Table of Contents
- Introduction
- The Strategic Shift Toward Digital Goods
- Auditing Your Expertise to Find Digital Products to Sell
- Market Research: Validating Your Digital Ideas
- Categorizing Digital Products for Your Shopify Store
- Practical Scenarios: Finding the Digital Angle
- Why a Native Shopify Integration Matters
- Building Your Curriculum: From Idea to Launch
- Pricing Your Digital Products Effectively
- Overcoming Common Challenges in Digital Sales
- Growing Your Digital Community
- Conclusion
- Frequently Asked Questions
Introduction
What if your business could grow its revenue without ever needing to worry about warehouse space, shipping delays, or rising fuel surcharges? For many e-commerce merchants, the burden of physical inventory is a constant struggle that eats into profit margins and limits scalability. However, the creator economy is shifting, and the barriers between physical commerce and digital learning have dissolved. Digital products often boast profit margins as high as 90% to 95%, primarily because the cost of goods sold is virtually non-existent after the initial creation phase.
Our mission at Tevello is to turn any Shopify store into a digital learning powerhouse. We believe that merchants should fully own their customer data and brand experience, which is why we’ve developed a solution that keeps your customers on your own URL throughout their entire learning journey. In this post, we will explore the strategic methods you can use to find digital products to sell that resonate with your target audience, increase your customer lifetime value (LTV), and establish recurring revenue streams.
Whether you are a seasoned Shopify veteran or just starting your journey, we will walk you through the process of auditing your expertise, researching market demand, and launching a digital wing of your brand that thrives alongside your physical products. By the end of this guide, you will have a clear roadmap for identifying and creating digital assets that transform your store into a comprehensive ecosystem of value.
The Strategic Shift Toward Digital Goods
The transition from selling only physical items to a hybrid model involving digital products is more than just a trend; it is a fundamental shift in how successful businesses operate. When you find digital products to sell, you are essentially creating "assets" that work for you 24/7. Unlike a physical product that requires a team to pick, pack, and ship, a digital course or membership is delivered instantly.
The benefits of this model are multifaceted:
- Diversified Revenue Streams: You are no longer dependent solely on the logistics of physical goods. If a supply chain issue occurs, your digital sales continue uninterrupted.
- Increased Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): A customer who buys a physical yoga mat is the perfect candidate for a digital "30-Day Yoga Mastery" course. By offering both, you capture more of their total spend.
- Building Brand Loyalty: Digital products, particularly courses and communities, allow you to provide ongoing value. This keeps your brand top-of-mind long after the initial transaction.
- Recurring Revenue Stability: Transitioning into memberships or subscription-based content provides a predictable monthly income that smooths out the peaks and valleys of traditional retail.
Auditing Your Expertise to Find Digital Products to Sell
The most successful digital products are rarely the result of chasing a random trend. Instead, they come from a deep understanding of what you already know or what your brand already represents. To find digital products to sell, you must first look inward and audit your existing knowledge base.
Solving Your Own Problems
Think back to the challenges you faced when you first started in your niche. What was the most difficult thing to learn? What resources did you wish existed? Often, the best product is a "starter guide" or "blueprint" that helps others avoid the mistakes you made. If you sell specialized equipment—for example, high-end woodworking tools—a digital series on "Fine Joinery for Beginners" is a natural extension of your brand.
Analyzing Customer Inquiries
Your customer support inbox is a goldmine for digital product ideas. Are customers frequently asking how to use a specific product? Are they asking for advice on how to achieve a certain result? If you find yourself answering the same three questions every day, those answers should be packaged into a digital guide, a video tutorial, or a comprehensive course. This not only generates revenue but also serves as a unified login that reduces customer support friction by providing users with the answers they need in a structured format.
Identifying the "Knowledge Gap"
Every physical product has a "how-to" component. A merchant selling organic seeds is not just selling seeds; they are selling the dream of a lush garden. The digital product here is the knowledge of soil health, pest management, and seasonal planting. By identifying this gap between the product and the desired outcome, you can create digital assets that bridge that divide.
Market Research: Validating Your Digital Ideas
Once you have a few ideas, the next step in learning how to find digital products to sell is validation. You want to ensure that there is a hungry market ready to pay for your expertise.
Utilizing Social Media Communities
Reddit, Facebook Groups, and niche forums are excellent places to observe potential customers in their natural habitat. Look for recurring pain points. If you see a thread on a fitness forum with 500 comments asking about "at-home workouts for busy parents," and you happen to sell yoga wear, you have just found your next digital product.
Analyzing Competitor Offerings
While we always encourage originality, looking at what others in your space are doing can provide inspiration. Are they selling ebooks? Do they have a membership site? Don't copy their content, but do look for what is missing. Perhaps their course is too long and complex, and your audience would prefer a "mini-course" that delivers a quick win in under an hour.
Keyword Research and Search Intent
Tools like Google Trends and Pinterest Trends can show you what people are actively searching for. If "crochet patterns for beginners" is spiking in search volume, and you sell yarn, the data is telling you exactly what to create. We have seen how powerful this can be for merchants; for instance, consider how one brand sold $112K+ by bundling courses with their existing digital and physical offerings. By aligning your products with what people are already searching for, you significantly reduce the friction of the sale.
Categorizing Digital Products for Your Shopify Store
To effectively find digital products to sell, it helps to understand the different formats available. Each has its own strengths and requires different levels of commitment to produce.
1. Online Courses and Video Training
This is the "gold standard" of digital products. Courses allow you to deep-dive into a topic and provide immense value. Because they often include video, worksheets, and quizzes, they command a higher price point than simple downloads.
- Example Scenario: A merchant selling high-quality coffee beans. To increase margins, they create a "Barista Basics" video course. It teaches customers how to dial in their espresso, froth milk perfectly, and maintain their machines. This requires no shipping, has no inventory cost, and turns a one-time bean buyer into a loyal student of the brand.
2. Digital Downloads and Templates
These are "low-friction" products. They are usually affordable and provide immediate utility. Think PDFs, spreadsheets, design templates, or checklists.
- Example Scenario: An interior design store selling physical home decor items. They could sell a "Room Refresh Blueprint" which is a PDF template that helps customers measure their space and create a cohesive color palette before they buy the furniture.
3. Memberships and Communities
Memberships are the key to building a "digital learning powerhouse." They provide recurring revenue and foster a sense of belonging. At Tevello, we include community features like profiles and social feeds in our platform because we know that students learn better when they are part of a group.
- Example Scenario: A gardening expert selling physical tools can create a monthly membership where users get access to a private forum, monthly live Q&As, and a library of seasonal planting guides. This is a powerful way of unifying a fragmented system into a single Shopify store, moving away from disparate platforms like Patreon or Facebook Groups and keeping everything under your own brand's roof.
Practical Scenarios: Finding the Digital Angle
Let's look at how different types of merchants can find digital products to sell by leveraging their existing business models.
The Hobby and Craft Merchant
If you sell supplies for a specific hobby—be it knitting, painting, or model building—your audience is constantly looking for "what's next." They have the tools; now they need the inspiration and the technique. By generating revenue from both physical and digital goods, you create a ecosystem where one drives the other. A digital pattern or a "how-to" video becomes the primary marketing tool for the physical supplies needed to complete the project.
The Health and Wellness Professional
For those selling supplements, equipment, or apparel, the digital product is the transformation. People don't just want a protein powder; they want a stronger body. A digital "8-Week Transformation Challenge" or a library of guided meditations is the perfect digital companion. This approach helps in securing a fixed cost structure for digital products while allowing you to scale to thousands of students without any increase in overhead.
The Professional Services Provider
If you are a consultant or an agency owner, you are likely trading time for money. To scale, you need to find digital products to sell that productize your knowledge. Instead of a 1-on-1 consultation, you can sell a "Strategy Masterclass" that covers your core methodology. This allows you to reach a much wider market and creates a more passive income stream.
Why a Native Shopify Integration Matters
When you decide to sell digital products, you face a critical choice: do you send your customers to a third-party marketplace, or do you keep them on your own store?
At Tevello, we are firm believers in the latter. We designed our app to provide a "Native Shopify Integration." This means when a customer buys your course, they use the same Shopify checkout they already trust. They don't get redirected to a different website with a different URL and a different login.
Keeping the customer on your domain is vital for several reasons:
- Trust and Consistency: Your brand stays front and center. The customer never wonders why they were sent to a different site.
- Data Ownership: You own the customer relationship and the data. You aren't building someone else's platform; you are building your own.
- Simplified Management: You manage your physical and digital orders in one single dashboard. No more syncing issues between two different platforms.
If unifying your stack is a priority, start by a simple, all-in-one price for unlimited courses.
Building Your Curriculum: From Idea to Launch
Once you find digital products to sell and validate your idea, it’s time to build. You don’t need a Hollywood studio to create a high-quality course. In fact, many students prefer the "authentic" feel of a merchant who is clearly an expert in their field.
Start with an Outline
Break your topic down into logical modules and lessons. Each lesson should have a clear "learning objective." What will the student be able to do after watching this video or reading this guide?
Choose Your Content Mix
Don't feel limited to just video. A great course often includes:
- Video Lessons: For demonstrating techniques or explaining complex concepts.
- Text Summaries: For quick reference.
- Downloadable Assets: PDFs, checklists, or templates that add tangible value.
- Quizzes: To help students verify their learning.
Leveraging Tevello’s Features
Our Unlimited Plan is designed to provide you with all the key features for courses and communities without any artificial limits. When you are ready to build, you can take advantage of:
- Unlimited Video Hosting: Don't worry about bandwidth or storage costs. We've got you covered.
- Drip Content Scheduling: Release lessons over time to keep students engaged and prevent overwhelm.
- Community Directories: Let your students find each other and build connections, which significantly increases retention.
Pricing Your Digital Products Effectively
One of the hardest parts of learning how to find digital products to sell is deciding what to charge. Because there is no physical cost, many merchants make the mistake of underpricing their digital assets.
Value-Based Pricing
Instead of looking at what it cost you to make (which was mostly your time), look at the value it provides the customer. If your course helps a small business owner save 10 hours a week, that is worth hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. Price based on the transformation you are providing.
The Power of the Flat-Rate Model
At Tevello, we reject complicated tier structures. We believe in predictable pricing without hidden transaction fees. We charge a flat $29.99 per month for our Unlimited Plan. This means as your business grows from 10 students to 10,000, your software costs stay exactly the same. We charge 0% transaction fees, meaning you keep 100% of what you earn. This transparency is key to building a sustainable business.
Tiered Offers and Bundles
To maximize your revenue, consider offering different levels of access.
- The Basic Ebook: A low-cost entry point.
- The Full Video Course: A mid-tier offer.
- The Membership/Community: A recurring monthly fee for ongoing access.
Many of our most successful merchants excel by migrating over 14,000 members and reducing support tickets through a streamlined, professional membership experience that offers massive value for a recurring fee.
Overcoming Common Challenges in Digital Sales
While digital products offer incredible upside, there are unique challenges you must navigate.
Dealing with Intangibility
Because the customer can't touch a digital product, they may be more hesitant to buy. You can overcome this by:
- Detailed Previews: Show snippets of your videos or pages from your PDF.
- Strong Social Proof: Feature reviews and testimonials prominently.
- Free Trials: Offer a 14-day free trial or a free "mini-course" to let them experience the value before they commit.
Protecting Your Content
Piracy is a concern for any digital creator. While no system is 100% foolproof, using a professional platform like Tevello helps protect your content by requiring a secure login to access your material. By seeing how the app natively integrates with Shopify, you ensure that only paying customers (or those you've manually invited) can access your intellectual property.
Growing Your Digital Community
Finding digital products to sell is only the first half of the equation; the second half is growing the community around them. A community is not just a place to host files; it's a place for interaction.
When students feel like they belong to a community, they are much less likely to cancel their subscriptions. They stay for the relationships as much as the content. This is why we’ve built robust community features into Tevello, including member directories and social feeds. This allows you to scale your impact without scaling your workload. As your community grows, your long-term members will often help answer questions for newer members, creating a self-sustaining ecosystem of support.
When you install Tevello from the Shopify App Store today, you get immediate access to these community-building tools, allowing you to start fostering these relationships from day one.
Conclusion
Finding the right digital products to sell is a transformative step for any Shopify merchant. By auditing your expertise, validating your ideas through market research, and choosing a native integration that respects your brand and your data, you can build a highly profitable, scalable wing of your business. Whether you are selling a "Barista Basics" course to coffee lovers or a massive gardening membership, the opportunity to diversify your revenue and increase your customer lifetime value is immense.
At Tevello, our goal is to provide you with a robust, all-in-one ecosystem where your physical and digital products can live side-by-side. We offer a flat-rate plan that supports unlimited members for just $29.99 a month, with 0% transaction fees. We want you to keep 100% of the revenue you work so hard to generate.
Ready to turn your Shopify store into a digital powerhouse? You can build your entire curriculum and set up your community before paying a cent.
To build your community without leaving Shopify, start by reviewing the Shopify App Store listing merchants install from.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Can I sell both physical products and digital courses on the same Shopify store?
Absolutely. This is one of the greatest advantages of using Tevello. Because we offer a native Shopify integration, your digital courses and physical inventory exist in the same ecosystem. Your customers use one checkout and one account to manage everything they buy from you.
2. How much does it cost to start selling courses with Tevello?
We believe in simple, transparent pricing. Our Unlimited Plan is $29.99 per month and includes unlimited courses, students, and video hosting. Best of all, we charge 0% transaction fees, so you keep all of your earnings. We also offer a 14-day free trial so you can explore all the features before committing.
3. Do I need to be a technical expert to set up a digital product?
Not at all. We have designed Tevello to be accessible for business owners of all technical levels. If you can navigate the Shopify admin, you can use Tevello. We handle the complex parts like video hosting and student access so you can focus on creating great content for your audience.
4. How do I protect my digital content from being shared for free?
While the internet makes it impossible to prevent 100% of piracy, Tevello provides a secure, password-protected environment for your content. Customers must log in to their Shopify account to access the courses they have purchased. This professional setup is much more secure than sending out unlisted links or basic PDF attachments.
