What are digital products? The best tools to sell them

What are digital products?

If you have the itch to go into business for yourself, but don’t have a specific product already in mind, you might be wondering how you can join the ranks of successful online business owners.

One option is to sell digital products.

They offer the opportunity to build an entire business without the need to think about inventory, warehouse space, and shipping costs.

Digital products offer a solid, passive income opportunity because you can, depending on the product, create something once and sell it over and over again without producing additional inventory, handling order fulfillment, or continuing to spend on product updates and maintenance. It’s an ideal venture if you want an effective way to generate an online income with as few points of friction as possible.

Sound like a great opportunity?

If you build on an ecommerce platform like WooCommerce, you’ll benefit from built-in digital product sales functionality. You’ll also get unlimited customizability and complete ownership over your online presence. That’s why millions of stores around the world trust Woo.

Today, we’ll walk you through the different types of digital products you can sell, how to choose the ones that best align with your creativity and business goals, and how to create and sell your digital products online.

A digital product is an intangible good accessed via an electronic device — things like ebooks, online courses, songs, games, artwork, and software.

After a customer purchases a digital item, a business delivers the virtual product in a downloadable format via email or another method. For example, a video game add-on might appear inside the game. Or the password to a digital membership library might appear on the post-purchase “thank you” page.

New business owners can decide to sell digital goods alone, or eventually mix in physical products to complement their digital assets. And existing physical businesses can likely find a way to add a few profitable digital products to their lineup to increase their reach and revenue potential.

Now we’ll look into the various types of digital products you can sell online and the best ways to present and monetize them. You can offer one-off digital downloads, give your customers the option to purchase bundled digital products at a discount, sell digital memberships and monthly or yearly subscription options for recurring revenue, and more.

Online courses

Remember when sitting in a physical classroom was your only option? Today, lifelong interests and new skills are learned wherever you have an internet connection.

You can create courses and make money from sharing your passion, and you don’t need to be a world-renowned scholar, college professor, or even a certified teacher — all you need is recognizable talent and a desire to share it.

So, what unique skill do you have? What’s something you’re deeply passionate about that you’d love to share with others? Turn your experience into a digital business and host weekly or monthly live classes or webinars.

Don’t feel comfortable on camera or simply don’t want to present live? Consider offering a pre-made online course where you can share your knowledge through downloadable texts and pre-recorded videos.

Build your website with WordPress and WooCommerce and use the Sensei Pro extension to create and manage your own online course.

You’ll be able to sell paid courses as a product directly through your site and even create memberships and subscriptions for recurring revenue. You’ll also benefit from video course templates, quizzes to test and grade student progress, prerequisites for students to access advanced content, flashcard image hotspot functionality, and more.

Want to learn more about selling online courses? See how to set up Sensei LMS in our guide: How to Sell Online Courses.

Podcasts and ebooks

Like online courses, podcasts and ebooks can help you monetize your knowledge. More than 76 million people in the United States listened to podcasts in 2024 — a figure that’s increased by over 27 million since 2020 and could reach nearly 114 million by 2029.

And it’s the same story for ebooks — with digital readership revenue extending past $50 billion annually.

Authors can use the built-in digital products offering for WooCommerce to sell their books online. Podcasters can also use WooCommerce with integrations like Audio Player for WooCommerce and WooCommerce Memberships. These let creators sell individual, premium media files or offer memberships for exclusive podcast content.

Memberships and subscriptions

One of the best things about online courses, podcasts, ebooks, and many other digital products, is the ability for business owners to sell them on a recurring basis. This provides more steady, predictable income and can truly allow for a very hands-off approach to business management.

Your customers can sign up for membership or subscription for as long as they want to keep access and your primary job (beside marketing) is to create the content in the first place or continue to drip out new content each week or month to keep people subscribed as long as possible.

Digital products for real-world memberships

Digital products can also be super useful for managing clubs that have in-person events and meetings. The Kansas City Parrot Head Club, for example, hosts charitable and social events each month for its approximately 200 members. Annual memberships, and renewals, along with tickets for specific events are managed through their site.

WooCommerce once again shines in this area with two key extensions: WooCommerce memberships and Woo subscriptions. Together, they work to create a membership option with recurring billing capabilities.

WooCommerce Memberships allows you to provide controlled access to gated areas on your site with libraries of exclusive content, access to exclusive communication channels, and discounts for other products available on your site.

Woo Subscriptions allows you to charge recurring payments for auto-shipped products at regular intervals — but it also unlocks the recurring billing option for memberships so you can charge customers a set fee each month (or other appropriate interval). It also allows for members to manage their subscription and pause or cancel on their own.

The best Patreon alternative

If you like the idea of providing a membership option to followers or creating a community of supporters who get rewarded for supporting your creative work, you may have considered Patreon or YouTube channel memberships.

The problem with these platforms is that you’re limited in design and product offerings (having to conform to their setups for delivering and publishing content) and are beholden to their terms of service.

Instead, look at WooCommerce as the best Patreon alternative. You can provide memberships with recurring billing and gated content, but have full ownership of the platform you build and can customize it in any way.

Digital artwork and printable downloads

Artists have a lovely opportunity to create digital products. And their online offers don’t have to conflict with their physical work.

You can sell graphic designs to stock photo sites for other creators and marketers to use in their work. You can sell art designed to be computer or phone backgrounds. You can sell digital files of artwork for customers to print on canvas, copy for school worksheets, or use in almost any way imaginable.

Turn watercolor art into phone wallpaper. Offer printable downloads of your digital art as greeting cards. Create posters that your customers can print themselves and frame however they’d like. The options are really only limited by shoppers’ imaginations.

For example, let’s say that you sell an illustration of a college football stadium. While you can certainly offer it in prints that you physically ship to customers, you could also offer it as a printable, digital download.

Football fans could print it from their home computer, or even upload it to a service like Shutterfly to professionally print it on everything from mugs and wine glasses to notebooks, laptop sleeves, and magnets.

You can use WooCommerce to display and sell all of these things or even offer something more unique like non-fungible tokens (NFTs), complete with a Certificate of Authenticity, by adding the Verisart extension.

Licensed digital assets

Creators often love to expand or modify another artist’s idea. It provides inspiration — a jumping off point — to create something new. And graphic designers working for creative agencies, advertisers, or other organizations find it advantageous to use premade assets where possible to work more efficiently instead of creating everything from scratch.

Consider providing digital assets for other creators to license and use in their own works. Unless you only offer exclusive licenses, your one-time creation can be licensed over and over again for years — leading to consistent revenue long after you actually did any work.

Here are some examples of licensable digital products:

While you can license these assets from your own WooCommerce site with an extension like License Manager for WooCommerce, you should also consider offering them through a marketplace that has a built-in traffic source of people looking to purchase licenses. These kinds of marketplaces include:

• Canva
• iStock
• Adobe Stock
• Unsplash
• Getty
• Envato Elements
• Shutterstock

These platforms offer exposure, but charge a commission for each sale in exchange. Many stock image sites, like Unsplash and Pexels, offer a mix of options for users, including royalty-free photos or premium images. Users can download and use royalty-free images with no fee (some attribution requirements and usage restrictions apply), while premium images have variable pricing depending on how the image will be used.

Commissioned works as licensed digital products

You’re not limited to licensing pre-created works. If you have artistic talent with a track record of performance, you can sell commissioned projects in almost any form imaginable. Record a voiceover, write and record custom music, create a graphic design based on a written request. These kinds of creative services are sold all the time on platforms like Upwork and Fiverr.

Music, video, and audio

If you’re a professional singer or musician, even if you just like writing and recording music in your spare time, you can sell full songs for download or offer snippets for customers to use as ringtones. With Audio Player for WooCommerce, customers can listen to your songs or ringtone snippets before they buy.

Paid newsletters

if you have talent, knowledge, and experience — in almost any niche imaginable — you have expertise to share with an audience. You may share this on a blog to generate organic traffic, and that’s great. But you should also consider providing exclusive access to premium content. You can do this through a membership offering, but another popular option is to create a paid newsletter.

Once you’ve demonstrated your expertise and built a following, you can write a newsletter at consistent intervals (like weekly) and charge for access. And this doesn’t have to be educational — anyone with a following (for any reason) can drip content to followers in exchange for a fee.

Learn more about how to create a paid newsletter through a website and platform that you fully own and control.

Software licensing

Don’t forget that software is a digital product! Build out your app idea, create a plugin for WordPress, or develop a SaaS program. These kinds of things are usually a pretty big endeavor, but they’re still digital products with lots of potential to generate revenue.

WooCommerce is the ideal platform for doing business online. A major part of that? The library of extensions available for online store owners to quickly add functionality to their site. Qualified developers can contribute their extension to the marketplace. Learn more here.

Digital gift cards

Digital gift cards are a great way to add a convenient product option to your store. So even if you do sell physical products, add an online gift card option for another revenue opportunity without having to deal with additional inventory, SKUs, and fulfillment headaches.

Digital services

Do you offer consulting or other services? You can deliver these virtually and let customers schedule their session or appointment with WooCommerce Bookings.

Now that we’ve reviewed some types of digital products, let’s take a look at some real stores that are selling digitally online, all with WooCommerce.

French Today

French today offers all sorts of instructional material to help people learn how to speak French the way it’s really used in daily life. They offer audiobooks based on a variety of experience levels and niche subjects (like verb drills), a monthly audio magazine subscription, personalized Skype French lessons, and even learning apps.

CLS by BARBRI

This online store offers online education for individuals seeking a career in the legal field. Students can choose from a variety of courses and search for the right fit based on the school they’re attending, their location, their topic of focus, and more. They also have a bookstore where visitors can purchase the digital textbooks needed for their courses.

Each course is offered entirely online, and students can work through the subjects on their own time. In addition to more traditional payment methods, CLS by BARBRI allows customers to pay monthly (or in a set number of installments) to make things easier.

Cosmos Magazine

Cosmos is a print science magazine that’s delivered quarterly to dedicated subscribers. Their goal is to make science accessible to everyone, regardless of their experience and knowledge level. And they do this through high-quality photos, top-knotch writing, and clear explanations.

In addition to their print magazine, they also have an online digital edition that’s updated on a daily basis, along with digital versions of all of their back issues. Finally, they have a membership available that includes access to the digital version of the magazine, along with exclusive features. This is an excellent example of how print and digital can exist side by side.

FilterGrade

FilterGrade is an online marketplace that offers a huge library of digital assets for creators — Lightroom presets, photo overlays, Photoshop actions, and more. Each product is available in a few different license types, with different pricing for each.

TipoType

TipoType offers a catalog full of high-quality fonts that customers can use for their digital and print creations. Each font is available in a variety of styles and has several license types depending on the customer’s use case.

They also offer custom services, such as custom font licensing, unique font adaptations, and extended language coverage.

HousingWire

HousingWire is a digital library of information specifically for the real estate industry. There are individual and group licenses available, and customers can choose between a monthly or yearly subscription. There are also enterprise plans for larger businesses.

A HousingWire membership provides access to real estate news, market data, housing research, exclusive in-person events, and a newsletter just for subscribers.

The Sweet Setup

The Sweet Setup has more than 60,000 digital subscribers to their website, which offers paid courses, reviews, and articles around productivity. Available courses cover everything from time management and productivity to making the most of specific software.

The Focus Club Membership offers access to all of the tools and courses available on their site, along with a digital community and monthly office hours.

There are a variety of places you can sell digital products online. Let’s explore a few options, starting with the one that provides the most freedom, control, and flexibility.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a powerful ecommerce tool built specifically for WordPress