Learn how to sell digital downloads, license codes, event codes and any other digital product on your website with Google Sheets, PayPal and Google Drive
The web has made it incredibly easy for anyone to sell digital products directly to customers through websites, social media, and email newsletters. You can sell PDF ebooks, event tickets, MP3 music, photos, gift cards, software apps, license keys, coupon codes, website templates, fonts, graphics, video courses, and many more downloadable files.
While there are quite a few e-commerce platforms that help you sell digital products – Gumroad, E-junkie, Paddle, FastSpring, Shopify, Instamojo and WooCommerce, to name a few, here’s a do-it-yourself solution that will help you build your own online digital store in under 5 minutes using PayPal and your Google account.
Sell Digital Goods – The Workflow
Before we get into the implementation, here’s an overview of how the payment and digital delivery workflow works.
- Embed the “Buy Now” buttons into your website or blog.
- The buyer clicks the checkout button, enters their credit card details and completes the payment. The customer stays on your site and isn’t redirected anywhere to complete the purchase.
- The order is delivered to the customer from your Gmail in a personalized email message. You can also attach a tax invoice in the confirmation email.
You can head over to the live demo page and experience the 1-step checkout experience on your desktop or mobile phone.
Sell Digital Downloads with PayPal and Google Drive
The workflow uses Google Drive for securely hosting files, PayPal for processing payments, Google Sheets for generating professional PDF invoices and Gmail for delivering the order to the buyer as file attachments.
There are no limitations on the size of files or the number of products that you can sell. There are no bandwidth or storage restrictions. There’s no transaction fee except for the payment processing fees that are charged directly by PayPal and Stripe.
Get Started Selling Digital Goods
Here’s a step-by-step video tutorial that explains how you can easily sell digital products with PayPal and Google Drive.
Step 1: Create a PayPal App
Create a PayPal Business account. Then go to developer.paypal.com and sign-in with PayPal.
Inside your PayPal developer dashboard, go to My Apps & Credentials, and create a new app under the Rest API Apps section. You can give your app any name as it is for internal use only. You need to create client credentials for both Sandbox and Live mode.
Step 2: Create a PayPal Webhook
When a buyer completes the purchase and makes the payment, PayPal will send your Google Sheets a notification by calling a specific URL and this is known as a webhook.
To create a webhook, go to digitalgoods.dev/copy and copy the Google Sheet to your Google Drive. Inside the sheet, go to Tools > Script Editor, then choose Publish > Deploy As Web App and click the Update button to create your PayPal webhook. Copy the URL to the clipboard.
You will have to authorize the script once since it has to do all the operations – send emails, attach Drive files, generate PDF invoices – on behalf of your Google Account.
