value of digital goods in ecommerce

It wasn’t long ago when businesses were only associated with a physical store. However, the concept of digital goods has emerged in the past decade. Digital products have gained much recognition since the Internet's emergence. Even though they cannot be considered replacements for physical goods, they are highly beneficial and provide customer satisfaction.

If you are an entrepreneur, it is not rocket science to know that you need business capital to operate a business successfully. For example, if you run a clothing shop, you must hire staff members, buy stocks, and pay for pre-operating systems. As you make plans regarding your business, there is a chance that this list will grow even further. One good thing about these online products is that they don’t have an expiration date, which means that your business will not be under any financial risk.

What are Digital Goods?

Digital goods are the types of products that you either buy or sell, but they don’t possess tangible features. You cannot smell or sense these products, but you can enjoy their services. You can easily create or sell digital products on your respective eCommerce websites. If you want to earn revenue for your business, the best way of doing so is by selling these products online is the best way to do so. You have an infinite inventory stock when you bring them to the market.

Pet Milestone Cards site
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website

Digital goods can be considered a great collection to sell because it reduces the business's risk. As a business owner, you don’t need to worry about deadstock as you have a digital reservoir at your disposal. Moreover, you don’t need to put a lot of investment upfront. Once you have identified the products to be sold, it will be easier for you to distribute them without investing much effort. You don’t need to look into the promotional materials as such, as everything else will be taking place in the online realm.

Best Ways to Make Digital Goods

1) Brainstorm Ideas

When you think about starting a business, brainstorming is always the first stage. Regardless of what business type you prefer, you have to brainstorm your ideas to create the perfect picture for your business plans. You can relate it to the example of starting a car. When you start a car, you don’t go to the fourth gear right away. You must make your way to that gear, and if you have any stumbles along the way, you go back to the previous gear. The same is the case with a business plan, you must follow a sequential plan to get the best out of it.

To sell digital products online, you must initially brainstorm ideas about your digital goods. You can then create a mind map, ensuring that all of your crafted ideas can be translated well. If you have an online team to work with, you must give equal importance to all of the suggestions and insights. By doing so, your teammates would be interested in working with you and hoping to make the most out of your digital goods.

2) Check Marketing Trends

Just because you have digital products to sell doesn’t mean that everyone will start hurrying toward you and buying products. As a business owner, you must note that you cannot sell digital goods when no one seems interested in them. Therefore, it is essential to look into the marketing trends to understand how good your products are. By researching your products, you will have an idea about their potential when you bring them to the market.

You can also research the demographic profiles of your target market. As a result, you will have an idea about the products that will look attractive to them. If you can fulfill their demands, it will only benefit your online sales and conversion rate.

For example, the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in many educational institutes getting closed. As a result, the students were getting lectures via online classes. Moreover, the teachers started providing free online courses for their students. You can do the same and provide online courses of different subjects in the form of digital goods. You can even create an educational website on Strikingly and add your online courses there.

Sell Digital Goods on Your Strikingly Website

1) Choose Online Store Template

It is common knowledge that if you want to sell digital products online, you need to create a website. After all, a website is the best way in the modern age to attract audiences towards your selling products. You must create an eye-catching website that has similar standards to the digital goods you would be selling. Before you think about adding your online products, you must consider an online store template.

Strikingly provides its users with exquisite website templates, which can be easily customized according to your business ideas and niche. Most importantly, our provided templates are mobile-friendly, so we haven’t ignored the traffic coming from mobile phones. Strikingly allows you to build a quality website design without writing a single line of code, which means that you don’t require any coding expertise to build your design on our platform.

strikingly website template

Image taken from Strikingly

Gone are the days when the website templates were only associated with the desktop version. As the years have passed, the number of mobile users has leapfrogged the number of desktop users. Therefore, you must prioritize the traffic coming from cell phones as well. Strikingly allows its users to switch their website version from desktop to mobile (and vice versa).

2) Add a Simple Store

You need a simple store to your business website to sell different types of digital products. This is the section that the customers will visualize before buying the digital goods from your store.

strikingly online store

Image taken from Strikingly

Like most of the elements on your Strikingly website, you can modify the simple store section depending on your preferences. As the website owner, you will have the authority to change your layout and the background according to your demands. If you are a beginner, you can afford to experiment with different website designs and choose the best one for your business plan. Strikingly provides multiple features to create the most exciting website design for your platform.

3) Connect Your Domain

Once you have customized your website template and added a simple store, the next step involves the connection of the domain to the website. You must note that you cannot sell digital goods if you don’t have a domain connected to your website. If you don’t have a domain yet, we offer it at the price of $24.95 every year or free for 1 year if you subscribe to any of our Yearly plans.

pricing list
Image taken from Strikingly

A domain name can also be considered a website name. When you create your online store, your domain name mustn’t overlap with any other business owners, or it will confuse your target audience. Similarly, .com is the most common domain extension. However, the domain extension may change according to your business niche. For example, if people establish a fundraiser website, they go for a .org domain extension. Otherwise, you can also look into the domain extensions that are offered for each country i.e. .uk for the United Kingdom, .pk for Pakistan, ch for Switzerland, etc.

4) Upload Your Products

When you upload your digital goods on Strikingly, you must select “Digital Downloads” as your product type. Now, you can proceed to all product attributes, such as product name, meta-description, image, price, etc. A quality product image is extremely important for representation purposes. Strikingly supports the following image formats on its platform:

  • Document: .pdf, .doc, .ppt, .pptx, .odt, .odp
  • Image: .jpg, .png, .gif
  • Audio: .mp3, .mp4
  • Zip Files: .zip, .rar

5) Add Payment Gateways

Finally, you must look into the payment options of your online store. As a business owner, you cannot provide a singular way of payment and expect all your customers to send their payments. For example, international customers like certain products but cannot buy them due to the lack of payment options. This won’t do good reading on your online store. It would also teach you that displaying quality online products isn’t everything.

accept payments

Image taken from Strikingly

Strikingly helps you easily add multiple payment gateways to your site. As you can see from the picture above, Stripe, PayPal, and Square are the three payment gateways provided on our platform. We also give our customers to convert the product price according to their country's currency before conducting their online transaction.

Conclusion

After following all of the above-mentioned steps, there is no doubt that you will create an eye-catching online store for your online products. These products have opened the door for both customers and entrepreneurs worldwide. These are the kind of products that can be enjoyed virtually by a wide range of the market.

By building a quality online store on Strikingly, you can sell and promote your digital products effectively. If you are struggling to build your online store or implement the website features on your platform, you can talk to our Happiness Officers. By learning more about the website features on Strikingly, you can promote your digital goods and give plenty of reasons for the customers to buy them from your store.