How to Boost Your Digital Product Sales on Shopify (Digital Downloads, Multiple Files and More)
Selling digital downloads on Shopify can be a lucrative venture – but whenever people discover a glimmer of opportunity in “them there ecommerce hills”, the gold rush that follows can mean hot competition.
How can you optimize to ensure you’re making sales with the minimum degree of ongoing effort? Read on for our five top tips to help streamline your digital downloads business, boosting sales and maximizing your returns.
1. Master Your Merchandising
Digital download products often center around a specialism or special interest. Your audience is typically either keen to learn more about the topic they relate to (as in the case of ebooks etc) or looking to get the most out of the product they are purchasing (for example, a piece of software).
As a result, it can be advantageous to offer bundles – Shopify digital downloads with multiple files grouped together for one price. This offers your customers the chance to get great value for money, at the same time as showcasing the breadth of your experience and subject specialism.
2. Streamline Your Product Management Processes
As you start to offer more products and refine your existing content, be wary of file management eating into your time. As you continue to work on launching new products and producing updated versions of existing files (for example, new editions of an ebook) it’s easy to get bogged down in tedious manual product set up tasks, reuploading files and linking them to products in your Shopify store.
Digital Downloads Pro offers huge time savings here. Upload your new file version once, and let it automatically update across all products that particular file is linked to. Every new and existing customer now has access to the latest edition of your file… and now you’re free to put the time you’ve saved towards growing your business.
3. Sharpen Your Product Descriptions
Don’t underestimate the power of your product descriptions when selling digital products on Shopify. Customers are increasingly comfortable with purchasing digital downloads, but you still need to convince them of the value of your products. By creating detailed product descriptions, you’ll increase conversion and guard against refund requests, as your customers make informed purchases and receive a product that matches their expectations.
Make sure product descriptions are written to be reader and SEO friendly, too. Focus on keywords and getting descriptions to a decent length, but also consider your formatting – leaning on reader-friendly bullet points and short, snappy sentences to clearly convey your product’s offering.
4. Harness Social Proof
After you’ve gone to the effort of writing product descriptions that win over satisfied customers, make sure you gather some evidence of their delight! While all products sold online are intangible up until the point of delivery, those browsing digital products may require a little extra convincing that what they’ll receive will be worth their outlay.
This is especially true if you’re working within a niche or very popular vertical – you’ll either need to prove that you really know your stuff, or that you’re providing something above and beyond your competitors’ offering.
The answer lies in capturing social proof, in the form of star ratings, testimonials or reviews. Demonstrate the fact that verified customers have enjoyed and valued your products – nothing is more powerful when it comes to reassuring a would-be purchaser. Learn about review apps and other tech to boost your digital download sales here.
5. Protect Yourself Against Fraud
Finally, after all your hard work setting up a store, creating high quality content and marketing it to the world, make sure you’re getting paid for your efforts. Every ecommerce venture carries some risk of fraud, and digital product sales are no different. Learn more in our article ‘Selling Digital Downloads on Shopify? Avoid These Five Common Issues…’.
Digital Downloads Pro puts you in control of when your digital files are delivered, meaning you can add a slight delay to ensure that funds have cleared and payment is fully received before your customer receives the product, guarding you against those who digitally “dine and dash”.
