Over the last few years, Etsy has taken over the creators and crafting market. From selling handcrafted goods to digital items, like images, vector art, fonts, and much more. It’s a marketplace for creators and drives people to your products. But Etsy has some challenges.

For starters, you have to pay to list your items, then Etsy charges extra fees. This includes fees based on sales, converting currencies, off-site advertising, and stocking. And don’t forget you still have merchant fees on top of the other fees. Shark Tank winner, Wendy’s Gnome Shop, is an excellent example of how Etsy fees impact your bottom line. She started her business on Etsy earning more than $600K but only pocketed $138K after fees. Wouldn’t it be nice to keep more of that income for yourself?

The next challenge is the marketplace itself. While listing items and having people find your items through Etsy’s search is convenient, your products are lumped in with competing products. 

We aren’t here to suggest you ditch Etsy altogether, but you should consider Etsy as a part of your business model rather than the only way you sell online. Let Etsy be the breadcrumbs to your website. In addition to selling on Etsy, set up your own website and take control of the sales process.

On a website platform like Zibster, you control how much you earn from each sale. The only fee per sale is a merchant processing fee, that’s it. You can sell virtually anything, and that includes digital products. 

Digital product sales are a growing area! If you sell digital products, like guides, ebooks, art, photographs, comics, novels, fonts, or vector design elements, Zibster makes selling a cinch. And you won’t need third-party storage systems. No DropBox or WeTransfer is needed to send digital products to your customers. Just upload your files to the Zibster file and document sections. Then use the Zibster file link as the direct download link when you set up the product for sale. This enables you to set how many times someone can download it and how long, by setting an expiration date. If you sell files larger than 4MB, you’ll want our premium feature, Original Files. It lets you store, share, and sell files up to 50MB each.

Learn how to set up a product for digital download

Once you have your products set up, you can start promoting your website and driving traffic to your online store. You can use the built-in email marketing campaign tool to send targeted emails, social media, and even your Etsy store to let your customers and leads know you have a website with more products (and even better offers). You may choose to only list a taste of your products on Etsy, with even more options on your website. This can help lure the die-hard fans of your products from Etsy to your website.

Selling from your own website gives you control to sell your products the way you want, to build a community with your customers, and to build your brand beyond the Etsy marketplace and its looming fees.

Want to learn more about how to build a website and sell digital products online? Or want us to build your website for you? Contact our team by phone at 844.353.3412 or visit zibster.com to start a live chat.