If you want to sell digital products such as e-books, audio files or software, WordPress is a great platform. What does it take in practice for you to succeed?
The market for digital products is growing rapidly. Books, music, games, courses and software are some big categories that are natural to sell as digital products. WordPress together with add-ons like WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads make it easy to get started.
Online is the obvious channel to sell software. Swedish companies buy software for SEK 23 billion a year, according to Statistics Sweden. A large proportion of these sales are made online. Here it is possible to sell the software as a web service or as a downloadable file.
Games are largely sold as downloads online. One of Sweden’s most talked about company sales in recent years is when the company behind the game Minecraft was sold for 2.5 billion dollars to Microsoft. Creator Markus “Notch” Persson sold 15 copies of the game on the first day he took payment. From the fall of 2010, when the company was founded, to December 31, 2011, Mojang earned 540,559,963 SEK from Minecraft sales alone.
Digital music accounted for 85.2 percent of total Swedish music sales in Sweden last year, according to IFPI Sweden. Streaming is completely dominant. Challenging Spotify may not be that appealing, but there is room for artists or DJs to sell their own downloads of concerts or special versions and mixes.
The TV and film industry is the next segment to go digital. Research firm Mediavision estimates that the TV market’s total digital revenue, both advertising and pay, will increase to 20% this year. While it will take some doing to challenge the likes of Netflix, there are always opportunities in niches.
The e-book market, on the other hand, has struggled to take off in Sweden, unlike the US and the UK. Of Swedish book publishers’ sales last year, e-books accounted for a measly two percent. The book industry has been struggling in this area for several years. In contrast, audiobooks as a streaming subscription service have performed better. The leading player in streaming audiobooks in the Nordic region, Storytel, had sales of SEK 254 million last year.
WordPress as a sales platform
WordPress is a natural choice of platform for selling digital products:
- It is important to present digital products in the right way with texts, images and videos. With WordPress, it’s easy to present content on the web in a stylish way.
- Search traffic is the most important source of traffic whether you sell digital or physical products and WordPress works very well in Google.
There are many different plugins to facilitate the sale of downloadable products, online courses, license keys and the like.
Keep in mind that:
- Ecommerce doesn’t work without product images. You need to illustrate your digital products with good images or illustrations.
- Offer visitors to read a chapter of a book, watch the beginning of a movie or listen to music files or other types of audio files.
- The store’s loading speed is business-critical – choose quality hosting.
- A smooth payment solution is important.
- WP is a platform where development is fast. Therefore, it is important to have a competent management of the installation. Angry Creative provides world-class management and support for Wordpress.
Plugins for selling digital products
WooCommerce
The most popular e-commerce plugin for WP, WooCommerce, has digital products as standard functionality. 37% of the world’s online stores use WooCommerce, according to the analytics firm BuiltWith It’s really just a matter of checking a box at the product level that the product is digital to sell downloads. If you want to sell license keys, you need the WooThemes Software Add-on, which costs just over $1000 per year.
Easy Digital Downloads
The Easy Digital Downloads plugin is an add-on that is entirely focused on selling digital products. User reviews give Easy Digital Downloads high marks for simplicity and support.
Sensei
There are also dedicated WordPress templates like Sensei that let you create and sell online courses.
SiteOrgin Pagebuilder
If you want to create optimized landing pages to better convert traffic from Adwords campaigns, for example, SiteOrgin Pagebuilder is an elegant solution.
Payment solutions
There are many ready-made connections to both Swedish and foreign payment solutions to WooCommerce and Easy Digital Download has several connections to well-known foreign payment solutions.
Popular Klarna Checkout has ready-made free links to WooCommerce. Most Swedish payment solutions have links to WooCommerce. In addition, there are interesting foreign alternatives such as Stripe that can accept card payments in many markets.
Image by Gergo-Sztuchlak Selected by freepik