Etsy or your own storefront? Where to sell your first digital product

There's a moment every new digital product maker hits. The thing is finished. You've tested it, fixed the typo on page three, and made a pretty mockup in Canva. And then you sit there with your finger over the keyboard, thinking: okay, but where do I actually sell this?

Here's my honest answer, and it might surprise you. I sell everything I make through a Beacons storefront. I don't sell on Etsy myself. And I still think Etsy might be the right first shop for you.

That's not me hedging. It's that "where should I sell?" sounds like a question about fees, and it's really a question about something else. Once you see what that something else is, the choice gets a lot easier. Let's walk through it like two friends with a notebook.

The real question: who brings the buyers?

Every place you can sell a digital product falls somewhere on one line. At one end is a marketplace like Etsy. At the other end is your own storefront, like my Beacons shop.

A marketplace already has shoppers. People open Etsy and type "budget planner" or "kids chore chart" into the search bar with their wallet halfway out. Your listing can show up in front of them on day one, even if nobody on earth knows your name. In exchange, you play by the marketplace's rules, pay its fees, and sit right next to hundreds of similar listings.

A storefront is a shop with your name on the door and nobody walking past it. Nobody stumbles onto a Beacons store while browsing. Every buyer arrives because you sent them, from a blog post, a Pinterest pin, a Threads post or an email. In exchange, you get more control over how your products look, what they are and how you talk about them.

So before you compare a single fee, ask yourself: do I already have a way to send people to a shop? If the honest answer is "not yet", that tells you a lot. If you're building one (a blog, a Pinterest account, a little audience somewhere), that tells you something too.

Fees still matter, though. So let's look at them properly.

What Etsy gives you, and what it asks in return

Etsy's big gift is built-in search traffic. Its costs come in layers, and new sellers are often surprised by how they stack. Here's what Etsy's own fee policy lists right now:

• Listing fee: 20 cents per listing, charged again when the listing renews (listings run four months, and an automatic renewal after a sale counts too).
• Transaction fee: 6.5% of the price.
• Payment processing: a percentage plus a small fixed fee per order, set by country. In the US it's around 3% plus 25 cents.
• Offsite Ads: if Etsy advertises your listing on other sites and someone buys through that ad, you pay 15% of that order, or 12% once your shop passes $10,000 in sales over the past year, capped at $100 per order. Shops under $10,000 can opt out. Shops above it can't.

There's also a rule every AI-assisted maker should know. Etsy's Creativity Standards say digital downloads need to be your own original work. Things made with AI tools can qualify when they're based on your own prompts and ideas, but you have to say in the listing description that AI was used. Bundles of other people's work don't qualify, and neither do bundles of AI prompts.

Honestly, I think that rule is fair. It just means "I asked AI for 50 planners and listed them all" isn't a business plan on Etsy. Something you designed for a real need, with AI as your helper, is.

What your own storefront gives you, and what it asks in return

My products are interactive pages: guides, tools and trackers people click through in a browser, built with AI and hosted on Netlify. I sell them through Beacons, which works as a link-in-bio page and a small shop in one.

Here's how Beacons' store fees work, from its help center this week:

• Free and Creator plans (Creator is $10 a month): Beacons takes 9% of each sale.
• Creator Plus ($30 a month) and Creator Max ($100 a month): Beacons takes 0%.
• Either way, the payment processor takes its own cut. Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction, and PayPal has its own rates.

So the free plan isn't free, exactly. It's "free until you sell something", which is a pretty friendly deal when you're starting out.

What a storefront gives you is room. Your product page looks the way you want, you're not sitting next to a competitor's listing, and you can sell things that aren't a simple file, like a web-based tool or a course. The catch is the one we already talked about: an empty shop stays empty until you bring people to it. That's why my blog and Pinterest aren't a side project. They're the road to the shop door.

The math on a $15 product

Let's make this concrete. Say you sell a $15 digital planner in the US, and a buyer pays with a card. This is a rough estimate that leaves out sales tax and currency conversion.

A few things jump out:

1. On a normal sale, Etsy and a free Beacons plan come out almost the same. The fee difference is small. The traffic difference is huge.
2. Offsite Ads sales cost noticeably more. You only pay when an ad actually leads to a sale, so it's not money down the drain, but it's worth knowing your opt-out option while you're under the threshold.
3. Creator Plus only pays off once you're selling regularly. Dropping the 9% fee saves you money once your sales pass about $333 a month (9% of $333 is $30). Below that, the free plan costs less.

The takeaway: at the beginning, the fee table shouldn't be what decides it for you.

Five questions to help you decide

Grab a pen. Answer these honestly, and you'll know which way you lean.

• Do I already have a way to send people to a shop? A blog, a Pinterest account, an email list, a few hundred followers who like what you make. If no, Etsy's search traffic is a real head start.
• Is my product a simple download? A printable, a template, a planner file. Those fit neatly into an Etsy listing. If it's an interactive tool, a course or something that lives on the web, a storefront usually fits it better. (Etsy delivers digital items as files, so check its current rules before packaging anything else.)
• Am I okay competing on a busy search page? On Etsy, buyers compare you with similar listings side by side, which means your photos, title and price need to hold their own.
• Do I want my own brand from day one? On a storefront, buyers remember your name. On a marketplace, they often remember "I got it on Etsy".
• How much time do I have each week? Etsy rewards listing and tweaking regularly inside Etsy. A storefront rewards showing up wherever your people are, like Pinterest or a blog. Both take time. Pick the kind of time you'll actually keep spending.

Mostly yes to the first one and "web-based" on the second? A storefront is probably your home. No audience yet and a simple download? Start on Etsy.

A prompt to talk it through with AI

If you're still on the fence, let AI play the role of a patient friend who asks good questions. Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT:

I've made my first digital product and I'm deciding where to sell it:
Etsy or my own storefront (like Beacons).

About my product: [what it is, who it's for, what format: printable file, template, interactive web page, course]
My price idea: [price]
How people could find me today: [blog, Pinterest, Instagram, email list, or nothing yet]
Time I can give this each week: [hours]

Ask me up to 5 questions, one at a time, to understand my situation.
Then recommend where I should start and why, in plain language.
Tell me the biggest risk of your recommendation and one thing I can do this week to start.
Don't invent numbers about my sales or traffic. If you mention fees, remind me to check the platform's current fee page.

The last line matters. AI tools love to sound confident about fees and rules that may have changed since they were trained. Always check the actual fee page before you decide.

You don't have to choose forever

Here's the part nobody tells you: this isn't a marriage. Plenty of sellers start on Etsy to learn what people buy, then open their own shop once they have an audience. Others start with a storefront and add Etsy later as a second shelf for their simplest downloads.

My advice is just to pick one and get your first product live this month. A product sitting in a folder while you research platforms earns exactly nothing. You'll learn more from your first ten listings or your first ten shop visitors than from another week of comparison videos.

If you haven't made that first product yet, start with how I make digital products with AI, from a blank chat to a listing. It walks through my whole process, step by step.

And if Etsy is where you're starting, my Etsy Success Guide 2026 Edition covers setting up and growing an Etsy shop for digital products, from your first listings to your first sales. It's the guide I'd hand a friend who just decided "okay, Etsy it is."