Shopify has become one of the leading solutions for businesses and professionals selling products online. In fact, many publishers rely on Shopify’s e-commerce solution not only for physical goods but also to sell digital downloads and subscriptions via their own shops.
In this article, we will analyze how to increase sales with Shopify.
What makes a digital magazine great? Discover the ten best digital magazines of the world: download the presentation here for free
Sell digital downloads with Shopify
More and more publishers are moving towards a digital content strategy. Customers show an increasing preference to purchase and consume former print products online via a multitude of devices such as tablets, smartphones or the PC. Benefits like interactive content and instant delivery are rendering digital content more and more attractive for the reader. Especially the potential to combine and sell related content that was previously not accessible enables publishers to upsell in a way not possible before.
According to a study by Technavio, digital goods market is expected to exceed US$549 billion by the end of 2019. In 2014 alone, e-book sales reached $5.69 billion (source: Statista), while the digital magazine publishing market will climb beyond $35 billion by 2020 (source: Technavio).E-commerce platforms like Shopify enable publishers to tap this new revenue streams by circumventing existing digital publishing marketplaces with their own store effectively lowering your cost of sales.
Shopify’s e-commerce platform allows you to use your own online shop to sell various kinds of digital products such as music, e-books, magazines, PDF’s, movies, photographs and any other type of downloadable file accessing new revenue streams for your content.
Hello May, an Australian online wedding portal founded by Sophie Lord, combined there free-to-access content with a Shopify shop to sell their magazines and paid content with the result of a significant increase in their revenue.
The Lifted Brow is another example of a successful paid content strategy using Shopify: readers can buy e-books and the quarterly digital magazines. Thanks to their online store, Lifted Brow was able to increase revenue and involve top-notch writers as collaborators, such as David Foster Wallace and Karen Russell.
If you’re wondering how you can set up your own magazines’ store, the answer is simple: there are Shopify plugins and extensions specialized in digital-magazine e-commerces, like FetchApp and Paperlit. Below, you’ll find more details about these plugins and why you should choose one of them to start selling your digital issues online today and increase sales with Shopify.
FetchApp for Spotify
With Shopify and FetchApp the transition to selling digital downloads becomes a seamless experience. FetchApp is perfectly integrated with Shopify and lets you sell your digital goods side-by-side with your other products on the store. It was the first plugin designed for Shopify, and it’s commonly employed by professionals and artists who want to share their knowledge or their artworks online.
This plugin is generally used for every kind of digital download, from videos to magazines. But if you want to push your subscription-based content as magazines or daily newspapers, you should opt for other solutions – like Paperlit – that offer an all-in-one platform for your digital content on Shopify.
Paperlit for Shopify
Paperlit is a landmark for all the publishers who want to create and market outstanding digital magazines. The platform helps you through all the process, from the design to the publication of the issue. It allows you to add as many interactive features as you like in order to engage the readers with videos, exclusive interviews and curated photo galleries. Paperlit helps you to increase sales with Shopify integrating your content via a plugin with the e-commerce platform.
It’s a simple-to-use 360° solution, which also includes the opportunity to build your own app and sell your digital magazines on the app stores, an in-app purchase feature and analytic features to track the engagement of your readers.
Since it offers a wide range of features and integrations, Paperlit is the right choice for publishers who want to manage the development and the sales of their digital magazines using just one platform for the sales through different channels.
Conclusion
Having an e-commerce is not only a must-have to sell physical products, but it’s also a great opportunity for publishers to increase their magazines’ sales online and grow the number of subscribers. Thanks to Shopify and its easy-to-use plugins such as FetchApp and Paperlit setting up an online shop is just a few clicks away.
