What To Sell Online: Digital Or Physical Products?

What To Sell Online: Digital Or Physical Products?

What made you decide to sell digital products as well as physical ones? What market research did you do? How did you come up with the idea for your business? What kind of market research did you undertake?

Trying to figure out what to sell online?

Stepping into the unchartered world of entrepreneurship can get your anxiety pumping. You want to hit a home run with your first idea, but you don’t want to chase rainbows, either.

Are you going to sell physical or digital products?

Your answer to the above question will drive decisions on the ecommerce platform, business plan, and marketing strategy.

If you’ve been wondering about the pros and cons of each approach, I’ve got you covered with cold, hard data and advice from 30 successful online entrepreneurs.  Some have sold both physical and digital products online. Some swear by the digital product model and others the physical.

Before we get into the expert advice, I wanted to give you a birds-eye view of the B2C markets of physical and digital products online.

Here’s what the data says:

Global B2C Ecommerce Sales Of Physical Products

Physical product sales dwarf digital. This is a 1 trillion dollar market. Global brands dominate a large percentage of these sales. The compound annual growth rate from 2016-2020 is expected to be around 11%.

Top Selling Ecommerce Product Categories

The data below is based on 2012 US retail ecommerce sales. This includes digital sales of books, music, and video (about 9% of total sales).

The data below breaks down the projected growth of those product categories from 2012-2018

Now that we have a basic understanding of the big picture. Let’s take a deep data dive on digital commerce, a subset of ecommerce.

Global B2C Ecommerce Sales Of Digital Products

Digital commerce is a huge segment in itself. Since you’re probably not a movie producer or rap star, we’re going to leave out video and audio and focus on the favored paths for online entrepreneurs:

• ePublishing/eBooks – Selling information in digital books.
• Online Courses – Selling information in protected content.
• SaaS Products – Selling software products.

ePublishing/eBooks Market Growth

eBooks are the fastest growing digital product online. 2016 revenue is expected to be roughly $16 billion. Compound annual growth is projected to be around 16% between 2016 and 2020.

Overall growth during that time span is expected around 93% – making eBooks the most significant growth segment overall. Expected sales in 2020 are $29 billion.

Self-Paced E-Learning/Online Courses Market Growth

While the overall numbers for eLearning (corporate, universities) are massive, this report shows dismal growth in the self-paced eLearning market. In the US, sales of online courses actually decreased in 2015.

These figures include retail packaged content, custom content development services, and authoring tools/platforms.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Market Growth

The global SaaS market is estimated at around $78 billion in 2015 and is expected to grow to a 132 billion dollar industry in 2020 (69%).

Source:

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If you need further convincing that digital marketing is right for your business, get in touch with us. At Crucial Constructs, We’re willing to listen to you and answer your questions. Contact us today!

“Marketing is telling the world you’re a  rock star. contact marketing is showing the world you are one.” – Robert Rose
“Good content isn’t about good storytelling. It’s about telling a true story well.” – Ann Handle
“Content is King but engagement is queen, and the lady rules the house!” – Mari Smith

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