18 Digital Product Ideas For Almost Every Small Business

17 min read

Digital products have two heavy advantages over physical goods: no shipping and no inventory. Now is the perfect time to sell e-goods: people in quarantine have time and lots of it. And they’re looking to learn something new or take up a hobby — that’s where e-books, DIY projects, tutorials and other digital products come in.

You might think that creating a digital product requires special knowledge and talent. Well, if we talk about music and art, that is definitely the case. But e-goods are more than just songs or pictures, and some of them require no more than a well-thought-out plan and some time to create them.

Check out a pretty diverse list of profitable digital products to sell and learn how you can add them to your store.

In this post:

What Are Digital Products and Services?

Digital products or e-goods are any products that exist in digital form. Common examples are different types of digital media (books, music, images), tickets, software. Professional services can also be sold as digital products. For instance, if you’re a teacher, you can sell online courses that you’ve created.

Who Can Sell Digital Products

If you have expertise or skills in any field, you can make money with digital products.

Are you great at sewing? Sell sewing patterns or tutorials to beginners or pros.

Does everyone compliment your cooking? Sell ready-made meal plans. Great for customers looking to save time!

Here’s who can benefit from selling digital products:

Online store owners. They can add e-goods to broaden the range of products.
Aspiring entrepreneurs who don’t have a huge budget but can put some time and effort into creating a product. Selling e-goods is an almost risk-free way of starting a business.
Experts who want to have additional income. Put your knowledge and skills into a digital product — this way you’ll be able to earn money even on vacation.

What are Examples of Digital Products?

Digital products are often used to teach and instruct, for example, cook, sew, take care of pets and plants, play a musical instrument, or design their Instagram account. Or, e-goods can serve as entertainment (movies, songs, videos).

Find your perfect product below with a few ideas for digital products!

1. E-books

With the rise of mobile devices, e-books are getting more and more popular.

The content can vary as much as:

Student books
Guides
Magazines
Manuals
Stories
Scripts
Articles
Comics
Novels, and more

It’s best for those who own an educational business; sellers of complicated products like electronics; kids’ stores; and housekeeping products. Also, if you are targeting the fitness and healthcare niche, it opens opportunities to create training guides, diaries, and diet schedules.

You can sell books both in print and in digital form, just like RETRO Video Game Magazine does:

RETRO Video Game Magazine

Tip: Make audio versions of your e-books and sell “E-book + Audio book” sets to increase average order amount.

You can also sell shorter, compact magazines for your online store. For example, if you sell cosmetics, you can review new products, share skin care tips and healthy recipes, or interview customers.

Sell magazines at a lower price, offer them as gifts, or share samples on your social media pages. A great way to engage your audience and build a community of your customers.

Also: How to Create and Sell an E-book

2. Music and audio products

If you are a musician born in the 21st century — how lucky you are!

With all those modern instruments, tools, software, the variety of music genres, and the power of the internet. Now could be your opportunity to start!

Selling music products in your online store is a great way to fundraise money for recording your first album. If you are good at singing and playing musical instruments, try selling:

Songs
Jingles
Beats
Covers (remember to take care of the copyright)
Ringtones
Soundtracks
Voice recordings for podcasts and ads

There’s one more product you can create with nothing but your own voice — audio books!

Just like with cover songs, it’s important to avoid violating someone’s copyright, but some research and contacts with authors will bring success, on the condition that you have a decent pronunciation and a magnetic voice.

Yossi Sassi Band offers a digital limited edition of their album

3. Research

If you know enough about statistics and data, why don’t you do research for people who need them?

Check out the research store by Business Insider — you can make quite a fortune with this type of service.

Business Insider

4. Tutorials

It’s never too late to learn — and that’s a bottomless pit of opportunities to teach somebody something.

Let’s say your online store sells guitars. Opportunity detected! You can sell tutorials on how to play them. This is true for many other niches, too.

Tom McLaughlin sells online and offline classes on woodworking. In his online store, you can buy plans alongside video tutorials and archived classes on how to create awesome wooden products.

Epic Woodworking

Tutorials and courses can be recorded on video or in audio format.

With the rising popularity of video content — it’s easier than ever to record on your smartphone and use free video editors.

Tip: Upload tutorials one by one and then sell a whole course with a discount.

Also: “Look! We’re Learning!”: How to Sell Digital Goods for Homeschooling

5. Software

Who is on the other side — a talented developer? In that case, you may find it interesting to see how Teemigs sells software on Facebook!

Teemigs

Your projects have been waiting in a corner of your hard drive long enough. If you are a beginner in coding, there’s nothing better to test your skills than getting out there and giving it a try.

6. Web Elements

Sortfolio alone lists about 1.5 million web design studios — needless to say, this job is very sexy today.

Besides regular projects, almost every web designer creates something “from the heart” from time to time. It may be stickers, clip art, buttons — generally speaking, products of random inspiration. Guess what our advice is? At least, add a store to your Facebook page to sell them.

7. Blueprints and plans

Just like the example above, SDS Plans sells house, garage, and cabin plans — only without teaching you how to build them.

Architects may find it a nice approach to online presence: it might be easier to promote a store with ready-made plans than by completing individual orders.

SDS Plans

8. Recipes

Recipes can be sold to many people — not only housewives.

If you have a food blog, recipes will be a good way to monetize it. If you’ve got a cookie recipe from your grandmother, but you do not want to open your own bakery, you can make a website and sell the recipe to restaurants, bakeries, and cuisine magazines.

Do not neglect your cooking skills or the secret family recipes you know — you can win a contest and add value to your recipe by rewarding it with a medal.
Choose Instagram for your marketing strategy, learn more about beautiful food photography, and share links to recipes on your online store.

Tenina Holder’s website is a source of inspiration for many foodies.

Cooking with Tenina

Read her success story about becoming an author of top-selling cookbooks here: Cooking with Tenina: A Recipe for E-commerce Success

Apart from single recipes, you can sell meal plans. For example, a whole menu for a week or a special occasion with tips on making cooking easier and more convenient.

9. Tickets

A lot of stores sell tickets. Nowadays, you can buy tickets for every kind of performance, from comedy shows to wrestling. If you are putting on an event of any kind, tickets are a great digital product to sell online.

10. DIY printables

Geometry fans will absolutely love this. Polygonal Paper is a unique store that sells blueprints and plans, which you can print and use to make your own trophy head, from lions to unicorns. Not a single animal was hurt!

These sculptures are super light and easy to DIY, but the store owners still provide you with video tutorials and recommendations for the paper. Thanks, guys, for being with us.

polygonal paper

Think out of the box and you’ll find more DIY product ideas — some of which are really surprising.

11. Photography

Photos are a popular digital product to sell online. But rather than submitting your photos to photo stock websites that normally pay the owner as little as 30% of the deal, consider opening an additional sales channel. Most photographers tend to have their own websites with a photo gallery.

It’s a matter of minutes to add a store to your website and sell photographs.

12. Posters

These are basically high-resolution images that your customers buy to print in any size they want. A convenient solution, as big printed posters may crease during shipping.

Even if you’re not an artist, you can use various online design tools to create your posters (some of them are free, like Canva).

Here are some examples of posters you can sell:

motivational
educational (schemes, tables, graphs for students)
decorative
with memes
lists and planners for customers to write on them.

Posters also make great merch: you can sell images with your logo or signature design or offer them as a gift to loyal customers.

Northbound Coffee Roasters

If your audience loves posters, you can also make other merchandise like t-shirts or mugs with Printful.

13. Maps

If you’re a travel enthusiast or a travel blogger, create maps and itineraries with unusual and picturesque places you’ve visited. Or, a more advanced alternative — a map for GPS navigators.

After the quarantine people will be up for adventures and now is a great time to create amazing maps to meet that demand.

You can also sell travel guides like Go! Girl Guides does

14. Checklists

A checklist is the simplest type of e-goods, that’s why it’s one of the most popular digital products. You can create a checklist for almost anything, for example:

making a capsule wardrobe
decluttering your home
getting ready for traveling
choosing running equipment

Checklist content is easy to digest and especially popular on social media. Lots of Instagram influencers sell them to diversify their income. Try adding them to your product list!

15. Patterns and designs for sewing, knitting, embroidery

Products for DIY hobbies are one of the online shopping trends during the quarantine. People take up new hobbies or replace store bought items with homemade ones. That’s where good instruction comes in handy.

Turn your products into patterns and think about adding video courses too!

Je Suis Lugly!

16. Pictures for social media profiles

This type of product is often overlooked though it’s one of the successful digital product ideas. People looking to enhance their profile or blog need unique images. And free stock photos don’t offer much variety. Create a catalog of images for Instagram Highlights covers, Facebook groups covers, templates for Pinterest pins, illustrations for posts and articles.

If you have a blog, use the “Buy Now” button to promote your products.

17. Templates

Templates make our routine easier: they help create presentations, design blog covers, or make infographics. There are also templates for DIY projects, scrapbooking, designing clothes, rooms and so on. With the range of products, you can come up with a template of any purpose and complexity.

Instarguide

18. Game and party scripts

Do you like hosting parties? Put your talent to use and make scripts for dinners, corporate parties, team buildings, or school events. Creating a unique party takes time and preparation, help your customers save time and energy by doing the work for them!

If you’re not ready to write a whole script, come up with a fun game that your customers can print to play with their family, students, or colleagues.

How to Start Selling Digital Products

The easiest way to start selling digital goods is to create an online store with Ecwid Ecommerce. Here’s how you can do that:

If you have a website or a blog, add an online store to it
Or, use our Instant Site with a built-in online store.

You can sell e-goods on all paid plans (starting from $15/mo.) All you have to do is to upload a file in your Control Panel, set a price, and choose a payment option. Learn more about adding and managing digital products in our Help Center.

Adding a digital product to an Ecwid store

After customers pay for your digital goods, they’ll receive a download link at the email they entered at checkout.

As the prime cost of digital products is low, you can give discounts to promote your e-goods. Also, you can sell several products in sets to increase the average order amount.

Add Most Profitable Digital Products to Your Store

We’ve created this list of digital product ideas with different niches in mind so that you can find something for your store no matter what you sell. If you’re looking for a new profitable item for your store, we’re sure this list will give you some ideas. And to prevent content theft, check out our blog post on protecting your e-goods from piracy.

What e-goods do you sell (or plan to) in your store? Do you have any other digital product ideas?

If you also want to sell downloadable items, you can add a digital product to your Ecwid store. Here’s how it works: you upload a file when creating a product page, and it will be delivered to customers automatically via unique download links after they make a purchase.

What digital downloads do you sell (or plan to) in your store? Do you have any other digital product ideas?