Full disclosure: I work on Crownerr, and this is the Crownerr blog, so treat this as a point of view, not a neutral review. That said, I will be straight about where Etsy and Gumroad beat running your own shop. Three things decide whether a digital product earns its keep: the margin, whether you can sell it again and again, and how much support it drags along behind it. Once a digital product exists, the cost of selling the next copy is close to nothing. That is the appeal. But close to nothing is not nothing once platform fees, processing and refunds get taken out, and that is why where you sell matters as much as what you sell.
The product types that actually sell
- Templates (design, spreadsheets, docs): they fix a concrete, repeated problem, need little support, and sell for years. Margins are excellent because you build once and the file does the rest, and the effort is mostly polish and documentation rather than ongoing work. They are also easy to copy, so your brand does a lot of the work. Best suited to anyone who already solves a problem in a tidy, repeatable way and can package it.
- Notion templates: demand is huge and production cost is tiny, so margins are about as high as digital goods get. The effort is low to build but high to market, because the space is crowded and a template alone does not stand out. The ones that win pair a genuinely useful system with screenshots that sell it. Good fit for operators and organisers who think in systems.
- Presets and LUTs: tiny files, impulse buys, almost no support once they ship, which makes the margin per sale close to total. The effort sits entirely up front in getting the look right, then it is hands-off. Ideal for photographers and video creators with a recognisable style people want to borrow.
- Ebooks and guides: more work up front, and the writing itself is the cost, but they build authority and feed everything else you sell. Margins stay high once written, and support is light beyond the odd question. Suits people with real expertise and the patience to write it down properly.
- Stock assets: each one earns little on its own, so the per-item margin matters less than the size of your library. A deep catalogue is what compounds, and the effort is relentless production rather than a single launch. This is a volume game best suited to prolific makers who enjoy churning out work.
- Printables: cheap to make and evergreen, with very high margins per unit, but the price is low, so you need volume or bundles to add up to real money. Effort is modest and support is near zero. A sensible starting point for first-time sellers testing whether they can sell anything at all.
- Courses: the highest ceiling and the highest effort. Filming, editing and structuring a course is a serious project, and once it is live you carry student questions and updates, so the support load is real. Margins are strong on each sale but the build cost is steep. Think of a course as a product line, not a quick win, and only commit if you can teach a result people will pay for.
- Memberships as a product: recurring access that compounds month over month, which gives you the best revenue shape of anything on this list. The catch is that the effort never stops, because the margin depends on you continuing to deliver and people continuing to stay. Best for creators with a steady output and an audience that already shows up regularly.
If this is your first launch, read how to sell digital products as a creator.
Where to sell: marketplace versus your own store
Marketplaces like Etsy and Gumroad are good at one thing, and it is the hard thing: discovery. People are already there with a card out. For printables, presets and Notion templates, a marketplace can drive your first sales when you have no audience at all. The cost is ownership and fees. At the time of writing, Etsy charges listing plus transaction fees and keeps the buyer relationship, so you cannot easily email that customer again. Gumroad takes a flat percentage and charges nothing monthly, which is fair when you are starting out. Always check the current fee pages, because these move.
It helps to put a number on the gap. Say you sell that same £20 product on a marketplace taking roughly 10% all in, between its cut and processing. You keep about £18, and you keep none of the customer. Move it to your own store on the Crownerr Free plan and you keep about £18.30 on the same sale, and you also keep the email address, which is the part that pays you again later. The headline percentages look close on any single transaction. The difference shows up on the hundredth sale, when the marketplace customers are still strangers and yours are a list you can launch the next product to. A marketplace also sets the rules: it decides what your listing looks like, where it ranks, and whether a search algorithm change wipes out your traffic overnight. On your own store none of that is someone else's lever to pull, which is worth real money once you depend on the income. Your own store flips the deal: you have to bring the audience, but you keep the margin and the customer, and that is what repeat sales, email and memberships all depend on. The sensible path is to use a marketplace to prove people want the thing, then move your best products to your own store. Here is how to set up a shop on Crownerr.
The fee tradeoff, with real numbers
On Crownerr, Free is £0/mo with a 6% fee, Creator is £79/mo with 3%, and Studio is £149/mo with 0%. On top of any of these, Stripe UK takes 1.5% + 20p. So on a £20 product you keep about £18.30 on Free after the 6% and Stripe, and about £19.50 on Studio with no platform fee. That gap is £1.20 a sale between the cheapest and the priciest plan. Studio costs £149/mo, so it only starts to win once you are selling enough that £1.20 multiplied by your volume clears that subscription, which on a £20 product lands somewhere north of a hundred and twenty sales a month before the maths tips. The paid plans only make sense once your volume is high enough that the lower percentage saves you more than the subscription costs, and below that line Free quietly keeps more in your pocket. There is more detail in creator platform fees explained.
Where Crownerr fits
If you are still testing whether anyone wants your digital goods, start on a marketplace or on the Crownerr Free plan and pay nothing until you make a sale. Once repeat sales and memberships are the bulk of your income, both the maths and the ownership argument push you towards your own store. You can compare the plans on the pricing page.