The default Shopify Digital Downloads app has just dropped below three stars. Despite Shopify being mostly good at eCommerce, it isn’t quite adept at making apps for its platform.
Thankfully, several third-party developers have come forward to address this gap. Below, we will address five of the best third-party apps for digital downloads for Shopify in 2022.
Downloadable Digital Assets provide an approach to digital products through simplicity and power. Much of this comes from its scalability, offering six storage levels:
Each storage level offers great scalability in a simple platform. The platform provides download emails to your customer and provides a regular on-site download link, handling delivery for you.
All levels have limited storage but provide you with unlimited products (regardless of your level). This means that some companies might not need to go beyond the $5 a month option, irrespective of how big they grow.
The system has multiple email templates, taking the effort out of thanking your customer and providing them with download links. It also supports almost any file type you can think of.
The customer account download links are limited to the highest tier ($25 a month). However, given how other entities price their offerings, Downloadable Digital Assets is easily one of the best digital downloads Shopify apps.
If your goal goes beyond offering a single digital file, you need to seek out specialized software. Courses provide specialized software that enables your users to create customer accounts to access your online coursework.
This platform provides your users with a dashboard to access everything you’ve uploaded. This enables you to manage online memberships for your content more efficiently.
Costs start pretty well with up to five lessons per store with all levels allowing for unlimited students. You can also activate lesson tracking, encouraging students to keep up with what you upload.
Additional content features, like releasing over time and branding your courses, are limited to higher levels. Thankfully, it is easy to move on once you get enough of a following to justify Course’s more robust offerings.
Eventually, you can integrate quizzes, custom certificates, and bundle deals with your course content. All your users need to provide is a payment card and an email address.
Single (previously known as Single Music) is still the premiere option for artists and bands to offer content online. You can also use their available live streaming features and video rental tools. These days, Single is one of the first to jump into the NFT market.
While there is a lot of controversy around NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), these digital attachments are popular. Many sellers have made a lot of money on them. Although educating yourself on NFTs is recommended, some people think it gives them a physical product.
Regarding Single’s other features, they offer a direct download of whatever media-based digital content you want to sell. Instead of doing so for a subscription, you sell for a per-track rate. This is less of a good deal if you are a more prominent artist but a pretty solid deal if you make a limited number of sales.
Given that this digital download platform is musician-focused, it isn’t ideal for anyone else. Regardless, it is still easily one of the best options for selling digital media directly to consumers.
Send Owl s another digital provider with a good deal of experience. The system offers instant and direct delivery with no download limits. However, the product limitations are up to 250, making it less than a deal for those who work with large product amounts.
Send Owl’s major selling point comes back to PDF stamping. This discourages sharing digital files association their name and email to anything they download. That means if they are the person who shared/leaked the file, your buyer is implicated.
You can also sell drip products, where “pieces” of the product are sold over time. This s ideal if you sell a week-to-week weight loss program where you want your buyers to be surprised by their next task (or similar products).
Kable is the new kid on the block but offers powerful and robust features worth mentioning. Its key features include customized email and SMS delivery, allowing you to test your products to your buyers.
Because of some limitations, it only allows you to sell up to 50 items. This makes them acceptable if you have small numbers of larger-sized files, but not great if you have a large number of files to work with.
Kable also enables you to control products using product keys. While these are outdated in many sectors, they can be handy in providing digital product security.
There are many Shopify apps to help you send out download links for your products. We found that the apps above make up some of the best in the business. User reviews of these apps prove our point.
Note that many of the apps are situational. For example, you won’t find much use out of Single Music f you want to sell digital recipes.
Whenever you choose an app, ask yourself where your priorities are. Knowing what you want will allow you to get the best use out of this list.
CollabPay Founder, lead developer and amateur bowler.
