Do Digital Products Sell Better Than Physical Products?

[Si_P]

Hi,

Something i've always wandered but everyone always seem to put emphasise on selling the likes of e-books, etc via Clickbank but is it not just as possible to make a super income selling physical products?

Which do you think sell better in your opinion?

Thanks,
Si

[Kevin Riley]

Originally Posted by Si_P

Hi,

Something i've always wandered but everyone always seem to put emphasise on selling the likes of e-books, etc via Clickbank but is it not just as possible to make a super income selling physical products?

Which do you think sell better in your opinion?

Thanks,
Si

That's because ClickBank only does transactions for digital products. I sell both, and they both sell well. Basically, select the format that goes best with your product and that your target market likes to use.

[CliveG]

In my experience it is easier to sell physical products, but there are huge advantages selling digital products, including:

* Once you have produced your product there is no marginal cost for each additional sale;
* You can deliver anywhere at low cost;
* You do not need a warehouse and/or shipping service;
* You can automate the whole process;
* etc.

[Allan Rich]

It really depends on your market.

But if I had to choose one... I would pick digital.

You would have to look at the manual labor and extra overhead with physical products... i.e. shipping, storage, inventory cost etc.

Digital products can be 100% automated passive income, which can generate just as much if not more revenue than physical products.

[euhlir]

There's definite bonuses to doing it online. No shipping, no handling, and you can sell it 24/7 without employees.

[Si_P]

I can understand that with your own products there is less cost involved online but let me ask this. Do you as an affiliate sell more in particular niches with digital or physical products?

[DavidO]

I sell a single product in both digital and physical versions. They do about 50/50. A lot of my market is older and non-technical and they buy more of the physical product. But I would be losing out if I chose one verson over the other.

As both a consumer and a marketer, I feel a certain amount of resentment towards digital products. You don't have to be a genius and even the non-savvy consumer can recognize that they have virtually zero production cost after development.

I welcome the $7 trend but let's look at the typical ebook. You pay, say $47, for what? A heavily-padded pdf in 18px font size and lots of pictures. This is the equivalent of maybe 10 to a maximum of 50 pages of a physical book.

And what about quality? A real publisher insists on editing and proofreading and generally puts out a high-quality product. Many, many ebooks are poor researched, often in substandard English, etc. etc.

Of course there are exceptions but the typical ebook has a real, intrinsic value of a few cents. It's a joke.

[Steven Carl Kelly]

Originally Posted by euhlir

There's definite bonuses to doing it online. No shipping, no handling, and you can sell it 24/7 without employees.

You can do that with physical products, too.

[ildarius]

Vast majority of products sold online are physical (according to Mike Moran and Bill Hunt of IBM Press), since that is the case I can only imagine that people are more used to buying physical products and so they probably sell better.

I know my Amazon sales always surprass my CB sales, but that's just me

[Paxton]

My splits are a bit different. 90:10 in favor of physical products. It's easier for me to build a lasting relationship with my customers with physical products and as long as I keep updating my sites with new products, there is a constant stream of repeat buyers.

No knocking e-products. Just have more success with real goods.

Has a lot to do with your mind-set of course and your own particular business plan.

[Loren Woirhaye]

Physical products sold by mail discourage returns and refunding
because it's a pain for the recipient to box it up and return it.

This is what Robert Collier called "not the best kind of sale, but
probably the average sale".

With digital products your costs as a publisher are reduced to
the point where, these days, they cost you virtually nothing
to distribute. Even video products cost just pennies to host
for downloading these days. Way cheaper than paper and
CD printing.

Physical products, especially if printed, bound, and coming in
those nice plastic CD binders and cases have a higher perceived
value - because people like to put them on their bookshelf and
look at them. I have bookshelves full of marketing and advertising
books and I like to look at them and pick them up and handle
them and show them to friends. It's an ego boost, but also
confirmation of what I've studied and learned from them - plus
they are easy to refer to when I need some info.

My advice is ultimately you should look at publishing in a
hard-copy format. It discourages ebook piracy because the
pirate would have to order the book, scan it, then send
it back to get his refund - and I think most of them are
not so motivated to do that.

Selling your books in print is actually the safest way to protect
your intellectual property. It's a lot of work to scan a book
without breaking the spine, and it looks like crap anyway. If
you tear the book apart to get a clean scan it destroys the
book and the pleasure of owning it - so that is a deterrent for
the casual info-pirate.

DVDs and CDs of course are easy to copy and distribute, so
make sure top refer to the valuable additional information
in the "workbook" often in your Audio/visual products. You
can "key" the printing of the workbook so if somebody pirates
it and distributes it you can sue the pants off them.

The advantage of digital products, in addition to being very
cheap to distribute with virtually zero fulfillment costs, is
that the purchase doesn't feel "real" - it's just imaginary money
to the buyer in many cases - just zapped via PayPal. The
digital transaction makes buyer's remorse less of a factor -
and in fact the buyer may get a warped view of the value of
the product and be willing to pay more because it does
not feel as "real" as a tangible product.

This is a counter-intuitive thing to grasp for a marketer -
so here's an example. You can go into a lot of stores today
and buy a yoga DVD for 10 or 20 dollars - yet online a
yoga video course might sell for $40-100 or more. Because
an online course can be sold via a salesletter and a DVD
only has the limited real estate of the box it comes in -
the reality is that more value can be built in a salesletter
than on a box, so a higher price can sometimes be commanded
for what is essentially a similar product.

[sanjid112]

Originally Posted by Si_P

Hi,

Something i've always wandered but everyone always seem to put emphasise on selling the likes of e-books, etc via Clickbank but is it not just as possible to make a super income selling physical products?

Which do you think sell better in your opinion?

Thanks,
Si

Hi Si...
Clickbank is a place to sell digital products, so you won't find any physical one there. Both can gain same profit. It is depend on what product you sell, your market, and how you sell it.

So, my answer, both are the same. You can gain super income from both products.

-Malik

[MisterMunch]

I see a lot better convertion on my physical websites. I target keyword people search when they try to buy.

For ebooks I target problem words. Clickbank around 1 percent Amazon around 10 percent. However. 1 clickbank product outearn 4-10 amazon products.

[mrmatt]

I agree with many here in that you should do both. In fact an easy up sell is to include the physical product as well. There are plenty of companies that will do all the fulfillment for you.

[mequad]

Hey Loren,

Well thought out and written post.

As we all know, there is no black and white answer here.

Physical products like model trains, must be sold physically.

But the INFO on how to set up a fantastic train track can be
sold by multiple marketing avenues.

None is better than the other...

The MORE sales funnels, the more gross income.

BUT, also the more Operating Costs.

So, NET income may not be much higher, but the work
it takes is usually a lot more.

If YOU are doing all the work, that's not so good!

If you outsource or delegate the work, and can still make
a good Net profit after all the pay-outs, then you will make
the most profit from multiple marketing avenues.

Decide how much extra hassle you are willing to shoulder.

If not much, then stick to digital delivery... it's the easiest.

[freudianslip27]

It's interesting how the tide has changed as technology moves forward. Being able to sell things digitally opened alot of doors for people, you no longer needed to worry about things like printing, fullfillment, etc. Just create a pdf and you're good to go.

But now companies exist to take digital products and convert them to physical ones. Crazy!

Matt

[reubin]

i think the maily factor of Digital Products Sell Better Than Physical Products is no shipping costs of digital products .

[Kirk Ward]

Originally Posted by Kevin Riley

That's because ClickBank only does transactions for digital products. I sell both, and they both sell well. Basically, select the format that goes best with your product and that your target market likes to use.

The key here is to match the format to the product and your target market. I sell both, but certain products sell better in one version than the other, and versey visa.

Kirk