Best Ecommerce Platforms for Digital Products
Payhip is the lowest-risk place to start selling digital products: its free forever plan unlocks every feature and takes 5% of each sale, and it covers downloads, courses, coaching and memberships from one store. If you would rather never think about sales tax, Gumroad and Lemon Squeezy also cost $0 a month and act as merchant of record, collecting and remitting tax for you, at 10% and 5% a sale.
Two questions sort the rest. First, do you pay per sale or per month? Sellfy, SendOwl, Shopify and Kajabi take nothing from a sale but charge a subscription, from $22 to $143 a month, while Podia and Teachable charge both on their entry plans. Second, who is the legal seller? Only four of these twelve say plainly that they are the merchant of record.
Our picks
- Selling with no monthly bill: Payhip. Free forever plan with every feature and a 5% cut, plus automatic EU and UK VAT collection.
- Software with license keys: Lemon Squeezy. Merchant of record at 5% plus 50 cents a sale, with license-key issuance and subscription billing built in.
- A course business that wants tax handled: Teachable. Merchant of record through its own gateways, remitting sales tax, VAT and GST in more than 45 countries.
- Files you expect people to share: SendOwl. Every plan includes PDF stamping, document locking and download throttling, with a 0% cut from $32.50 a month.
- Printables that need to be found: Etsy. The only marketplace here with its own shoppers, for 20 cents a listing and 6.5% of the sale.
At a glance
| Option | Starting Price | Transaction Fee | Free Plan | Platform Type | Merchant of Record |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Freesource | 10%source | Free forever plansource | Creator storefrontsource | Yessource | |
| Freesource | 5%source | Free forever plansource | Payments and merchant of recordsource | Yessource | |
| Freesource | 5%source | Free forever plansource | Creator storefrontsource | Nosource | |
| $22source | 0%source | Free trial onlysource | Creator storefrontsource | Nosource | |
| $42source | 5%source | Free trial onlysource | Course and membership platformsource | Nosource | |
| $32.5source | 0%source | Free trial onlysource | Creator storefrontsource | ||
| Freesource | 5%source | Free forever plansource | Payments and merchant of recordsource | Yessource | |
| Freesource | 0%source | Free forever plansource | Self-hosted pluginsource | ||
| $29source | 0%source | Free trial onlysource | Full ecommerce platformsource | ||
| $29source | 7.5%source | Free trial onlysource | Course and membership platformsource | Yessource | |
| $143source | 0%source | Free trial onlysource | Course and membership platformsource | ||
| Freesource | 6.5%source | Free forever plansource | Marketplacesource |
A cut of every sale or a flat monthly fee
Per-sale pricing suits a new or sporadic seller. Payhip takes 5%, Gumroad 10% plus 50 cents (30% when a buyer finds you through its Discover marketplace), and Etsy stacks 20 cents to list, 6.5% of the sale, 3% plus 25 cents for payment, and up to 15% more on Offsite Ads sales. Subscriptions suit a steady one: against Payhip's 5%, Sellfy's $22 a month pays for itself once you sell more than $440 a month. Watch the ceilings, though. Sellfy's Starter and SendOwl's Launch plan both stop at $10,000 of annual sales.
The Transaction Fee column is not one basis. For Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy and Paddle, card processing sits inside the number. On most other rows, including the 0% ones, processing is billed on top, usually around 2.9% plus 30 cents. Shopify's 0% holds only with Shopify Payments; a third-party gateway on Basic adds 2%.
Who files the sales tax and VAT
This column decides whether sales tax and VAT paperwork lands on you. Gumroad (since January 2025), Lemon Squeezy, Paddle and Teachable are the legal seller and remit tax for you. Payhip, Sellfy and Podia are not, so you connect your own Stripe or PayPal and file yourself, though Payhip does collect and remit EU and UK VAT automatically. Shopify calculates tax and sells filing as a paid add-on. Paddle is worth a separate note: it handles the money and compliance behind your own site but has no storefront, so it pairs with a product rather than replacing a shop.
Course platforms: what the entry plan leaves out
The three course platforms price far apart and each entry tier has a catch. Teachable's $29 Starter allows five products and takes 7.5%, with the fee gone on the $69 Builder plan. Podia's $42 Mover takes 5% and caps email at 100 subscribers; the fee disappears at $84. Kajabi's $143 Basic takes nothing per sale but stops at 5 products, 2,500 contacts and one website, and bundles community, podcasts, funnels and a branded mobile app in exchange.
The options in detail
Gumroad
Gumroad is the default first store for a lot of creators: you upload a file, get a link, and start selling the same afternoon with no monthly bill. The trade is the highest headline cut here, 10% plus 50 cents on every direct sale, rising to 30% when a buyer finds you through Gumroad's own Discover marketplace. Since January 2025 it has acted as merchant of record, so sales tax and VAT collection and remittance are handled for you worldwide. It sells digital files, courses and memberships but not physical goods, and the storefront is deliberately plain: this is a place to sell, not to build a brand site.
Lemon Squeezy
Lemon Squeezy is the merchant-of-record option aimed at software and app sellers: 5% plus 50 cents a sale, no monthly fee, and global tax collection and remittance taken off your plate entirely. It goes further than most creator tools on the software side, with license-key issuance, subscription and usage-based billing, and a customer portal built in. Email marketing is bundled and free up to 500 subscribers. Worth knowing before you commit: the company was acquired by Stripe, and its own site now leads with a 2026 update about Lemon Squeezy plus Stripe Managed Payments, so its roadmap is tied to Stripe's.
Payhip
Payhip is the cheapest honest way to start: a free forever plan with every feature unlocked and a 5% cut, then flat $29 and $99 tiers that drop the cut to 2% and zero. Its range is unusually wide for the price, covering digital downloads, online courses, coaching, memberships and physical products from one store builder. It collects and remits EU and UK VAT automatically, which is more than most non merchant-of-record platforms do, but you connect your own Stripe or PayPal and stay the seller of record everywhere else. Payouts land immediately after a sale rather than on a weekly cycle.
Sellfy
Sellfy swaps the per-sale cut for a flat subscription: nothing is taken from a sale, but each plan caps your annual revenue, starting at $10,000 a year on Starter. That maths turns in your favour once you are selling steadily, and against you if sales are sporadic. Every plan gets the same features, including print-on-demand merch alongside downloads and subscriptions, so it suits a creator selling files and physical products from one storefront. You keep your own Stripe or PayPal account, which means you also keep the tax paperwork: Sellfy's help centre states plainly that it is not your merchant of record.
Podia
Podia bundles the whole creator business into one subscription: courses, digital downloads, coaching, a community, live and in-person events, a website with a blog, and email marketing. That breadth is the point, and it is why the entry price is higher than a pure storefront. The $42 Mover plan still takes a 5% cut and caps email at 100 subscribers; the fee disappears on the $84 Shaker plan, which is where most people who take Podia seriously end up. Card processing is billed separately by Stripe or PayPal, so tax filing remains yours.
SendOwl
SendOwl is the delivery engine rather than the shop window: it exists to get a file, licence key or stream to a buyer reliably, and it bolts onto whatever site you already have through payment links, an embeddable cart or a WordPress plugin. Every feature is on every plan, including PDF stamping and document locking, download throttling and fraud filters, so the tiers only differ by order and sales volume. Nothing is taken per sale, but the Launch plan caps you at $10,000 of annual sales, which is low enough to force an upgrade fairly quickly. It is the strongest pick here for protecting files you expect people to try to share.
Paddle
Paddle is the grown-up merchant-of-record option, built for software and app businesses rather than creators selling files. One 5% plus 50 cents rate covers payments, subscription billing, global tax compliance, fraud protection, failed-payment recovery and 24/7 support for your customers, with no monthly fee. What you do not get is a storefront: Paddle sits behind your own site and handles the money, so it is a choice you make alongside a product, not instead of one. Large sellers move to custom pricing, and the company positions itself squarely at SaaS, apps and games.
Easy Digital Downloads
Easy Digital Downloads is a WordPress plugin, not a hosted service, so you own the store outright and nothing is skimmed from a sale. The Lite version is free on WordPress.org; the paid passes, from $99.50 a year for one site up to $499.50 for the full set, buy extensions rather than capacity, including software licensing and API keys, a multi-vendor marketplace, abandoned-cart recovery and EU VAT compliance. It is the natural choice if you already run a WordPress site and want selling to be part of it. The cost you cannot see on the pricing page is hosting, updates and the maintenance that comes with running your own stack.
Shopify
Shopify is the general-purpose store platform rather than a digital-goods specialist: selling files needs an app, and the parts of Shopify you pay for, inventory, shipping, point of sale, are the parts a digital seller never touches. What you get in exchange is the strongest checkout, theme ecosystem and app market of anything here, plus a path to physical products later. Using Shopify Payments there is no platform cut on top of card rates from 2.9% plus 30 cents; bring a third-party gateway on Basic and Shopify adds 2%. Sales tax is calculated for you and filing is a paid add-on, so compliance stays your responsibility.
Teachable
Teachable is built around courses, with digital downloads, memberships and coaching alongside them, and it is the one course platform here that also takes the tax problem away: through its native payment gateways it calculates, collects and remits sales tax, VAT and GST across more than 45 countries. The catch is the entry tier. Starter is limited to five products and still takes 7.5% of every sale, the steepest subscription-plus-cut combination in this table, and the fee only disappears on the $69 Builder plan. If you plan to sell more than a couple of courses, price the second tier, not the first.
Kajabi
Kajabi is the premium end of this list and prices itself accordingly: $143 a month billed annually for the Basic plan, roughly five times the nearest subscription here. Nothing is taken from a sale, and the pitch is that it replaces the five tools a course business usually stitches together, covering courses, communities, memberships, coaching, podcasts, a website, funnels, email and a branded mobile app. Basic still caps you at 5 products, 2,500 contacts and one website, so the price is for depth rather than volume. It only makes sense once revenue is real enough that the subscription is a rounding error.
Etsy
Etsy is the only entry here that brings its own shoppers, which is the whole argument for it: printables, templates and digital art get found by people already searching, instead of waiting for traffic you have to generate. The cost is layered rather than simple, 20 cents to list, 6.5% of the sale, 3% plus 25 cents to process the payment, and up to 15% more if the sale came through Offsite Ads, which is not optional above a revenue threshold. You are also renting the relationship: the customer is Etsy's, the listing must fit its handmade-and-original policy, and a policy change can move your shop overnight. Best treated as a discovery channel alongside a store you control, not as the store itself.
How we researched this
Etsy is here as the one marketplace and Easy Digital Downloads as the one WordPress plugin because the rows span every kind of tool a digital seller might weigh, rather than one roundup's first page: four creator storefronts, two payment layers, three course platforms and Shopify as the full store builder make up the rest. Fees, plans and tax status were all taken off each platform's own pages. Starting Price is the annual-billing rate; a seller paying by the month sees Sellfy at $29 rather than $22, Teachable at $39, SendOwl at $39 and Kajabi at $179.
Squarespace, Ko-fi and Whop were researched but left out because each was missing a price or fee we could cite from the company's own page. WooCommerce was skipped because Easy Digital Downloads already fills the WordPress slot, Thrivecart because it sells a one-time license rather than a monthly plan, and BigCommerce, Wix and Ecwid because their digital-goods features are thinner than Shopify's. The five blanks are all Merchant of Record: SendOwl, Easy Digital Downloads, Shopify and Kajabi have you connect your own payment account but none states its status on a page we could reach, and Etsy's tax pages could not be read. Before you rely on a platform to file tax in your buyers' countries, confirm it in that platform's help center.