How to sell digital products without sending every file by hand
To sell digital products from your site, upload each file as protected, set a price, and let the site deliver it on its own. Whoever pays downloads it instantly and can come back for it anytime, without messaging you.
Nohemí teaches second grade in Fresnillo, and in the afternoons she puts together printable reading and writing workbooks: 40 pages, $95 each. She advertises them in teacher groups, and until recently this was how she sold digital products: someone would transfer the money, send her the receipt on WhatsApp, and she’d reply with the PDF.
The problem is the timing. Her customers buy on Sunday night, when they’re planning the week, and Monday before eight. At that hour Nohemí is having dinner with her kids or standing in front of 31 children. One Sunday, fourteen receipts came in between nine and eleven; she answered the last one at one in the morning, and three people had already asked her, “so are you going to send it or not?”
The file is the same for all fourteen. Sending it fourteen times is exactly the kind of work a website can do on its own.
What is a digital product?
A digital product is a file you make once and deliver as many times as needed: a PDF, an Excel template, a ZIP package. It never runs out and it’s never shipped; the only work each sale requires is delivering it. That covers Nohemí’s workbooks, an accountant’s expense-tracking template, and a designer’s editable invitations.
On a site built with Proyecta, those files live in a section of your dashboard called Downloads. Each one gets a title, a one-line description, a category, who’s allowed to download it, and, if it’s for sale, a price.
It accepts PDF, ZIP, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and CSV. Loose photos don’t count: they go inside a ZIP. Videos are a course, not a download.
Do you have to charge for every digital product?
No. The free ones are what people pass around, and that’s often how a future buyer finds you. Each file has its own access level, and there are four:
- Free. Anyone can download it, no account needed.
- Requires an account. You need to log in first. It doesn’t cost anything.
- Requires purchase. You pay once, and it opens for whoever paid.
- Requires membership. Only unlocks for someone with an active membership on your site. Only applies if you sell one.
Nohemí used three. Free: a single page with October’s school dates, the kind of thing teachers pass around among themselves. Account-required: a five-page sample from the syllables workbook. For sale: the three complete workbooks.
The account-required sample has a purpose: buying on the site requires logging in anyway. A teacher who already logged in for the sample is one click away from buying the full version.
Where do you upload the file you’re selling?
In the Protected file field, not File. Both fields live on the same entry, and only one of them protects anything.
Whatever you upload under “File” gets a public address: anyone with that address can open it, whether they paid or not. That’s perfect for the free ones. Whatever you upload under “Protected file” has no address at all; it’s only delivered to someone the site has confirmed paid.
Two rules follow from that:
- “Requires an account” is not a lock. It hides the button until the person logs in, but the file still sits in the public field. Never put something you’re charging for there.
- If you mark “Requires purchase” and upload the file in the wrong field, your dashboard flags it right there in the list: This file is public: upload it under “Protected file”.
What happens when someone buys?
The site charges and delivers without you stepping in. For someone not logged in, the button reads “Log in to buy”; once they’re in, it reads “Buy” and takes them straight to payment, no cart involved. The moment the payment clears, that same button switches to “Download.”
Every time it’s clicked, the site checks that the person actually bought it and hands them a link that lasts six hours. If they forward that link, it works for a few hours and then stops opening. Whoever actually paid loses nothing: they can come back anytime, hit “Download” again, and get a fresh link. It also shows up for them under “My digital purchases” in their account.
If you refund someone, their access closes with the refund.
For Nohemí, that’s the whole Sunday handled: all fourteen pay and download their workbook while she has dinner.
Why isn’t the buy button showing up?
Because either the protected file or the price is missing. The site won’t show a buy button it can’t actually fulfill, so check these two things:
- No protected file. In your dashboard, the entry reads “No file.” Upload one and the button appears.
- No price. A file marked “Requires purchase” with an empty price field won’t sell.
In both cases, the title and description still show up on your site, so from the outside everything looks fine. After publishing, go in as a customer and confirm every paid item actually has its button.
What do people download before you’ve uploaded your files?
A sample PDF, and only on the free and account-required ones. The moment your site goes live, those entries already have something to download: a PDF built from the title, the description, and the entry’s text.
It’s there so your site doesn’t launch with dead buttons, but it isn’t your real material. In your dashboard, any entry still running on the sample reads “No file”: upload your own for each one before you share the link in any group.
Paid entries don’t get a sample. They deliver nothing until you upload the protected file.
What can’t the site prevent?
Someone forwarding a file they’ve already downloaded. That’s the limit of selling digital products anywhere: the site closes the link, but a PDF that’s already on someone’s phone gets sent over WhatsApp like any other photo.
It already happened to Nohemí: a teacher from another school messaged her asking for “the next workbook,” and she’d never bought the first one. It had reached her through her school district’s group chat.
What’s actually in your hands:
- A price low enough that paying is easier than asking around. At $95, buying it is faster than going and asking for it.
- Your name on every page. Not just the cover — on the bottom of every single page, with your site’s address. That teacher found Nohemí because the page said so.
Before you upload your first file, try this test
Open the PDF you sell most and go to a page in the middle, page 17, say. If someone only ever saw that one page, would they know whose it is and where to buy the rest? If not, fix it before you upload it.
Then describe it to Proyecta exactly like this: “a site to sell my printable second-grade workbooks: one free page of school dates, a five-page sample that requires an account, and three workbooks at $95 each, paid by card and downloaded instantly.”
Once it’s live, go to Downloads in your dashboard, upload each file in its own field, and check that every entry has the access level and price you asked for. Everything else — charging, delivering, and delivering again — is handled by the site. Get started at proyecta.dev.