You Ask, I Answer: Digital Ecommerce Platform Recommendations?

In today's episode, Robin asks, what recommendations for an e-commerce platform do you have for selling digital goods? Well, the answer to that question uh depends on the kinds of goods that you're selling. So there are obviously no shortage of vendors, and I guess the other question is um where you want to set things up. If you are the do-it-yourself type of person, uh then uh something like your WordPress website with an integration with company like Stripe would be a good choice because it's very flexible. Uh it handles all the payment processing and stuff, so you don't have to worry about uh holding on to uh potentially sensitive information and they have subscriptions and you know box products and things.

Typically with Stripe, um there's a fair amount of work setting it up uh to to make it do what you want it to do. Um but their commission structure is pretty good. I think it's like three and a half percent. Um and it gives you maximum flexibility. It gives you the ability to to put stuff up on your website and then just have Stripe essentially be the the the credit card swiper is what it belong uh boils down to.

Uh some folks like PayPal uh again, mostly for the uh ease of setting up simple products. Like if you've got one thing to sell and only one thing, it's probably not a bad choice. Um my personal favorite is a company called Gumroad, which uh spelled exactly like how it sounds uh G-U-M-R-O-A-D. And their transaction C fee is about five percent. But what I like about them is that it's a very easy system to use for the non-technical.

You upload your products. Uh, there's all sorts of you can specify DRM, you can add affiliates, which I think is a huge uh deal, um, and allows you to have you know grouped products, variations of products and things. Uh I like them for books, for video, for music, any individual file download that you would want to sell. I would say Gumroad should probably be something you uh strongly suggest you check out. If you have a multi-part course uh where you are trying to um get you know videos and quizzes and things set up, uh the module that I like is one called Learn Dash.

Uh Learn Dash is built into WordPress, it's uh it's a paid plugin, and it allows you to set up courses and set up you know the transaction processing and things. I like that better than Gumroad for courses specifically because it's also course management software uh and it does a really good job of helping you structure a thorough, well thought out course. Now, a lot of other folks will use uh systems like uh thinkific and kajabi and stuff, and and those are fine. Their transaction fees tend to be higher. Um their uh monthly fees tend to be much much higher uh than Learn Dash.

Learn Dash is much more technical uh in nature, so there's that aspect of it. Um for uh like physical goods, um you know, the uh eBay and Amazon. I you have to put your book up on Amazon because it's where a lot of the people are. Um what I would do uh there is make it substantially higher price to deal with the fact that Amazon will take anywhere from 30 to 65% of the of the the the fees, right? Um and so, like for my books, they'll be substantially higher cost on Amazon, but they're there because it's where the people are.

Uh and I will put in the book description. I've not gotten taken down for this yet. I'll put the book description. If you want um to buy direct, uh, here's the URL, you know, um AI for marketers book.com. And uh that I think does help, at least from the discovery perspective.

No matter which you choose, um, one of the things you're gonna want to do is give some thought to uh how you're gonna price things, whether they're gonna be versions, whether they're gonna be add-ons, um, and then the big thing with a system like even like Gumroad is you've got to promote it, right? So those are good transaction engines, and Gumroad has some promotional stuff, but it's not it's not professional marketing quality, right? It's it's meant for like the individual author whoever who doesn't want to maintain a mailing list uh and may or may not have a particularly good website. It's really good for that solo printer kind of uh thing. If you want to uh get good results out of your digital sales, you've got to have a really good marketing system to support.

And I would spend more time on the marketing system than I would on the e-commerce system. So take a look into uh you know small business friendly systems, Mautic is my personal favorite for marketing automation. Um the self hosted version substantial technical obstacles, but super super cheap. Um I think I'm paying now about 20 bucks a month total to send to almost 90,000 subscribers uh on a weekly basis. Uh on any other system, that would be like three thousand dollars a month.

Um twenty bucks is obviously a lot more manageable. Um the challenge to the extent that there is one is that none of these systems talk to each other, so you'll probably want to have some kind of uh backend CRM on your website just to keep track of people. Uh for the again, for the average solopreneur or a small business, uh, HubSpot's uh free CRM, as long as it remains free, ain't bad. Uh it does a decent amount, uh, helps you at least just track customers and things. And it's good enough.

It's good enough. There are open source alternatives, but they're not nearly as polished. And as long as HubSpot continues to offer its zero dollar um solopreneur version, it's hard to recommend anything else. Uh it does start to get expensive when you start having to pay for uh features. They go it goes from zero to really expensive really, really fast.

Uh particularly if you use the marketing side. That's again, I would why recommend pairing it with something like Mautic so that Mautic handles all the marketing automation stuff, HubSpot handles the CRM stuff, and then Gumroad handles like the transaction processing stuff. That's a pretty good tech stack. If you don't have the time or the experience to set something up like that, just start with Gumroad. Their tools are not terrible for marketing.

Um and it's a place to start. So good question. There's a lot of other things you can do for you know promotion of your your digital goods and things, but that's totally a separate topic. But um start with Gumroad, unless you're doing a course, in that case, do learn dash and be grudgingly put your stuff up in the places where all the people are so at least you get some awareness. If you have follow up questions, leave them in the comments box below.

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