Does this sound familiar?

Let’s say you write an ebook on your favourite topic, package it up nicely, design a sleek cover, and price it at ₦5,000 per copy. You share it with your friends on social media, and naturally, everyone wants a copy, because who doesn’t love supporting a friend’s hustle?

So you upload it to a cloud drive and manually send the link to everyone who pays, after carefully confirming each payment yourself.

On launch day, you’re feeling pretty good about your system. Sure, it’s a bit manual, but hey, you’re living the dream, right?

Three days later? Not so much anymore because you’re drowning in messages, bank alerts are coming in at random times, and you honestly can’t keep track of who paid when anymore. The excitement has quickly turned into frustration.

Like any smart person, you head straight to Google and search “best platforms to sell my ebook online”, because what you really want is to focus on selling, not get buried under admin work.

Of course, there are plenty of e-commerce platforms out there that’ll let you sell just about anything, but which ones understand what you need as an African digital creator?

Whether you’re selling ebooks, courses, or other digital products, you need a platform that makes the whole process simple for both you and your customers.

In this article, we’ll cover the best platforms to sell digital products online, with a special focus on options that work well in Nigeria.

1. Selar

Probably the best of all time, Selar is an e-commerce platform that allows you to sell any kind of digital product or service anywhere in the world.

The platform is so easy to set up, such that you can upload your digital products and start selling in minutes.

You can host over 10 courses on Selar, upload your ebooks, worksheets, and templates, create compelling sales pages that convert, and tap into the affiliate network to give your revenue a nice boost.

It also comes with lots of relevant features like analytics, automated follow-ups, and payment flexibility.

Selar is a feature-rich platform for all your product needs and serves any kind of digital products – online video courses, audio, documents, resources, workbooks, and more securely in less than 5 minutes.

Unique Features Of Selar 

• Upload an ebook or any product without worrying about intellectual theft.
• Upload unlimited course videos without ever hitting storage limits or worrying about extra fees.
• Built-in analytics, customizable landing pages, and legal pages.
• You can connect your domain name if you want to build a solid brand.
• Create sales pages to boost sales of products.
• Abandoned cart emails to remind your customers of their pending order and get them to buy from you.
• Receive payouts in 24 hours or less.
• Incentivise your customers through coupon codes and discounts.
• Create membership sites and coaching programs for exclusive students of your choice.
• Sell tickets to your events, webinars, and coaching programs.
• Accept payment in 8 different currencies/PayPal/Stripe integration.
• Pre-launch your course seamlessly on Selar.
• Tailored for the African creator’s needs and serves this need with its diverse features.
• Leverage Selar’s 40K+ affiliates to promote your product and increase sales.

It’s free, sign up, and start selling on Selar.

Pricing: Selar has multiple subscription tiers, including Starter (free plan), Pro, Turbo, TurboPlus and Enterprise plan, with pricing that varies based on the features and capabilities you need. Annual subscriptions typically come with significant discounts. See pricing page for current rates and feature comparisons.

2. Gumroad

Founded in 2011, Gumroad is a platform where creators can host and sell their digital products.

More than just a hosting platform, Gumroad combines relevant features such as analytics, sales pages, and email marketing to help creators get paid for what they know.

Its payment methods are flexible, as it accepts all major credit cards like Mastercard, Visa, and more. Also, the company processes all payments through a proprietary payment gateway, rather than using pre-built solutions like Stripe. Unfortunately, the company doesn’t support cryptocurrencies, Apple Pay, or Skrill.

One of the unique features of Gumroad is its “Pay what you want” feature, which allows customers to enter any figure of their choice when paying for a product.

Registration is longer because you are required to enter accurate information to recommend your product on Gumroad Discover, which is a marketplace where you can see available products from other creators.

Gumroad uses PayPal to send payouts to creators, so you’ll need to have a PayPal account and connect it to Gumroad to receive payouts.

Pricing: Free to use, but charges you per sale. That is, if you sell a book for $50, Gumroad takes 10% + $0.5 processing fees.

LEARN: How to Easily Create and Sell Digital Products Online

3. Sellfy

Sellfy provides an easy-to-use platform to sell all kinds of products, both digital and physical. It provides the opportunity to sell digital products, physical products, print-on-demand merchandise, and so much more.

The unique feature of Sellfy is that it has built-in marketing tools that track your store’s performance and set up incentives to help your customers spend more.

Its print-on-demand feature lets you offer shirts, hoodies, hats, and mugs. It will print products as soon as orders come in and then send them to your customers. You don’t even have to lift a finger.

Other built-in features include discount codes, pixel tracking, email marketing, Stripe/PayPal integration, and landing pages.

Pricing: Starter ($29/month), Business ($79/month), Premium ($159/month). You can pay yearly or biannually.

4. Podia

Podia is an ideal platform for selling digital products like online courses, memberships, and downloads.

In essence, Podia is an e-commerce platform that supports you in selling all kinds of digital products online. You can create a website to sell your goods, leverage affiliates, or add a live chat widget to assist customers.

One unique feature about Podia is that it allows you to upload unlimited videos and files, so you never have to worry about storage. Also, you can have various price tiers for your products and use other marketing tools such as upsells, presells, and drip content.

Podia doesn’t charge a transaction fee, but you’ll still need to pay the Stripe and PayPal processing fees. If you want recurring payments, you can always create a membership program.

Unlike other platforms, Podia doesn’t offer a robust data analytics system; hence, you cannot make many data-driven decisions for your business.

Pricing: Free plan, Mover plan: $33/month, Shaker plan: $75/month, Earthquaker: $166/month.

LEARN: How to Build a 6-Figure Online Business With Digital Products

5. SendOwl

SendOwl makes it easy to sell digital products from websites and social media. It allows you to start and customise an online store that can be integrated into your website or blog in minutes.

You can also create social links that direct customers to your sites when you share them on social media.

SendOwl makes checkout and payment relatively easy. Customers can add to their cart and continue shopping, and it has flexible payment options. And if you want to add physical products to the card, it handles that for you.

One unique feature of SendOwl is that it supports multi-language and multi-currency transactions, and you can easily keep track of your store’s progress.

Pricing: Free, Starter ($15/month), Pro ($39/month), Premium ($99/month).

6. Teachable

Teachable is another one of the best places to sell digital products online. It is ideal for creators who want to sell online courses and coaching sessions. The platform is designed for creators and entrepreneurs who enjoy using other learning tools, such as online quizzes and coaching products, to teach.

With Teachable, you have a wide range of features to successfully sell your online course, collect payments without worrying about VAT or tax, track insights, and monitor student progress.

One of Teachable’s unique features is that you can easily build a checkout page with robust e-commerce features so you can get paid quickly without the need for third-party integrations.

Hence, creators can easily use Teachable with zero tech skills required.

Pricing: Free, Basic: $39/month, Pro: $119/month, Business: $299/month; 25% discount on annual plans.

LEARN: 10 Best Digital Products to Sell Online

7. Kajabi

Kajabi is designed for creators to sell online courses. Being an all-in-one platform, users can create, host, market, and distribute their courses on Kajabi.

One feature that makes Kajabi easily stand out is how it’s niched down to providing the best features for creators who want to sell online courses. Kajabi provides all the tools needed for easy course creation from start to finish.

They also provide other tools like website builder, product launch tools, and webinar funnels that helps you easily manage your online course business. Online course creators love Kajabi because you do not need to worry about coding.

Unlike Selar, Kajabi does not offer a free plan and the prices are slightly higher than the other platforms.

Pricing: Basic: $149/month, Growth:$199/month, Pro: $399/month; 20% discount on annual billing.

8. Payhip

Another one of the best places to sell digital products is Payhip. Payhip focuses on helping users who want to sell digital downloads do so easily.

You can use this platform to sell ebooks, online learning resources, software, files, and subscriptions.

Transactions done on Payhip are secure so you can sell your digital products from anywhere and get paid for it.

The checkout process is so seamless, as customers who pay will be able to download your products immediately. Even better, Payhip sends emails to your customers pointing them in direction of the download page.

The unique feature of Payhip is that you can digitally stamp your products to prevent customers from illegally sharing them.

And if you want to sell software, Payhip offers software keys so your product remains protected.

Pricing: Free, Plus: $29/month, Pro: $99/month.

LEARN: How to Sell Your Knowledge Online: Digital Creator 101

9. Bigcommerce

BigCommerce is an ideal e-commerce platform where you can sell all kinds of digital and physical products.

What makes this a full-option website is that it has all you need to get started in e-commerce and sell your digital products to anyone, anywhere.

You can design a website with templates to customize and use third-party apps to add more features to your online store.

One unique feature of Bigcommerce is that it is designed for expansion. So you can focus on growing your business without worrying about storage or anything. There’s also an in-built mobile optimisation so all your landing pages are automatically optimised for mobile.

If you add other features such as SEO, discounts, and email marketing, Bigcommerce makes a pretty good tool.

Pricing: Standard: $29.95/month, Plus: $79.95/month, Pro: $299.95/month

10. Shopify

Want to venture into e-commerce full-time? Think Shopify. Shopify is one of the best platforms to sell digital products, physical products, and in fact, anything online. It is an all-in-one platform for e-commerce

The platform has expanded to support e-commerce, Social commerce, and easy shopping with click-to-buy options.

The best part is that you have a wide array of third-party apps that you can integrate to get the full experience of e-commerce.

Shopify handles all your eCommerce needs from start to finish, such as site hosting, security, updates, apps, etc. You don’t need to buy hosting or a domain name. Shopify handles all that for you.

Also, there are lots of apps that integrate with Shopify, some of which can be pricey to use but offer a lot of advantages, such as adding more functionality to your store.

The downside to using this platform as a creator is that Shopify has its in-built payment system so you may have to pay a 2% extra fee to use third-party apps like PayPal.

Pricing: Basic: $32/month, Shopify: $92/month, Advanced: $299/month

What are the best platforms to sell digital products?

Here are the top ten platforms to sell digital products online and in Nigeria;

• Selar
• Gumroad
• Sellfy
• Podia
• SendOwl
• Teachable
• Kajabi
• Payhip
• Bigcommerce
• Shopify

When selecting a platform, there are a few things to consider. Some of these include: budget (especially for first-time creators), features, payment flexibility, and constraints.

Our advice would be to start with a platform designed for digital creators like Selar, then, as you grow, you can decide to incur more expenses and launch your site. It’s entirely up to you.

Selar makes it very easy to sell to anyone in any part of the world, receive payments, and get paid for what you know. It doesn’t get better than this!