Selling digital products on Shopify is one of the easiest ways to build an online business with low overhead.
Unlike physical products, there’s no inventory to manage, no shipping costs, and no delays in delivery.
Types of Digital Products
Common examples include:
- E-books and PDFs
- Online courses and guides
- Templates (Canva, Notion, Excel, etc.)
- Digital art, photos, and graphics
- Music, audio files, or videos
- Software files and licenses
Shopify works extremely well for selling digital products because you can automate file delivery after checkout and use all the built in ecommerce features like payments, taxes, customer accounts etc.
Shopify's Recommended Setup
Shopify hosts a free app (built and maintained by them), called digital downloads.
Noteworthy: Most Apps published by Shopify have terrible reviews because unlike most privatley founded apps, their support is usually a lot slower.
Therefore, merchants get frustrated faster and leave negative reviews more frequently.
In my opinion most of the official Shopify Apps actually work well if you know how to use them.
Creating Your First Digital Product
Digital products are created in the same way normal products are.
Just go to your admin dashboard and create the product, add a title, prices, upload a good image and add a descrption.
Important: I'd personally turn off quantity tracking (as digital products don't really run out of stock).
Configure file delivery in the Digital Downloads App
Inside the Digital Downloads app, simply upload your file (PDF, ZIP, MP3, MP4, etc.) and attach it to the correct product.
After checkout, Shopify will automatically email the customer a secure download link.
Before launching, always test your flow:
- Place a test order
- Confirm that the download email has been sent
- Check the order confirmation page
- Try to download the file that was sent to you
Final Thoughts
The process above is one of the simplest ways to start selling digital products.
It's a minimum viable setup if you want, which is not super complex, and free.
As a business grows other needs or more complex requirements might come up.
At that point you can look at some of the paid digital product apps, which offer specialized features, or you could consider building a custom app from scratch for your specific needs.
If you want to see the full app setup including menus, check out the full video here: