You've made something people will pay for: a guide, a template pack, a course, a tool. Now you need somewhere to sell it. This page explains what you need to sell a digital product online, the three ways to put it together, and what changes when you own your site instead of renting a stall in someone else's marketplace.
This is not a guide to creating a digital product. It starts where that ends: you have something ready to sell, and you want to know what to sell it on.
This guide is written by Diane Corriette, founder of Djangify and a full-stack developer with over 15 years of experience helping independent professionals sell their expertise online. Djangify was built to sell my own digital products first, so everything here comes from actually running a business this way, not just building the software behind it.
Whatever you sell, whether it's a PDF, a template, a course or a tool, the same nine pieces have to exist somewhere. A marketplace bundles most of them for you. Selling from your own website means choosing each one, or choosing a system that includes them. Tick off the ones you already have below.
"An independent digital business takes more effort than a marketplace listing ever will. The reward is straightforward: the income is actually yours to keep."
- Diane Corriette, Djangify Founder
See exactly what marketplace fees cost you over a year, and what changes when you own your site instead.
See the difference between payment-processor fees (unavoidable) and marketplace fees (the ones you can cut).
Both remove marketplace fees entirely. The difference is how much server work you want to take on yourself.
Marketplace fees compound against you as you grow. The more you sell, the more you hand over. A fixed-cost, owned system flips that: your costs stay flat while your margin grows with every sale. The same logic applies to traffic. Marketplace visitors are rented, here for as long as the platform keeps sending them and gone the moment it doesn't.
Once you know what you need, there are three common ways to get it. None of them is wrong. They suit different stages and different appetites for setup.
Etsy, Gumroad, Payhip and similar platforms. You list the product and the platform provides the listing, checkout and delivery.
A common route is WordPress with an eCommerce plugin, a downloads plugin and a payment plugin.
A purpose-built tool that includes the pieces in one place: product pages, checkout, secure delivery, customer accounts, orders, pages and a blog, all managed from one admin.
If you want to test an idea quickly, a marketplace is a sensible place to start. If you already know you'll be selling for a long time, owning your site usually makes more sense, and you don't have to choose one or the other on day one. The FAQ at the bottom of this page covers moving across without losing customers.
An eCommerce builder is software that gives you a working online site without you having to piece it together. For digital products, that means it handles the full journey from "someone finds your product" to "they've downloaded it and can come back for more".
Here is what to expect it to cover, whichever builder you look at:
That list is valuable even if you never use Djangify. It's the checklist to hold any option up against.
Djangify is an eCommerce builder made only for digital products. It comes in two forms: managed hosting, where I run the servers for you, and self-hosted, where you own the code and run it yourself. The full comparison explains which fits you, and how the eCommerce builder works shows what happens behind the scenes. If you'd rather see it in action, you can "buy" dummy products and walk through the whole customer journey in the live demo.
Selling the owned way means your site runs on your own domain, your payment processor pays out directly to you, and your customer list belongs to you rather than to a marketplace algorithm. There's no revenue share that grows as you succeed, and you have more freedom and control over what happens with your own digital business.
What doesn't come with it is a marketplace's search traffic. Places like Etsy and Gumroad have buyers who are already searching inside their own ecosystem, which makes a listing easier to find, although plenty of sellers struggle to be found even there. An owned site starts with none of that built in.
That is the real trade: independence in exchange for extra work. It's a little like building and owning your own house instead of renting one that's already furnished.
Owning your site means the search traffic a marketplace hands you for free doesn't come with it. Every visitor has to be earned, through search-led content, social platforms used with a clear purpose rather than a dozen used generically, and email capture that turns a one-time visit into a relationship you own. It's slower than plugging into a marketplace's existing audience, and it compounds in a way marketplace traffic never does: the work stays yours, and so does everyone it brings in.
That work is yours on any platform. Djangify builds the SEO foundations into your site, but it can't write your articles, set up Google Search Console or bring you visitors. Your site is where the sale happens. Getting people there is down to you.
The real math behind marketplace fees vs a fixed-cost system.
A full breakdown of Etsy and Gumroad vs owning your site.
What each option includes, what you are responsible for, and which one fits how you want to work.
The trust signals that turn a first-time visitor into a buyer.
Why a lightweight, digital-only system beats a bloated platform.
How to build search trust and authority without a personal brand.
From the Builder
The Self-Hosted Digital eCommerce Builder gives you the full Djangify codebase, checkout, delivery, customer accounts, blog and SEO tools, on your own hosting, for one payment instead of a recurring cut of every sale.
No. Djangify is for selling digital products you have already made. You bring the PDF, template, course, tool or other file, and Djangify provides the checkout, secure delivery and customer accounts around it. See how it works
Managed hosting and self-hosted licences are both flat, predictable costs, never a percentage of what you sell — see current pricing on the product page. Compare that to a 10% marketplace fee: on 500 sales of a £40 product, that's £2,000 a year gone in fees alone, and it grows every year you sell more. Djangify's cost stays exactly the same whether you sell five products or five thousand. See pricing
Yes. You upload your own products directly, there's no lock-in period or platform approval process to go through first. Your customer list belongs to you from the first sale, which means you can email them, launch new products to them, and build an actual relationship, rather than processing a transaction and losing contact the moment it's done.
Yes. Checkout, encrypted file delivery with per-purchase download limits, and customer accounts are all built into the core system, not bolted on with third-party plugins that need their own updates and their own security patches. A customer pays, their file unlocks automatically, and they can log back in any time to re-download it. How it works
Nine things: a finished product, a place to sell it, a payment system, secure delivery, customer accounts, email, a way to attract visitors, trust and legal pages, and a way to manage orders. A marketplace bundles most of these for you. On your own website you either choose each piece or use an eCommerce builder that includes them.
An eCommerce builder is software that gives you a working online site without you assembling it from separate parts. For digital products, it covers product pages, checkout, secure file delivery, customer accounts, orders and the pages and blog around them, all managed from one admin.
Yes. You need a way to take payments, deliver the file securely, give customers an account to download again, and send order emails. You can build that from separate plugins, or use an eCommerce builder such as Djangify that includes it. Either way you keep your customer list and the sale goes to your own payment account.
Djangify gives you everything you need to sell: your own site, checkout, secure delivery, customer accounts and the SEO foundations that help search engines understand your site. What it can't do is make your product sell or bring you visitors. That comes from the work you do, such as publishing helpful content, setting up Google Search Console and building an audience. The same is true of every platform, which is why nobody expects Shopify or a marketplace to do the selling for them.
Add up the platform's percentage plus payment processing fees against your actual sales volume. On 500 sales of a £40 product at a 10% marketplace fee, that's roughly £2,000 a year gone before any other costs. Over five years at the same volume, that's £10,000 handed over for something Djangify charges a flat monthly fee for (see current pricing on the product page), regardless of how much you sell. The percentage model gets worse exactly when your business is doing well, which is the part most sellers don't notice until they actually run the numbers.
No. Managed hosting sets your site up automatically the moment you pay: you log in, add your products, connect Stripe and start selling, no server, no code, no configuration. Self-hosting is available if you want full control instead — if you can ask Claude to do something and follow the steps it gives you, you can do this. It comes with a written deployment guide plus an AI-assisted setup file for exactly that reason.
No, and you don't have to choose one or the other on day one. Keep selling on a marketplace while you build your own site, and point new buyers there once it's live. From that point on, every new customer is yours: their email, their order history, their ability to buy from you again, none of it routes through the platform. Existing marketplace customers stay exactly where they are unless you actively bring them across.
Self-hosted means you run the code on your own VPS and handle updates, backups and security yourself, for a one-off licence fee. Managed hosting means Djangify runs the infrastructure for you, your site is ready the moment you pay, for a flat monthly fee — see current pricing on the product page. Both give you the same software, the same ownership of your data and customer list, and skip marketplace commission entirely. The only real difference is who's responsible for the server.
You build it deliberately: search-led blog content answering the exact questions your buyer types into Google, one or two social platforms used with a real purpose rather than a dozen used generically, and an email list that turns a one-time visitor into your own audience instead of the platform's. It takes longer than the traffic a marketplace hands you automatically. It also doesn't come with a fee attached, and it doesn't disappear the moment a platform changes its algorithm or its rules.
Yes. Djangify supports British pounds, US dollars, euros, Canadian dollars and Australian dollars. You set your currency once in the admin and it updates across the whole site.
Plan 30 or 90 days of content for your site, in your own voice.
Every feature, architecture decision and update behind the software you'd be running, tracked as it happens.
A full comparison of what you get, give up and take on with each hosting option.