Shopify cannot deliver a digital file on its own. Selling digital products on Shopify starts with installing a delivery app, then switching the product to non-physical so shipping charges drop off. Shopify’s own free Digital Products app covers files up to 5 GB and emails every buyer a download link.
What the setup guides skip is the running cost. Shopify Basic is $25 a month, or $19 a month billed yearly, and the card processing rate does not appear on the pricing page at all. Whether you should sell digital products on Shopify turns mostly on whether you also sell physical goods.
Every guide for this walks you through the same 10 minutes of clicking, and the steps they give you are correct. Uncheck a box, install an app, upload a file, done.
What none of them answer is what 2 of the 4 questions Google shows under this search are actually asking, which is what the thing costs once you are running it.
A seller who signs up on the strength of a setup tutorial meets the plan fee, then the delivery app fee, then the card fee. One at a time, in that order, after the store is already built.
The setup is below, and so is the arithmetic. By the end you will know what a year costs, which limits in the free app decide whether it suits your files, and when Shopify is simply the wrong tool for what you sell.
Key Takeaways
- Shopify has no built-in digital delivery. Its own documentation says you must install an App Store app to send a download link.
- The first-party Digital Products app is free, caps files at 5 GB, and puts no limit at all on download bandwidth.
- 3 Shopify pages send you to the pricing page for the card processing rate. The pricing page does not carry it.
- Shopify Basic is $19 a month on annual billing, so $228 across a year, charged before you make a single sale.
- Shopify Starter and Shopify Lite, the 2 cheap plans older guides still point at, are both closed to new stores.
What has to happen before Shopify can deliver a file
Shopify does not ship a download link on its own. Its own manual says so in 1 sentence, on the page about selling services or digital products: “To provide a download link to your customers for a digital product, you must use an app from the Shopify App Store.”
That single line makes the setup 2 jobs. The store takes the payment. A separate app sends the file.
Picking the wrong combination of those 2 pieces is the kind of mistake that bills you every month for a year before you notice it. The Online Selling Mistakes Challenge is free, runs 5 days by email, and covers the ones that cost solo sellers the most.
Shopify makes its own app for this, called Digital Products. It is free, it is built by Shopify rather than a third party, and it has been in the App Store since 2012. It sits on 4.8 stars from 1,219 reviews. For most sellers it is the sensible starting point, because it costs nothing and it is the one app Shopify’s own documentation walks you through.
Searching the App Store for “digital downloads” returns 1,732 results, and the top 4 slots on that page are paid ads. That is worth knowing before you go shopping: the ordering you see is not a quality ranking, and the free first-party option does not sit at the top of it.
Setting up a digital product, step by step
The setup itself is short. Here is the whole sequence.
1. Install the Digital Products app. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings, then Apps, then Shopify App Store. Search for Digital Products and install it. Until the app is on, the Digital Products block does not appear on your product pages at all.
2. Create the product. Products, then Add product. Title, description, price, images. Nothing unusual yet.
3. Turn off shipping. In the Shipping section, deactivate the Physical product setting. Miss this and Shopify will try to charge your buyer postage on a PDF, which is the single most common setup mistake and the one your customers will email you about.
4. Turn off inventory tracking. A file does not run out. Leaving quantity tracking on is how a seller wakes up to an out-of-stock ebook.
5. Attach the file or the link. Go to Apps, then Digital Products, then Add assets. Upload a file, or paste a link. You can attach several files to 1 product, and you can bundle them into a .zip.
6. Set the fulfilment behaviour. Under Fulfillment settings you choose an Access limit, which defaults to Unlimited, and a Delivery method, which is either Send automatically or Send manually.
Leave delivery on automatic unless you have a reason not to. Switching to manual has a side effect Shopify documents but most tutorials do not repeat: the download link stops appearing on the Thank You page, even after you have marked the order fulfilled. Your buyer pays, sees a confirmation with no file on it, and emails you.
Shopify’s own closing instruction on this is the right one, and almost nobody does it. Place a test order before you launch. Buy your own product, on your own card, and check that the email arrives and the link opens. If you want the wider version of that habit, we wrote up creating digital downloads that sell separately.
The limits inside the free app, and the 2 that bite
The Digital Products app is free, and its limits are what decide whether it suits your files. Here is what the app will and will not do, taken from Shopify’s own documentation for the app.
The free app caps files at 5 GB, puts no limit at all on download bandwidth, and accepts links from only 12 named providers.
| Limit | The rule | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| File size | 5 GB maximum per file | Split into several files, or use a .zip |
| Folders | Cannot upload a folder | Zip it. The app takes archive files |
| Bandwidth | No limit on downloads | Nothing. This is the app’s best feature |
| Links | Only 12 approved providers | Host the file yourself, or upload it |
| Editing a file | Past buyers lose their link | Upload a new asset, do not replace the old file |
2 of those need spelling out.
The link list is closed. You can sell access to content hosted somewhere else, and it is a genuinely useful option for video. But the list of places Shopify will accept a link from is fixed: Notion, Calendly, Acuity, Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific, Google Drive and Docs, Dropbox, Canva, YouTube, Vimeo and Figma. Shopify’s wording leaves no room: “Links from any other website aren’t accepted.” Your own S3 bucket, your own domain, a Loom recording, none of those go in.
Editing a file breaks the past. This one sits in a Caution box in Shopify’s manual, and the only full-length guide ranking for this search never mentions it. If you edit or delete a digital file, every customer who already bought that product loses access through their download link. Publish version 2 of your template as a new asset rather than swapping the old file, or you will silently break the delivery for everyone who bought version 1.
The 5 GB cap is the one people actually run into. A seller hit the cap with a 9GB product and said so in r/ShopifyeCommerce: “I’m selling a digital product on Shopify that’s around 9GB. Shopify Digital Downloads has a 5GB limit, so I’m using Sky Pilot instead.”
He could not zip the whole thing into 1 archive either, so he was splitting it into 4 downloads. That is the moment a free setup turns into a paid one, and it arrives without warning.
If file size is being driven by security rather than by content, 8 ways to protect digital downloads covers the options that do not need a bigger file.
What it actually costs to sell digital products on Shopify
Selling a digital file on Shopify costs the monthly plan fee plus card processing, with the delivery app free on top. That is 3 layers, and you can read only 2 of them before signing up.
Shopify Basic is $25 a month month-to-month or $19 a month billed yearly, the first-party delivery app is $0, and the card processing rate is the one number Shopify does not print on its pricing page.
| Layer | What it is | Real cost | Where it is published |
|---|---|---|---|
| The plan | Shopify Basic | $25/mo, or $19/mo billed yearly | Pricing page |
| The plan, tier up | Grow, then Advanced | $65 and $399/mo, or $49 and $299 yearly | Pricing page |
| Delivery | Digital Products app | $0 | App Store listing |
| Card processing | Shopify Payments | Not published before signup | Nowhere |
| Not using their processor | Third-party gateway fee | 2% Basic, 1% Grow, 0.6% Advanced | Pricing page |
Shopify’s live plan cards for Basic, Grow and Advanced. The prices shown are the billed-yearly rates. The third line of each card is the percentage Shopify adds if you use any processor other than Shopify Payments.
The one number Shopify will not print
That third row deserves a section of its own, because chasing it is genuinely strange.
Ask Shopify how much it takes from a $100 sale and you get sent in a circle.
The digital-products landing page answers the cost question with “You’ll just pay your standard Shopify subscription and the usual payment processing rates on each sale,” then adds “You can see current plan pricing on our pricing page.” The Basic plan help doc says the plan “offers competitive transaction fees” and tells you to “Review Shopify’s pricing page to find the specific transaction fees under plans in your region.” The Lite plan doc closes with that same referral sentence word for word.
All 3 send you to the pricing page. The pricing page carries no card rate anywhere, and its FAQ says only that the fees “vary depending on the plan that you choose.”
Across those 3 pages and 5 more I swept for a card rate, the number never appears. The pricing page, its 76-row comparison table, the Basic plan doc, the Lite plan doc, the Starter plan doc, the Shopify Payments doc, the Shopify Payments transactions doc and the digital-products landing page. None of them prints it.
The rate does exist, and Shopify says it varies by plan and by region. What you cannot do is read the number while you are still deciding whether the store is worth opening.
2 of the 3 cost layers are on Shopify’s pricing page. The third one, the cut taken from every sale, is on none of the pages a seller would check first.
For scale, Stripe puts its number on its own pricing page in plain sight: 2.9% + $0.30 per successful transaction for domestic cards, with 1.5% added for international cards and 1% more when a currency has to be converted. That is the scale of the missing layer, not Shopify’s actual rate.
The one percentage Shopify does publish is the penalty. Use any processor other than Shopify Payments and Basic adds 2% on top, Grow adds 1%, Advanced adds 0.6%. On a $30 template that is 60 cents a sale on Basic, on top of whatever your own processor charges you.
The cheap route people still recommend is gone. Search for this topic and you will find guides pointing at Shopify Starter at $5 a month as the budget way in.
Shopify’s own Starter plan documentation now says: “The Starter plan isn’t available to new stores. If you’re a merchant currently on the Starter plan and you decide to change your plan, then you can’t revert back to the Starter plan.” The Lite plan, the old Buy Button tier, carries a word-for-word identical closure.
The Starter plan is closed to new stores, Lite is closed too, and Basic at $19 a month on annual billing is now the lowest tier on Shopify’s pricing page. Shopify publishes only that monthly figure, never an annual total, so 12 months of it works out at $228 before you sell anything.
Worth noticing how stale the advice on this topic gets. The one genuine long-form article ranking on page 1, a Printify blog post written for 2026, tells readers Shopify offers a “14-day free trial.”
The live pricing page offers 3 days free, then $1 a month for 3 months. That is a current article with the trial length more than 4 times too long, so treat every other number in the genre the same way and check it at the source.
When a paid delivery app earns its money
2 things push a seller off Shopify’s free Digital Products app, and only 1 of them is about features.
The first is file size. Past 5 GB you have no choice.
The second is what the free app does not do: branded download pages, video streaming rather than downloads, PDF stamping, license keys, timed access. If you sell a video course and want it streamed instead of downloaded, that is a paid app.
Sky Pilot is one of the better known of them, on 4.8 stars from 426 reviews. Its free tier gives you 100 MB of storage and 1 GB of bandwidth a month, which is a demo rather than a plan. Starter is $9 a month, or $90 a year, for 10 GB of storage and 15 GB of monthly bandwidth, with $2 per GB after that. Lite is $24.99 a month for 50 GB of bandwidth, and Growth is $54.99 a month for 200 GB plus video streaming and PDF stamping.
Read those bandwidth numbers carefully, because this is where the free app quietly wins. Shopify’s own app says “There is no bandwidth limit for downloads.” Sky Pilot meters it.
Say your product is a 200 MB video pack and it sells 100 copies in a month. That is 20 GB of downloads, and on Shopify’s free app you pay nothing for it.
On Sky Pilot’s $9 Starter plan, 15 GB is included and the other 5 GB bills at $2 each, so the month costs $19 instead of $9. Sell 300 copies and the overage alone is $90.
None of that makes the paid apps bad. It means the trade is bandwidth billing in exchange for streaming and file protection, and you should know which of those you actually need before you pick. There is a wider survey of the options in our rundown of digital delivery systems.
The tax rule the setup guides skip
EU buyers pay VAT on a digital file at their own country’s rate, not yours. Shopify puts the rule in a Note on its digital products page and then moves on: “Customers in the EU need to pay VAT on digital goods at the rate applicable in their own country regardless of where the seller is located.”
That is a real obligation and it does not care where you live. Sell a $12 preset pack to a buyer in Germany and German VAT applies, not yours. Shopify gives you the tax settings to handle it, but the app does not turn them on for you and the setup tutorials do not mention them.
Configure it before your first international sale. Going back to find you have been absorbing the tax is a worse afternoon.
Is Shopify the right home for a digital-only catalogue?
Sometimes yes. Here is the honest split.
Shopify makes sense when you already sell physical goods, or expect to. The whole platform is built around inventory, shipping and a storefront, and the digital side rides along free on top. Take a ceramicist selling mugs who adds a glaze-recipe PDF. That seller is using Shopify exactly as intended, and the marginal cost of that PDF is zero.
It makes less sense when digital is all you sell. You are paying $228 a year minimum for inventory management you do not use, shipping rules you do not use, and a POS system you do not use, so you can attach a file to a product page. A seller doing 20 sales a month at $15 turns over $3,600 a year and hands $228 of it straight back as rent, which is 6% of revenue for tooling they never touch.
Volume settles it. A flat monthly fee gets cheaper per sale as you grow, and a percentage does the opposite, so the answer flips somewhere in the middle. Work out where your own volume puts you before you pick, because that crossover is the whole decision and it lands in a different place for a $9 preset than it does for a $199 course.
If digital is the whole business, these are the places worth pricing against Shopify.
Run 240 sales of a $15 file through each of them for a year, with every subscription quoted on annual billing, and Shopify Basic costs $228 in plan fees, Gumroad takes $480 in its cut, Sellfy’s cheapest plan costs $264, Payhip’s free plan takes $180, and CartMango, which I built, costs $10. Card processing sits on top of every one of those.
| Where you sell | What it charges | A year, 240 sales | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify Basic | $19 a month billed yearly | $228 | Storefront and physical tooling you may not need |
| Gumroad | 10% + $0.50 a sale | $480 | Card processing stacks on top of that cut |
| Sellfy | From $22 a month billed yearly | $264 | Annual sales caps on every tier |
| Payhip | 5% a sale on the free plan | $180 | No upsells or downsells on any plan |
| CartMango | Free during beta, then $10 a year | $10 | 2 GB storage on the $10 tier, no storefront to browse |
CartMango being mine is also why it sits last in that table rather than first. It is a checkout rather than a store, so it does the file delivery and the payment and nothing else, and the honest limit is the one in that last column: the $10 Silver tier gives you 2 GB of storage total, so the 9 GB seller from earlier would need the $20 tier for its 10 GB and would still have to host video elsewhere. What CartMango gives back is no per-sale cut, direct Stripe and PayPal payouts, and a hosted sales page if you have no website.
2 comparisons on this site go deeper on the same trade-off from the other side: Sellfy vs Shopify and Payhip vs Shopify. If you are still working out what you are selling rather than where, start with what an online store for digital products actually involves and how to price digital products.
FAQ
Can I sell digital products on Shopify?
Yes. Shopify supports digital products on every plan, and its own help centre states there are no additional fees for selling them. You mark the product as non-physical so shipping charges do not apply, then install an app to deliver the file. Shopify’s free Digital Products app does the delivery, and it works alongside physical products in the same order.
How much does it cost to sell digital products on Shopify?
The delivery app is free. The plan is not. Shopify Basic is $25 a month month-to-month, or $19 a month billed yearly, which is $228 a year. Grow is $65 and $49, Advanced is $399 and $299. On top of that sits card processing, which Shopify does not publish on its pricing page, and a 2% surcharge on Basic if you use a processor other than Shopify Payments.
How much does Shopify take from a $100 sale?
Shopify takes no platform commission on a digital sale, so the deduction is card processing plus a possible surcharge. The exact processing rate is not printed on Shopify’s pricing page, in its comparison table, or in its Shopify Payments help docs. You see it in the admin after you sign up. If you use an outside processor, Basic adds 2% on top, so $2 of that $100 before your own processor’s cut.
Can I still get the Shopify Starter plan?
No, not as a new seller. Shopify’s help centre says the Starter plan is not available to new stores, and that a merchant who leaves it cannot go back. The Lite plan carries the same closure. Guides still pointing at either one are out of date. Basic at $19 a month on annual billing is the lowest tier on Shopify’s pricing page today.
What happens if I update a file after someone has bought it?
They lose access. Shopify’s documentation is direct about it: editing or deleting a digital file means customers who already purchased cannot use their download link any more. Add the new version as a separate asset rather than replacing the old one, and tell existing buyers where to find it.
Do digital products sell well on Shopify?
That depends on the traffic you bring, because Shopify is a store you own rather than a marketplace. Nobody browses it the way they browse Etsy, so every visitor arrives because you sent them. The platform puts no ceiling on digital sales, and its free delivery app carries 1,219 reviews from stores doing exactly this, but the selling is on you.
Is there a file size limit on Shopify digital downloads?
Yes, 5 GB per file in the free Digital Products app. You can attach several files to 1 product and you can upload archive files, so a .zip is the usual way around it. Folders cannot be uploaded. Above 5 GB per file you need a paid third-party app, and that is the point at which the cost to sell digital products on Shopify stops being just the plan fee.
The bill that runs whether you sell or not
The awkward part of a monthly platform fee is that it does not care how your month went. Shopify Basic charges its $228 a year whether you sold 300 templates or 3, and the card rate you cannot read up front applies to every one of those sales either way. If you sell physical goods too, that is a fair trade for a real storefront and a real fulfilment stack.
If digital files are the whole business, the money is buying capability you never open. I built CartMango for that seller: a checkout and a hosted sales page, no platform cut on any sale, Stripe and PayPal paying you directly, and a price you can read before you sign up rather than after.
And if you decide to sell digital products on Shopify anyway, nothing above changes the setup steps. It only changes what you expect the year to cost.
About the Author
👋 I’m Welly, founder of CartMango (the site you’re on), a checkout platform for digital product sellers. We’ve previously processed $179M+. I also run BirdSend (email marketing tool, 3.1B+ emails sent). On the side I show other non-techie digital sellers how I use AI workflows to automate 50%+ of my operations. Find me on LinkedIn.
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