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Writer's pictureMaida Barrientos

Top Shopify Apps for Digital Download Shop

These are the top shopify apps best for digital downloads or digital services shop that we have compiled for you.

Sample Digital products and services shopify site using these shopify apps we recommend below.

Many entrepreneurs build entire businesses around these intangible goods, due to their popularity and ease of distribution, or launch digital product lines to complement the physical items or services they offer. And it's easy to get started, considering there are many ways to set up a online store with Shopify.

What makes digital products especially appealing, however, is they can be created once and sold repeatedly to different customers without having to replenish inventory, making them ideal for creatives, artists, educators, and freelancers looking for new income streams that require less effort to maintain.

What are digital products?

A digital product is an intangible asset or piece of media that can be sold and distributed repeatedly online without the need to replenish inventory. These products often come in the form of downloadable or streamable files, such as MP3s, PDFs, videos, plug-ins, and templates.

The benefits of creating digital products

Digital products have many advantages that make them uniquely attractive to sell:

  1. Low overhead costs. You don’t have to hold inventory or incur any shipping charges.

  2. Extremely high profit margins. There’s no recurring cost of goods, so you retain the majority of your sales in profits.

  3. Potential to automate. Orders can be delivered instantly, letting you be relatively hands-off with fulfillment.

  4. Flexible products. You can offer free products to build your email list, monthly paid subscriptions for access to exclusive digital content, or licenses to use your digital products. You have a lot of options as to how you incorporate digital products into your business.

  5. E-learning is the future of education. You have a massive opportunity to expand your business and impact with e-learning, an industry expected to be worth $331 billion by 2025.

But digital products also come with specific challenges you’ll need to watch out for:

  1. You’re competing with free content. With digital goods, consumers can probably find free alternatives to what you’re selling. You’ll have to think carefully about the niche you target and your product descriptions, offer premium value with your products, and know how to build your brand in order to compete.

  2. You’re susceptible to piracy/theft. You need to take precautions and reduce these risks by employing the right tools to protect your products.

  3. There are some restrictions on how you sell. For example, you must sell physical products through the Facebook and Instagram sales channel, according to their commerce policy.

Most of these challenges can be overcome, however, if you employ the right tools when designing your digital product business.

Top shopify apps for selling digital products

If you’re building a digital product store or are looking for ways to add digital products to your existing store, there are a number of digital marketing tools you’ll want to consider, depending on your needs:

This popular Shopify-developed app offers a simple way to get your non-physical (as well as tangible!) products onto your store. And you can add your digital attachments to a variant which means you’re able to utilize the reporting, too.

Customers get instant access to the items they purchased, and also get emailed the link to go back to. And, should you update the attached file, they’ll be automatically notified.

Another digital delivery app is SendOwl. With a range of features and some handy automations (think expiring links and auto-generated license keys), SendOwl proves popular with complex digital-goods businesses.

The app’s ease-of-use, wide-ranging language support and detailed analytical tools also make it a hot favourite.

FetchApp is another great app for managing your downloads and for keeping track of who has access to your paid content. The app allows you to control how many times a product can be downloaded, as well as the amount of time a download link works for.

The app gives you greater control over your files, allowing you to bundle products with multiple files together, or to split large files into multiple smaller files so that you can sell a single product in multiple parts. And it’s affordable; they charge based on your storage needs.

Your email list should be one of your biggest assets as a thought leader. If you want to get set up and sending quickly, we highly recommend Klaviyo. Sending regular ‘learning boosts’ to your email list is a great way to stay top of mind, and ensure that your learners don’t lose out on the benefits of your content as time goes by.

With the Klaviyo and Shopify integration, subscribers are automatically added to an address book, and you can set up automated email campaigns to encourage customer reviews, offer product recommendations, and continue delivering your awesome thought leadership content — straight to their inboxes.

Price: free - $1000+/month, sign up!

If you haven’t given your e-commerce site an SEO check lately, you should take a look at Plug in SEO. A useful app that helps ensure your product pages are optimized for search engines, and analyzes your site to find any problems or gaps in your SEO game.

Plug in SEO doesn’t just tell you what’s wrong. It also helps you prioritize which problems are the most important to fix, so you can be smart about spending your resources. Competition is fierce when it comes to selling online, so make sure you get those SEO basics right first-time.

Offering a subscription or membership service for your digital products is a great idea if you have lots of digital downloads, or if you offer multiple different online courses. It’s also handy in enabling you to project your revenue more easily (based on the number of active members and average membership length).

To power your subscriptions/memberships, look no further than ReCharge. This app works for merchants of all shapes and sizes, and offers plenty of options for your business. Think gift subscriptions, time-limited subscriptions, customisable subscription frequency, and renewals. Nice, huh?

With so much free content out there on the Internet, how do you get people to shell out their hard-earned dollars for your course? With social proof. Yotpo is a review app that allows your customers to review your products and even answer questions for other users.

And all of this user-generated content isn’t just great in showing off your social proof. It’s also good for your website’s SEO, which means more people will end up on your site in the first place.

This app’s perfect for if you have items that cross-sell well, like ebooks that go along with your courses, for example. Directed Edge can be configured to automatically show related products based on the app’s algorithms, or related products you handpick yourself. You can also configure it to show things like recently viewed products, or also-bought products.

There are tons of different recommendation types available, so you can configure the app to display products in a way that’s perfect for your store. That means you make more from every sale.

If you live in a country that requires you to collect VAT taxes for your digital products, you need a simple way to sort it. If you’re on Shopify Plus, look to Avalara. Using geolocation to map multiple rates and rules of each transaction, Avalara automates tax calculations and the filing process for you. No more getting bogged down!

If the only courses and digital products you’re selling are your own, skip this one. But, if you’re running an online marketplace that features multiple thought leaders, you’ll need a way to pay your third-party vendors!

Beyond these digital product delivery systems, there are other Shopify apps to power and protect your digital goods, such as:

  1. Recurring Order & Subscription. This is an app for weekly or monthly subscriptions. Use the subscription management app to automate recurring orders, invoices, and digital subscriptions for online memberships or programs.

  2. Photolock. If you want extra protection for visual products like stock photos, this app offers most of the security measures you may need, from watermarks to source code protection.

  3. Disable Right-Click. When your content is your product, this app helps you protect it from theft. You can lock images and text so they can’t be saved or copied without your permission.

Depending on your needs, these apps and more can be used together to help you incorporate digital products into your Shopify store and execute any of the digital product ideas below.

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