Where to Sell Digital Products: Designer Opinion

In this post, I’m going to tell you where to sell digital products like fonts and SVGs online. Selling digital products has changed everything about my business. After years of work, I’ve created a solid passive income stream.

I’ve been designing and selling fonts since 2017. Since then I have learned a lot about the font and digital design market and which marketplaces I prefer most.

Related: 20 Digital Products to Sell

*Disclaimer: Affiliate links may be included in any links below. By clicking on one of my affiliate links I may get a small commission but your purchase price will stay the same.

Design Bundles

Design Bundles closed my shop because I liked a LinkedIn post about what happens when you try to shut down your DB store. Yeah, they closed my shop I’d been building for 6 years over a like. Because of that I can no longer give my support to them.

Design Bundles seems to be more for the every day crafter, so if you have high priced items for professional settings they might not do as well.

Pros:

• Easy & free to upload.
• Easy to use affiliate program which makes it so you can get 15% of any purchase regardless if it’s your item or not.
• The potential for bundles. You can make good amount of money just from having one product in one of their bundles.
  • March 2023 Update: bundles are no longer big sellers like they once were. Instead of making $4-800 on average per bundle invite, I’m not making $50-100. A huge decline!
• Payouts can be made whenever and will be deposited in 7 days.

Cons:

• 50-75% commission (but there are commissions for all sites so this isn’t a huge con for me).
• Only get paid through Paypal or Payoneer (not a problem for me, but it’s been for others).
• Facebook group is now just AI tutorials and the support/community is no longer there. If you want a community for digital designers, join this group!
• The CEO will remove designers from their site over a personal opinion, I am not an isolated case.
• Minimum pricing for products is $5, which prices out single designs from their marketplace.

June 2023 Update: sales have declined so bad on Design Bundles. May was my lowest month since 2019. AI is taking over the site, and there’s obviously a lot of changes happening behind the scenes that are affecting the platform. 

Creative Market

Creative Market is where I started to sell fonts first, and for a while I thought it was the best. But in recent years they have been making many changes to their platform that have sellers unsure of the future of Creative Market. From what I can tell, Creative Market is more for professional users (but not always the case).

Pros:

• Easy & free to upload.
• Their affiliate program has potential to bring in a lot of money (10% of purchases from your referred user for an entire year).
• Payouts made from Paypal don’t have an added fee.

Cons:

• They don’t have a Facebook group, so the owners of CM are not involved with their sellers.
• Payouts can only be made after $20 in earnings AND only one time per month. You have the option to payout a certain amount or the entire month’s earnings at the end of the month. However, if you forget to do a Payout in May you will not be paid until July when you get paid for June’s earnings (if you remember to do the payout!)
• Creative Market is also much harder to get accepted into these days than they were a few years ago. I recommend starting to sell on Font Bundles and having a font or two before applying. If you get denied, don’t give up! Focus on the marketplaces you are on and try again.
• The license changes to fonts and designs have raised some flags for many buyers.

March 2023 Update: you can now opt-in to automatic monthly payouts. 

So Fontsy

In 2021, I finally quit selling on So Fontsy. I’m gonna be honest, sales aren’t that great on here. I sold with them for 2+ years and up until 2021 So Fontsy required you to have a freebie multiple times a year. If you weren’t keeping up with the spreadsheet, and you forgot about it, they would select a random product for you. If you’re in bundles on other sites contracts could conflict with this, so it’s really not ideal.

The site is the most annoying platform to upload to. It takes so long, and honestly just isn’t worth the effort for $5 a month payouts. I’m not alone in these small payments either, I have a lot of designer friends who have this same experience with this platform.

However, some designers do have success with selling fonts and designs on So Fontsy. It really depends what you sell and how you market yourself!

Pros:

• Free to upload.
• Potential to get in their curated bundles.

Cons:

• Uploading is time consuming and ‘clunky’ at this time – even after they upgraded their site.
• There is a potential to get in their curated bundles, however from my handful of experiences they do not sell nearly as well as Font/Design Bundles. I’m talking like $10-40 payouts, which is so terrible.

Etsy

As a product shop owner, I strongly recommend getting off Etsy if possible. They truly do not care about their sellers, and it’s become very apparent since 2018. However, as a Font and SVG Designer I also know how much traffic is on Etsy. Between selling fonts, SVGs, and mockups on Etsy – the last two have done much better. It seems like Etsy customers want to purchase fonts for $1 so higher priced ones don’t sell as well, in my experience.

Pros:

• Well known and tons of traffic.
• Easy to upload.

Cons:

• It costs $0.20 JUST to list an item. This can add up when you’re first starting out and adding all your fonts / designs. It also costs $0.20 to renew every 3 months (or when the product sells). So if you have a $5 item they take $0.20 PLUS a percentage of the sale AND transaction fee. You can look them up for more in depth details. None of the other sites listed today ever expire and are free to upload so this is one of Etsy’s biggest cons.
• There are a ton of scammers out there and Etsy is filled with them. You may have to file takedowns for shops with stolen fonts / designs.

Creative Fabrica

Creative Fabrica is different than the rest because of their subscription model. It can be confusing to understand – but basically you get a percentage of the overall sales for the day based on how many items you’ve sold.

Pros:

• Easy & free to upload.
• If you forget about it you can easily go back to the site and have money waiting in your account. The more items you have the more money you can potentially get. Uploading designs frequently seems to help increase sales. I ran a test one month and I made $60 more than normal months just from adding new products each week!

Cons:

• Products don’t automatically publish. They need to go through approval.
• You don’t make as much per sale.

June 2023 Update: I’ve started uploading more to Creative Fabrica this year. It IS helping my shop to earn more money each month, but that money is still minimal. I will continue to add products to Creative Fabrica because I might as well try to make the most money from my designs as I can. Creative Fabrica gets millions more monthly viewers than Design Bundles so they definitely have a larger customer base. In my opinion, it’s worth it to continue uploading there for now.

In conclusion… 

Don’t put your eggs in one basket. Upload to as many sites as you can sustain, and see what happens. Each marketplace is a little different and you might not care about some of the things I do.

Let me know if you have any questions about selling digital products on marketplaces!