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My story
“Product inventory, shipping fees and returns – these are the three top reasons why your profit margins are so low (or at times it even goes to negative) while selling goods online.”
As a seller of physical product, you need to stock up the products that sells, ship it to the customer and accept minimum 30-days free returns. Failure to do any of these three, will cost you greatly in customer acquisition.
My wife and I were happy with our online sales but the excessive returns on our Amazon store forced us to look for other avenues of making money. The ones that do not require handling returns. Digital products fall into this category perfectly.
What is a digital product?
As the name suggests, digital product is digital with no physical form, that may be used by a customer as a utility on computers, smartphone, or other electronics. As any other products, it helps solve a problem, or adds value to its purchaser. These digital assets are produced by creator once and sold multiple times without having to re-create them.
What are some of digital product ideas?
The best digital products are the one which solve problems of a community or large number of people. In some cases, it educates people to advance their career or business, while in others, it’s a finished product that helps buyer get certain things done. The following are some of the popular digital product ideas to earn extra money.
Educational products:
The largest number of digital products fall under this category. Be it a simple eBook, presentation slide or an online training course, these digital products consist of the highest share within the industry. These digital products teach buyer on certain topic like how to start blogging, invest in stock market, or take better product pictures. A successful blogger will always have an educational digital product as one of his/her income stream.
An online training is another very popular digital product under this category. With the boom of online training platform like, Udemy, Skillshare, and Teachable, creating an online training program and marketing it is becoming easier than ever before. I discuss how these online training programs are good ways of kickstarting your career in another blog post
Digital template:
This is one of the easy to create, low-cost digital product category that almost anyone can produce. Because they are low cost in creation, the sale price is also low therefore they trade in volume rather than price.
The digital template includes, MS Word, Excel PowerPoint presentation slides, PDF templates, Website themes, and invitation cards and printables. This list is limitless. The digital templates make buyers life easy by streamlining his/her work. It helps him do his job quickly.
How to create digital products to sell?
Level of difficulty in creating a digital product depends on what kind of digital product you want to create. For example, it does not take much to create an eBook, flyer or small template. It only requires some skills and knowledge on the particular field or application. With the advent of technology and free online learning, creating a digital product to sell is easier than before.
Creating a digital product starts with an idea, the type of digital product you want to create and you audience. Digital products like, MS Word and Excel templates just require software and the idea of what you want to create that sells. A digital product like an application to solve a bigger problem might take time and investment to develop the finished product. Printable and Flyers require online template design platforms which are specifically built to create digital products like Corjil, Canva etc. Therefore, creating a digital product to sell depends on what type of digital products you want to create and if there is a demand for it.
Where to sell digital products online?
The digital products can be sold in every online marketplace like Etsy, Amazon, Ebay, Skillshare, or your own website. Some of these are more streamlined toward selling digital products than others. Etsy is famous for printables, flyer design, invitation cards and office templates. You can sell eBooks on amazon. A training courses can be sold in Skillshare, Udemy or Teachables or on your own website. Corjil and Cava is famous for online template design and sharing with clients that are customizable by the buyer before download.
Why I love digital products?
I love digital products for their versatility.
One of the main reasons why I moved to digital products was because, me and my wife were trying to find alternatives to our online business which received a lot of returns. It already takes time and money to setup inventory, sell a product and ship it to the customer. On top of that, handling returns takes a toil into your initial investment let alone profit. You must build a system that takes returns into account from the start. There are others ways of selling good like dropshipping where you don’t have to manage inventory that will be another topic to discuss on some other post.
We wanted a system that does not have any returns or shipping.
We needed a system that does not require carrying an inventory and the cost associated with it.
We wanted to control the cost of a product and not by any other factor (like manufacturing cost, cost of good on landing, shipping etc).
On top of all these, we wanted a product which can be automated.
We do not want to be involved in handling and fulfilment of the product, which means more time for us to research and refine our products.
Not only these, digital products have so many other benefits that I can never be tired of discussing. It removes the time and location constraints from your business and life – which means your business will stop being a job and becomes an actual business. You’ll have a freedom of choice on when you want to work and where you want to work from. This is the biggest freedom you’ll get in life. I wonder why anybody would not want to have a business like that. Let us know in the comments below if you’d love to have a business like that!
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