If you've been following The Lux List! for awhile, you know we constantly rave about digital products. Outside of the freedom to work anywhere and the passive income, there are tons of other benefits linked to selling digital products that's made it super popular. It It's like you can't even get on social media these days without seeing someone promoting their newest digital product.
In this blog post, we'll explore the top advantages and disadvantages of selling digital products to help you make an informed decision on whether or not, it's right for you. Check it out below:
Advantages:
Passive Income: Who doesn't love easy money? Creating passive income is one of the easier ways to build recurring revenue in business with little effort over time. With digital products, you don’t have to create a product every time a customer orders from you. You simply create one product, upload it on a website, and drive traffic. You can even automate the entire selling process to make it easier to attain customers, make sales, and then earn income passively.
Personal Freedom: You can sell digital products from anywhere, to anywhere — digital products put no limits on your lifestyle or your office space. All you need are a phone or a laptop.
Low Overhead Costs: Costs to produce digital products are generally low because you don't have to hire a ton of people, buy tons of materials, store inventory, or have an office or warehouse.
Easier to Reach Target Market: Because your marketplace is online, you’re not bound to a brick-and-mortar location where your only potential customer base is dependent upon your local area. You can create ads and marketing campaigns to reach your target market.
No Inventory Management: There’s no need to store products, manage inventory or be stuck buying a minimum order quantity when selling digital products.
No Shipping Required: Not having to do fulfillment can bring fulfillment! With digital products, there's no packing orders and mailing out shipments daily to weekly saving you time, stress, and money.
Easy Automation: The entire process of selling digital products can be automated saving you tons of time!
Lower Barrier-to-Entry: It generally costs less to create digital products vs physical products, and anyone can create a digital product... especially using PLR.
High Profit Margins: Digital products are generally inexpensive to make, and once finalized, you generally only have to create the product once for it to be sold an unlimited number of times. Plus, there are lower overhead costs — because of this, digital products have the potential for a very healthy profit margin.
No Wear and Tear: Digital products can last a long time because they’re not subject to the same kind of wear and tear that physical products experience. You may have to update from time to time, but that's totally dependent on you and the types of digital products you sell.
Unlimited Stock: There's no selling out of digital products so you’ll never miss out on sales.
Low Risk: Selling digital products is a much lower-risk option than selling physical products because the process to develop and deliver them isn't as cumbersome.
Sold on digital products? Let's get to the disadvantages so you can make the best decision for you...
Disadvantages:
Easy to Replicate: Since digital products are sent out online, they can be easy to copy, duplicate, replicate, and share with others without your permission. You can limit these types of unauthorized disclosures using expiring links, license keys, watermarks, source code protection, PDF stamping, and digital product distribution platforms that offer product-specific security features.
Not Tangible: Digital products can’t actually be held by a customer (unless they’re printed as a book, t-shirt, etc.), which may bother some customers because they feel the need to have something tangible as a takeaway.
Some Customers Don’t Understand Digital Products: It's hard to believe, but there are still a league of people in the world that don't understand digital products. Some customers still expect all products that are sold online to be physical products that they’ll receive in the mail, so it’s important to be extremely clear and direct on your website when an item is only distributed electronically.
Lower Perceived Quality: Some customers may perceive digital products to be of less value than printed products because they exist in an intangible form.
Repeat Buyer Issues: Once a customer buys a digital product there’s no need to re-buy it. This may challenge you to get more creative as to how you offer recurring types of digital based products and services (like digital membership, subscription services, challenges, etc.) to help attain repeat business.
Competitive Market: Because creating some digital products have low risks and barriers to entry, it can be a very competitive landscape to exist in as an e-commerce platform.
Some Restrictions Apply: While digital products may not face the same restrictions that physical products face, digital products still face some sales channel restrictions. For example, Facebook and Instagram list “primarily selling physical goods” as a criteria for their business approval requirements and limit the selling of digital products through their shopping platform.
So there you have it! In our opinion, you should take advantage of selling digital products today. Leave us a comment and let us know if you're on #TeamDigitalProducts or #TeamPhysicalProducts!
P.S,-We have over 200 done for you digital products to help you kickstart your digital product journey.