Hello Hivers,
I have 2 shops online where I sell my digital products, one is on Gumroad and another one (with same products more or less) on BuyMeACoffee.
Both shops are about 2 years old and the one on Gumroad brings more profit, I guess because it had more exposure to potential clients.
Surprisingly most of the profit comes from my free products, not paid ones. How does that work? Well they serve as lead magnet and when a customer downloads the product he/she has an option to make a small donation. Since the downloads are valuable to them they do make tiny donations which in sum make decent profit.
Here is the breakdown of my top selling digital products on Gumroad.
Total number of sales is 1594 and total profit is $405.75
So it turns out this could be good business strategy, giving away free useful products but offering and option for small donations.
I'm considering opening all my products to be free since my paid products have earned me less than free ones.
Check my web2 links here.
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Oh! that's an interesting phenomenon. I have seen lately that freebies are becoming more of a thing. I imagine people feel better giving something for a product they enjoyed than buying it and feel like it was a rip-off, specially when most digital products compile information that can be found online already
It depends on type of the digital product, guides and tutorials are too often compilations, even courses. Other types like illustrations and planners or my custom Canva frames are 100% hand-made and often author spends good amount of time in making them so it's not reasonable to give them away for free. Yes, people like free stuff that's a fact but in return they are willing to give something back, if not a donation, than e-mail subscription which is still very valuable.
Yeah, I know the value of the actual job, but thinking as a customer, there is far to many things free available (often not good, generic) and a lot of stories of people selling things that are not good (specially those cases when you can't actually see the whole thing before buying) so it makes hard for people to trust digital sales.... Its a shame tho.
Absolutely true. And the problem is most of time you can't return digital product if it doesn't meet quality standards.