Sell Digital Products and Create a Marketplace

Marketify is a WordPress theme from Astoundify that can be used to build an online store to sell digital products. These digital products can be of any type, such as themes, plugins, fonts, audio and video files, as well as eBooks, or anything else that can be downloaded.

As well as selling your own products through the site, the Marketify theme can also be used to create a multi-vendor marketplace, selling products from other developers. Examples of other popular marketplaces selling digital products are sites such as ThemeForest and CodeCanyon.

By using this theme and the recommended plugins, you can create an eCommerce store designed for selling digital products created by yourself or others. In this Marketify review we will take a detailed look at the theme’s features and find out how easy it is to use.

Features and Usage

Marketify has been designed to create a site that can sell digital products created by a single user, or building a marketplace that includes products from multiple authors. Any type of digital product could be sold; as long as it can be downloaded you can sell it on your site.

The eCommerce functionality is provided by the Easy Digital Downloads plugin which is available separately. Although this plugin is free, the Marketify theme makes optional use of a number of premium extensions for Easy Digital Downloads.

At its most basic this this will allow you to create an attractive online store to promote and sell a digital product such as a plugin or theme you’ve developed. However, it can do a lot more than that and is ideal for anyone wanting to build a marketplace online store that sells a wide range of products, which they themselves haven’t created or own.

Working with Other Vendors

Those with products to sell can create an account and profile on your site and then start listing their products for sale at your store. Users who sign up this way are given the role of ‘Shop Vendor’, allowing them to create a profile and list products. This is all done through frontend submission forms, without the user having any access to the backend of your WordPress site. Marketify uses the Front End Submissions extension for Easy Digital Downloads to add this functionality to the theme.

By using the Commissions extension for Easy Digital Downloads, setting up a profit sharing system is very easy. Implementing this approach means that for each sale, the revenue is automatically split between the site owner and the product author, with the whole process managed for you.

The commissions can be set at a global level that is applied to all products. Alternatively commissions can be set on a per product basis, overriding the global value. This is great for creating deals with individual vendors on your site. In both cases, the rate of commission can be either a percentage or a flat fee.

A recent update to the theme now allows it to be integrated with the PayPal Adaptive Payments extension. This means that the commission payments to vendors can be handled on an automated basis, preventing you from having to go into PayPal and process them.

When it comes to pricing the products at your store, this can be done on an individual product basis, giving you and you your vendor’s total control over how the different products are priced. You can also create pricing bundles, such as access to all products for a set price, similar to a theme club or access to all products for a certain period.

Other features of the Marketify theme include:

• Social logins for making it even easier for visitors to become customers
• Audio and video previews of products
• Responsive layout for use on small screen devices
• Inclusion of the Marketify full-width slider
• Customers ratings and reviews of products
• Offer points and rewards
• Show recommended products
• Customers can create wish lists

Recommended Plugins

Although the developers of the theme state that are ‘technically no required plugins’ to use Marketify. There are a number of recommended plugins that are recommended in order to allow you to build your online store or marketplace.

Some of these plugins are free, while a number of them are premium extensions for the free Easy Digital Downloads plugin. You can view the list of recommended plugins here to get an idea of how this theme works and the additional cost of recreating the functionality of the demo site.

If you do want to create a marketplace, selling other people’s products, then you will need to invest in the premium addons for Easy Digital Downloads to really offer this service properly.

Site Appearance

The Marketify theme is very well designed in terms of its appearance and it looks great. The homepage design features full-width background images, and a great layout for showcasing the available products, as well as highlighting the qualities of your store.

The theme comes with two main homepage layouts, allowing you to quickly setup your store to suit the type of products it will sell and how you want it to function; whether that’s listing products or prompting customers to search for what they are looking for.

However you can easily create your own custom homepage layouts in order to build the store you want. The theme makes use of homepage widget areas so adding features to your homepage, such as the slider, price table, or testimonials, is just a case of dragging the corresponding widget to the homepage widget area.

Most of the widgets that come with the theme have settings allowing you to customise how they function and the appearance of the homepage further.

The theme also comes with a few custom page templates for giving your some easy to use templates to apply to your pages. As well as the typical full width and single column page templates, Marketify also includes a pricing page template, and a meet the team template.

Although the theme itself doesn’t use shortcodes, the shortcodes from Easy Digital Downloads can be used to quickly add a particular element to your pages, such as a list of products, or vendor profiles.

The theme also allows you to include a blog at your store or marketplace. The design of the blog hasn’t been added as an oversight and has an attractive appearance that fits in well with the rest of the site.

Customer Experience

Browsing the store is very easy thanks to the top navigation menu and sidebar links. Products can be organised in any way you see fit but a good option could be to group them by type such as audio, video or by platform such WordPress, Joomla, etc. It really depends on the products you are selling, but just like a regular WordPress site, the organisation of your content is very flexible.

The products are displayed using a responsive grid layout, each with their own logo, link to the product details, and a link to the author’s profile page, as well as the option to buy the product. Once again, the design is really clean and attractive and works well to present the products in a great light.

From the product listings, users can either click on the ‘Details’ button to view the product, or they can add the item to their cart. Clicking the ‘Buy Now’ button opens a lightbox-style overlay which allows the customer to add the item to their cart without leaving the product page. This is a good design choice as it makes it easy for customers to continue shopping from where they left off.

Alternatively, once the product has been added to the cart, the customer can head straight to the checkout page to complete the transaction.

Customers at an online store powered by Marketify can also view the author profiles and see all the products offered by a specific author. They can also read the author’s profile, and send them a direct message. As the potential customer and the author can connect with each other directly, it removes you the site owner from the pre-sales discussion process.

Those who want to list their products on your store can quickly create an author account using the front end submission form and then update their profile and start adding products to the marketplace. The forms for adding a product, including uploading the files and setting the price, all use the same design as the rest of the store creating a consistent user experience.

The frontend submission forms make it extremely easy for authors to being listing their products on your store. The whole process is very quick and painless.

From the author dashboard, it is also possible to track earnings by viewing the sales figures for their products.

Pricing

The Marketify theme is available from ThemeForest for $60. However, in order to get the most from this theme and use all the features and functionality it has to offer, it will require the use of some premium plugins. Most of the premium plugins are extension of the free Easy Digital Downloads plugin.

The plugins are all optional; however, if you do want to use some of the features such as frontend submissions, handling commissions, or displaying recommended products, you will need to purchase the recommended plugins. These premium extensions are priced individually or can be purchased together in the marketplace bundle for $159.

If you are only selling your own products then most of these premium extensions are entirely optional. However, if you are creating a marketplace, working with other vendors to sell their products then they are necessary. If your site and its products prove popular you should be able to recoup the investment quite quickly.

Support and Documentation

The theme is well documented with text based pages detailing the features. There is also a number of tutorial videos covering the setup process helping you to make the most of the theme. The online documentation can be found here.

Customers also get access to the support forums where they can ask for help and make feature requests from the developers.

Final Conclusion and Recommendations

The Marketify theme has a really professional and attractive appearance. The theme can easily allow you to create an online store for selling digital products. The ability to allow other vendors to sign up and list their own products also makes it a great choice for creating a digital marketplace.

By integrating it with the tried and tested Easy Digital Downloads plugin, the theme developers have created an effective and powerful way to build an online store using WordPress. The premium extensions for Easy Digital Downloads allow you to add some useful features to the site, such as profit sharing, however they do come at an extra financial cost.

If you only want to sell your own digital products though, most of these premium extensions are optional extras and can be added at a later date if you want to expand the features of your store.

The theme developers have also announced that in a forthcoming update, the scope of the theme will be increased to handle physical products, further expanding the products that can be sold in an online store using this theme.

Although there are many eCommerce themes for WordPress, Marketify has been created specifically to sell digital products and integrate closely with the well-regarded Easy Digital Download eCommerce plugin. When it comes to marketplace themes and solutions for WordPress there are fewer options available making Marketify even more attractive.

If you like the appearance of the theme and are looking for a solution for selling your own digital products as well as those from other vendors, then the Marketify theme is a strong contender and could be just what you are looking for.

Marketify

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