they will be paid on time.
Clickbank receives some criticism for their payment system, which means your first cheque is by mail, and direct debit takes a while to kick in, however, once you are established as an affiliate or a product seller the payments are made fortnightly providing there is at least $100 due to be paid.
They also have a standard “no questions asked” 60 day money back guarantee for customers, and many product creators find this rule unfair as they may feel that their product should not be refundable. But if you list with Clickbank, you have to agree to their terms and conditions and refunds are inevitable with digital sales.
eJunkie
Listing your digital products with eJunkie is a great place to start due to its low cost. You only pay a monthly fee of $5 per month and the price only goes up when you start to list a few products. But even at 20 products, it still remains cheap at $8 per month.
The beauty of eJunkie is that it has a built in affiliate program, but unlike Clickbank, it is not a huge army of affiliates. This is due mainly to the affiliate program putting the product creator in charge of things like payment and refunds.
Therefore, if you list your digital products on eJunkie you may need to recruit your own affiliates (or joint venture partners) yourself to get some sales coming in.
Besides the significantly lower fees for product creators, another big benefit of eJunkie compared to Clickbank is that they pay you for your sales immediately into your Paypal account. This means you are automatically paid every time one of your products sells, whereas Clickbank could hang onto the payment for over a month.
You also control how and when your affiliates are paid. If you don’t know an affiliate personally, you may decide to hang onto their commission until you are sure their customers won’t claim a refund, otherwise you may be out of pocket.
The other benefit of eJunkie is their advanced security on purchase downloads. It’s not uncommon for people to share download links, thereby lowering the product value. eJunkie normally only allows 5 downloads per purchase, and it has to be from the same IP address where the purchase was made. This gives product creators more confidence their digital products aren’t being shared around the internet.
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