If you are an affiliate marketer, you have probably heard about Digistore24. It is one of the leading affiliate marketing platforms. As an affiliate marketer or product creator, you want to know if you should use the platform.
After all, you want to focus your marketing efforts on the best affiliate marketing platform.
This Digistore 24 review will try and address these questions. By the end of the article, you’ll have a clear overview of Digistore 24. Let’s start with the basics.
What is Digistore 24
DigiStore24 (D24) is an online affiliate marketing platform for vendors and affiliates. The company is based in Germany and started by focusing on the German-speaking market. They have a strong presence in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. They are one of the largest affiliate marketplaces in Europe.
As a vendor, you can list physical and digital products to sell. Affiliates can sign up to the platform to find products to support. The platform is free to use for vendors and affiliates. Digistore24 make their money through commissions on sales.
What Products or Services are Available on Digistore 24
Digistore 24 has three different product listings. You have Digital Products, Physical Products, and Events & Seminars. Under each of these listings, you have different categories of products. Digital products has the largest range of categories, with 26 in all.
There are two categories for physical products and three categories for events and seminars. For the physical products, you have skincare and supplements. The events and seminars categories are finance, leadership, and sales training.
That sounds great until you have a closer look at what’s on offer.
There were only two listings under the events heading when I wrote this review.
There were only two skincare listings under the physical products section. Supplements were a bit better with 40 products.
The quality of the digital products is mediocre. There are a lot of online courses and PDF guides. I don’t think I’d be promoting any of the offers I saw listed on the site as an affiliate. The supplements listing seems quite popular, though.
As an affiliate, Digistore24 seems to be a good way to validate the demand for a product or service. I wouldn’t be spending a lot of time on the platform personally.
How Does Digistore24 Work
Signing up to the platform is straightforward. Head over to the registration page, enter your details, confirm your email address and phone number. You’ll have an account set up in less than five minutes.
Once you’ve registered, you can start listing your products or request to become an affiliate for offers.
Digistore24 operates similarly to any other online marketplace for affiliates. The platform has a nice User Interface. Everything is logically laid out, and the site is easy to navigate. You can see your earnings through the dashboards.
As an affiliate, signing up for affiliate offers is straightforward. You can easily access your affiliate links and see how you’re performing. It’s like the other affiliate marketing platforms you might sign up for.
As a vendor, listing your product is easy. You just need to fill out the product listing form. You can also see how many sales you’re getting through the platform and that kind of thing.
Digistore pricing, cost, and commissions
Digistore24 is free to use. You get charged as an affiliate or vendor when you make a sale.
Commission rates for the affiliate vary based on the product/service. In general, vendors offer anything from 15% – 90% commissions. The higher commissions are generally for the digital products.
The platform charges are structured at a flat 7.9% of sale value + $1. Let’s say you sell a product for $100 and your commission rate on the product is 50%. If you have an 8.89% sales tax, this is how it would break down:
- Gross sale – $108.89
- Paid to tax authority – $8.89
- The margin for Digistore24 – $9.60
- Payable to affiliate – $45.20
- Payable to supplier – $45.20
In addition, 10% of the sale value will be held by Digistore24 and refunded after 60 days.
That’s quite a high commission when compared to other affiliate programs. To put it in perspective, JV Zoo charges a 5% commission on all sales. So that’s 50% more than you’d pay if you used JV Zoo. Clickbank, on the other hand, charges a monthly fee, and $2 per sale.
What are the pros of Digistore24 for affiliates and sellers?
One of the biggest strengths of Digistore24 is the nice user dashboard. The website has a nice design, and it’s easy to navigate as an affiliate or vendor. They’re popular, so that means there is a market for the products you list on the site.
Everything is nicely automated and you know it works. Plus, they offer strong customer support team as you can see from the TrustPilot reviews.
These are benefits for vendors and affiliates. Let’s quickly look at some of the pros of Digistore24 for vendors, and some of the pros of Digistore24 for affiliates.
Digitstore24 Vendor’s benefits
If you’re a vendor, you’ll also be competing with a lot of mediocre products. That’s an opportunity. However, I’m not sure that listing a good product on a site that has a lot of poor-quality products is necessarily a good thing. You’d probably be better off focusing your efforts on a larger affiliate marketing platform.
Here are a couple of other things to consider:
- List your products and find qualified partners to market them for you.
- Digitstore24 handles distribution of digital products and sales of event tickets.
- Can set up sales funnels.
- You can set up and automate your sales processes.
To be clear, you’ll get many of these benefits from other affiliate marketplaces.
Digistore24 Affiliate Benefits
As an affiliate, Digistore 24 has lots of potential. You can find a range of physical and digital products to support. They also provide instant approval of affiliate applications. Here are a few of the other benefits:
- You get the option of weekly, biweekly, and monthly payments.
- Payment options for monthly payments require a low minimum payout ($50).
- Commission rates range from 15% to 90%.
- PayPal, bank transfer, credit and debit card payments can be made
- Instant approval of affiliate applications and trackable affiliate links.
As a platform, Digistore24 is something you might want to explore as an affiliate. The most important thing for an affiliate, though, is what’s available in the marketplace. With than in mind, let’s look at some of the cons of Digistore24.
Cons of Using Digistore24
Now let’s look at some of the limitations of using the Digistore24 affiliate network as your primary affiliate network.
1. Limited products
Digistore24 offers fewer products than most other affiliate networks. Most of the physical products and digital services focus on making money online and the fitness niche, which makes for a very narrow market segment.
As I mentioned earlier, there is next to nothing listed under many of the categories. For me, that seems to imply that the English-speaking affiliate community on the site is small. If you could be earning a good income from the site, I’m sure a lot more vendors would be active.
2. Poor Quality Products
Poor quality products are an issue for affiliate marketers. If you don’t sell products people value, you will lose the trust of your audience. That can lead to ‘offer blindness’ where your audience ignores your promotions.
Unfortunately, Digistore 24 has a lot of low-quality products. That is a big problem with the digital product inventory. The software category, for example, has a lot of two-star products.
With the physical supplements, you are supporting higher quality products. However, if you’re not active in the health and fitness niche that’s not very useful.
The other issue I came across is the transparency of the rating system.
It’s not clear where these ratings come from. I’m not sure if these are ratings from people who purchased the product, and if so, how many people provided feedback. You need to have this information as an affiliate when evaluating products.
3. Technical Issues
The Digistore24 app can be glitchy and has some legacy issues. On Android, you will often get a black screen upon opening the app, or the app itself will crash. There are loading issue. You might need to reboot your phone and then restart the app.
In extreme cases, you may need to delete and reload the app.
All this can get cumbersome for the user. Personally, I don’t think I’d ever use the app so I don’t see this as being a big problem. Something to keep in mind, though.
Impression of Digistore24
DiDigistore24 is a place where you can list digital and physical products to sell or promote. It seems to be a successful affiliate network for German speakers. If you’re into affiliate marketing, I don’t think it’s a good place to list products or find affiliate offers at the moment.
That could change over time. The company does have the framework for a good affiliate marketplace.
If you want to find digital products to support, it makes more sense to focus your efforts on sites like Clickbank, Warrior Forum, or JV Zoo which have larger communities and a wider product offering.
