Platforms for selling digital products charge around 10% of every sale. In exchange, you get a listing page that looks nearly identical to every other seller's on that platform, and file delivery that is not nearly as hard to set up yourself as most people assume. That trade gets harder to justify the more you sell. Sell €10,000 worth of digital products through Gumroad and €1,000 of it has gone to Gumroad's account, not yours.
The practical alternative is not complicated. You own the product page, the buyer pays through it, and immediately sees a link to your file — a Google Drive folder, a Dropbox link, a Notion duplicate URL, whatever you set up. There is no platform in the middle taking a percentage.
What counts as a digital download
A digital download is any product where delivery is a file. Payment goes through, the buyer gets a link or an attachment. No shipping, no inventory, nothing that runs out at midnight.
Common categories:
- eBooks and PDF guides
- Photo presets (Lightroom, Capture One)
- Canva, Figma, or Adobe templates
- Notion databases and planning systems
- Music and audio samples
- Video tutorials or course modules delivered as downloadable files
- Spreadsheet tools and calculators
- Fonts and design assets
- Workbooks, planners, and written resources
The practical implication of "no physical stock" is that marginal cost per sale is near zero. Once the file exists, selling one copy or a thousand copies costs the same amount of your time. That is why a percentage fee model is particularly expensive in this category. Every additional sale adds revenue, but the platform extracts a cut of every single one.
The platform route versus the direct route
The decision most digital product sellers face at the start: upload to Gumroad, Etsy, or a similar platform, or sell directly with your own product page.
The platform route has one real advantage: built-in discoverability. Gumroad and similar platforms show your listing to people browsing the platform. If you have no audience and no other way to drive traffic, that can matter in the early stages.
For most sellers, that advantage disappears quickly. If your traffic comes from Instagram, TikTok, a newsletter, or search, you are driving buyers to the platform yourself. At that point you are paying 10% per sale for file hosting and a checkout form.
That is the gap NanoCart fills. You get a product page with built-in checkout — Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay — but without the percentage cut. You pay a flat monthly fee (from €2.50/month), and the money goes directly to you minus only the payment processor's standard fee.
How delivery works with NanoCart
You create a product page in NanoCart with photos, a description, and a price. In the post-purchase section, you add the link to your file — a Google Drive link, a Dropbox folder, a Notion duplicate URL, or any other URL where the buyer can access the product. After payment, NanoCart shows that link to the buyer on the confirmation screen. No manual messages, no emailing files by hand.
You host the file wherever you want. Google Drive, Dropbox, your own server, a Notion page — NanoCart does not care. You just paste the link, and the buyer sees it only after paying.
Setup time for the whole thing: about 20 minutes. If you are connecting Stripe, the verification step takes 1 to 3 business days. Start that as early as possible, because it is the only part you cannot finish immediately. PayPal works immediately if you have an existing account.
What you actually need
Pricing digital downloads
The most common mistake: setting a price that competes with free.
If you sell a Lightroom preset pack for €5, you are in direct competition with free packs from YouTube tutorials. Buyers who compare on price will always find something cheaper. Buyers who compare on quality, specificity, or fit for their niche will pay more. Pricing too low signals low value, not accessibility.
Petra sells Lightroom presets for film photographers from Prague. She launched at €9.90 and got a few sales from Instagram. She raised the price to €24 without changing anything else on the page. Conversion went from 1.8% to 2.4%. Revenue per visitor more than doubled. Her explanation: buyers at €9 were comparing her to free options. Buyers at €24 were comparing her to other paid preset packs, which felt like a different category. If presets are your category, that pricing effect usually gets even stronger because buyers compare packs side by side.
General price ranges for solo digital products:
- Single asset (one preset, one template): €5 to €25
- Packs (10 presets, full Notion system, template bundle): €19 to €75
- Guides and eBooks: €12 to €49
- Comprehensive tools or courses: €49 to €199
Starting at the lower end of your target range and raising the price after the first 5 to 10 reviews is reasonable. But do not start so low that raising later feels like a large jump, or that early buyers feel like they were given a good deal you then took away.
Getting the first buyers
Traffic for digital products comes from the same places as any other product: social media, search, communities, and existing audience. The difference is that digital products have a structural advantage in organic search that physical products rarely have.
The topic of the product is often a keyword people search for. A preset pack for Sony film simulations ranks for related search terms if the product page description uses those terms naturally. An eBook on pricing strategy for freelancers ranks for "how to price freelance services" if the page is written with that intent. For physical product sellers, most pages are too specific to rank for anything significant. For digital product sellers, the product itself is often the answer to a question people are typing into Google.
For social traffic: show the process, not just the product. Photographers who post a before/after using their own presets sell more presets than photographers who post "link in bio to buy." Template creators who show a real Notion system being filled in sell more templates than those who show a static screenshot. The content that performs is almost always the one that answers "what does this actually do?"
Lena sells financial planning spreadsheet templates for freelancers from Berlin. Her first 10 sales came from a single thread on Twitter about how she tracks her income, where she mentioned the template at the end as "the spreadsheet I actually use, if anyone wants it." She sold 11 copies in two days at €18 each from one organic post with no paid promotion.
A before/after edit with your presets. A screen recording filling in your Notion template. A full page from your guide. Physical sellers cannot hand out the product to demonstrate it. Digital sellers can show exactly what is inside without giving it away, and that transparency converts better than describing features in bullet points.
Questions that come up
"My product is a Notion template. How do I deliver it?" In NanoCart, you add the Notion duplicate link in the post-purchase section. The buyer pays, sees the link on the confirmation screen, clicks it, and duplicates the page to their own Notion workspace. Same flow as any other digital product — just a different URL.
If your product is specifically a template business, go deeper on positioning, use-case clarity, and what the buyer can copy in five minutes. Those details matter more than the file format itself.
"What if someone shares the download link?" The link you add to NanoCart can point to anything. If you want to limit access, use a Google Drive link with restricted sharing, or a service like Payhip or Gumroad as pure file hosting (without their checkout). For most solo creators selling under €100, the audience willing to pay is large enough that DRM overhead costs more in friction for legitimate buyers than it recovers from the minority who share links.
"What if I update the file after launch?" Keep the same product page. Note in the description that the version is current as of a given date. For buyers who already purchased, a one-time email with the updated file is fair if the update is significant. Most buyers do not expect automatic lifetime updates unless you specifically promised them.
Your action plan
- Finish the file. If it is not done, nothing else on this list matters.
- Host the file somewhere: Google Drive, Dropbox, your own server. Get the download link.
- Create a NanoCart account. Add photos, a description that addresses a specific use case (not just the format), a price, and paste your download link in the post-purchase section.
- Connect Stripe or PayPal. If you choose Stripe, start verification now — it takes 1 to 3 business days.
- Make one piece of content showing what the product does: a before/after, a screen recording, a use case example. Publish it with the link to your NanoCart product page.
- Share once. Check what happens. Do not wait until you have 10 pieces of content before selling.