Envato now takes a flat 50% of every author’s revenue. For ThemeForest and CodeCanyon authors who were previously keeping up to 87.5% of their earnings, that’s a significant pay cut. Overnight.
Gumroad takes 10% of every sale on its free plan. Etsy charges 6.5% in transaction fees, plus listing fees, plus payment processing. That adds up fast, especially at scale.
ThemeSelection was a Power Elite Author on ThemeForest. After moving to their own WordPress store with Easy Digital Downloads (EDD), they now save $5,000 to $6,000 every month — money that used to go to the marketplace, now staying in their business.
This guide is the plan that gets you there. You’ll learn what it’s really costing you to stay on a marketplace, what changes when you own your store, and exactly how to build and launch your WordPress store step by step.
- Key Takeaways
- What Marketplaces Are Really Costing You
- What Changes When You Own Your Store
- Before You Leave: Start Here
- Should You Leave Completely, or Run Both?
- Why Build Your Store With WordPress and Easy Digital Downloads
- How to Build Your WordPress Store With Easy Digital Downloads
- How to Drive Traffic to Your New Store
- FAQs: Moving From a Marketplace to WordPress
- How much can I save by moving from a marketplace to my own WordPress store?
- Can I sell on a marketplace and my own WordPress store at the same time?
- Will I lose my existing customers when I leave a marketplace?
- How long does it take to set up a WordPress store with Easy Digital Downloads?
- Should I delete my marketplace account when I launch my own store?
- What's the best WordPress plugin for selling digital products?
- Migrate from a Marketplace to WordPress
Key Takeaways
| Marketplace fees keep rising | Envato now takes a flat 50% of every author’s revenue. Etsy and Gumroad take 6–10% on every sale, plus payment processing. |
| Your own store keeps ~97% | On your own WordPress store, you pay payment processing only — around 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction with Stripe. |
| Build your email list first | Most marketplaces don’t let you contact customers after the sale. Start collecting emails before you move. |
| EDD is free to start | Easy Digital Downloads works on any WordPress site with no trial period, no expiry, and no coding required. |
| ThemeSelection saves $5–6K/month | After leaving ThemeForest, ThemeSelection saves $5,000–$6,000 every month by selling directly with EDD. |
What Marketplaces Are Really Costing You
Most sellers know marketplace fees exist. Few have done the math on what staying costs them long term.
The Real Cost in Fees
Here’s how the major platforms compare:
| Marketplace | Fee Structure | What You Keep (approx.) |
|---|---|---|
| Envato (from July 1, 2026) | Flat 50% revenue share | ~50% |
| Gumroad (free plan) | 10% per transaction | ~90% |
| Etsy | 6.5% transaction + $0.20 listing + ~3% payment processing | ~87–90% |
| Your own WordPress store | Payment processing only (~2.9% + $0.30 with Stripe) | ~97% |
For an Envato author earning $5,000/month, the shift to a flat 50% share means $2,500 going to the platform every month. On your own WordPress store with Stripe, you’d keep around $4,850 of that same revenue.
For a side-by-side comparison with each platform, see how Easy Digital Downloads compares to Etsy and Gumroad. Also worth reading: marketplace vs. your own store.
What Fees Don’t Show
The fee table is just the start. Here’s what the numbers don’t capture.
- Your customers aren’t really yours. Most marketplaces don’t share buyer contact details. You can’t email them, build a relationship, or market to them after the sale.
- Your product page works against you. Competing products appear right next to yours. A buyer lands on your listing and immediately sees alternatives.
- You follow their rules. Pricing limits, delivery restrictions, content policies — they can change at any time, without your input.
- Upsells and bundles are limited or blocked. Offering a discounted bundle or a follow-up product is difficult or impossible on most marketplace platforms.
Signs It’s Time to Move
You’re probably ready to make the switch if:
- Your marketing spend benefits the marketplace’s brand, not yours
- You can’t reach buyers after a purchase
- Platform fees or policies have changed and cost you money
- You want to offer subscriptions, software licensing, or product bundles that the marketplace doesn’t support
- You’re competing on price with dozens of near-identical listings
What Changes When You Own Your Store
Moving to your own store isn’t just about keeping more revenue. It changes how you run your business in ways that benefit you and your customers.
What You Gain 🙌
Full pricing control. No platform limits on what you charge or how you structure your pricing. Variable pricing, pay-what-you-want, bundles, and tiered licensing are all yours to design.
A direct line to your customers. Every purchase builds your own customer list. You can email buyers, offer upgrades, run loyalty offers, and build relationships without asking anyone’s permission.
Your brand, front and center. Your store, your design, your checkout experience. No competing products, no platform branding.
Features marketplaces can’t offer. Subscription billing, software license management, content restriction, and product bundles are all available when you control the platform. Some require an Easy Digital Downloads Pro plan — more on that in Step 2.
Before You Leave: Start Here
There are two things to do before your new store is live. One protects the audience you’ve already built. The other sets you up for a strong launch.
Your Marketplace Customers Aren’t Really Yours to Contact
This is the part that surprises most sellers. It’s not just that the platform takes a cut; it’s that when you leave, your buyer relationships often don’t come with you.
Most marketplace platforms are designed to keep buyers attached to the platform, not to individual sellers.
- Envato and ThemeForest: Authors receive no buyer email addresses at all. There’s no follow or subscribe feature, no email marketing tools, and no way to capture leads from your profile or product listings. Your buyers are Envato’s buyers.
- Etsy: A 2024 policy change removed most third-party email integrations. Buyer emails can only be used for transaction-related communication, not added to a marketing list without explicit consent. There’s no native newsletter tool for standard seller accounts.
- Gumroad: It’s different. Every download (free or paid) captures an email address, and you can export your full list at any time. Gumroad has native broadcast and workflow tools built in. If you sell on Gumroad, you can start building and exporting your list before you move — and you should.
For Etsy and Envato sellers, the practical path is different: start building your external presence now, before your store is live. A simple opt-in page, a social account you control, or a “follow me here” line in your support documentation or order receipts where your platform’s terms allow.
The tools to do this properly come in the next step. Once your WordPress store is live, you’ll have lead magnets, exit-intent popups, and embedded opt-in forms at your disposal. More on that after setup.
Tell Your Customers You’re Moving
Before your launch day, send a newsletter to everyone on your list. Let them know:
- You’re opening your own store (and when)
- Where to find you going forward
- How support, updates, and refunds will be handled
- Any launch incentive (a discount code is a strong motivator)
Here’s something most sellers miss: don’t delete your marketplace listings when you launch. Keep them active and use them as a discovery funnel. Update your profile and product descriptions to point buyers to your website for support, your full product catalog, or direct purchases.
Envato has also removed exclusivity requirements entirely. ThemeForest and CodeCanyon authors can now sell on their own website at the same time, with no platform penalty. That wasn’t possible before.
Should You Leave Completely, or Run Both?
You don’t have to choose one or the other. Running both in parallel is a legitimate long-term strategy.
- During the transition: Keep your marketplace active while your new site builds search engine visibility and organic traffic. Use the marketplace for discovery, your website for direct sales, better margins, and real customer relationships.
- Long term: Some sellers permanently maintain both. Offer a limited selection on the marketplace and direct buyers to your site for the full catalog and direct support.
- Going all in: Once your own traffic matches or exceeds what the marketplace sends you (or when the fees clearly outweigh the discovery benefit) it’s time to shift focus entirely.
For Envato authors specifically, the recent exclusivity removal makes the hybrid approach viable. You can stay listed on ThemeForest or CodeCanyon while building your own independent store, without any restrictions.
Why Build Your Store With WordPress and Easy Digital Downloads
Before walking through the setup, here’s why this combination specifically.
Why WordPress
WordPress powers more than 43% of the internet. It’s open source, which means your data is yours: no platform can lock you out, change the terms, or disappear.
It also has the largest ecosystem of themes, plugins, and developers of any CMS. Whatever your store needs in the future — memberships, course delivery, affiliate programs — WordPress can handle it.
Why Easy Digital Downloads Instead of WooCommerce or Shopify
WooCommerce and Shopify are powerful platforms, but they’re built for physical goods first. Selling digital products on either means navigating shipping settings, inventory tools, and physical product workflows you’ll never use.
Easy Digital Downloads was built exclusively for digital product sellers.
File delivery, license key management, subscription billing, and content restriction are all native to the platform. There’s no physical product overhead to configure or skip past.
If you’re comparing your options, see how Easy Digital Downloads stacks up against WooCommerce and Shopify.
ThemeSelection’s founder and CEO Ajay Patel describes the impact:
“The ability to control our sales process, offer flexible licensing, and provide a seamless customer experience has had a transformative impact on our business.” After leaving ThemeForest, ThemeSelection has generated over $856,000 in lifetime sales with more than 163,000 active users.
Read the full case study.
See our Selling WordPress Themes and Selling WordPress Plugins guides for a deeper look at what this transition looks like.
How to Build Your WordPress Store With Easy Digital Downloads
Before you start: If you already have a WordPress site, create a full backup before making any changes. I highly recommend Duplicator Pro as a backup and migration tool.
Step 1: Choose Managed WordPress Hosting
Your hosting is the foundation of your store. Managed WordPress hosting handles server-level updates, backups, and WordPress-specific optimization so you can focus on your products instead of your infrastructure.
When evaluating providers, look for:
- Automatic WordPress core updates and daily backups
- A staging environment for testing changes before they go live
- WordPress-optimized server configuration for fast load times
- Reliable uptime with responsive support
Easy Digital Downloads recommends Levamo for managed WordPress hosting.
If you don’t have a domain name yet, WPBeginner’s guide to choosing and registering a domain name is a solid starting point.
Step 2: Install Easy Digital Downloads
Easy Digital Downloads is free to start — no trial period, no expiry on the free version.
That said, most digital product sellers benefit from an EDD Pro pass. The Pro plans unlock features that go well beyond what any marketplace offers: email marketing integrations, content restriction, subscription billing, software license management, and more. These are the features that let you run a store the marketplace never let you build.
Once you select and register your license, you can get the plugin.
To install Easy Digital Downloads Pro, log in to your EDD account and go to the Downloads tab in your account dashboard. Download your plugin zip file.
In your WordPress admin, go to Plugins » Add Plugin and click Upload Plugin. Select the zip file you just downloaded, click Install Now, then Activate.
Once activated, a Downloads menu item is added to your admin area.
Go to Setup » Get Started to launch the Setup Wizard.
It walks you through your store’s basic configuration in just a few minutes.
For the full setup walkthrough, see the EDD Quickstart Guide and the Getting Started documentation.
Step 3: Connect Your Payment Gateway
Easy Digital Downloads supports Stripe, PayPal, and Square out of the box. Stripe is the recommended choice for most sellers. It supports more payment methods, a better checkout experience, and subscription billing if you plan to offer recurring products.
During the Setup Wizard, you’ll be prompted to connect with Stripe as your payment gateway.
You can also configure this option under Downloads » Settings » Payments » Stripe. Click Connect with Stripe to link your existing Stripe account or create a new one.
Once connected, enable Stripe as an Active Gateway (Payments » General) and click Save Changes.
For full Stripe configuration, webhook setup, and troubleshooting, see the Stripe setup documentation.
Step 4: Create Your First Product Listing
This is where you bring a marketplace product into your own store.
In your WordPress admin, go to Downloads » Add Download.
Enter a product name. Use the same name your product has on the marketplace. Buyers searching for it by name will recognize it immediately.
Then add your product description.
This is your full sales copy. On a marketplace, you had limited control over formatting and presentation. Here, you control everything.
Describe what the product does, who it’s for, and what’s included. Write with your buyer’s search terms in mind; this is where your SEO keywords live.
Locate the Download Details metabox beneath the editor.
This is where you set the price, upload your product file(s), configure licensing options, etc.
Within the Details tab, choose a Product Type and enter your Price.
Under the Files tab, click Upload a File and add your product file (zip, PDF, mp3, or any other format). Add a File Name.
To the right, select Set Download Image. This is where you upload a featured image. The product image from your marketplace listing works fine to start.
For more detailed instructions, check out our Creating Products documentation.
Click Publish when you’re ready. Your product is live.
Step 5: Import Your Existing Products
If you have more products to bring over, EDD gives you tools to speed up the process. The approach depends on which marketplace you’re moving from.
For most platforms:
Go to Downloads » Tools » Import/Export and use the Import CSV option.
Export your product data from your marketplace as a CSV file and follow EDD’s import wizard. You can import both products and orders. Customer data is included with order imports.
See the full migration guide for platform-specific instructions.
For Gumroad:
Gumroad migration is largely a manual process. EDD has a dedicated Gumroad migration guide that maps each Gumroad feature to its EDD equivalent: memberships become subscriptions, license key generation maps to Software Licensing, and so on.
For Etsy and Envato/ThemeForest:
Export your product data as a CSV from your marketplace settings, then use the Import CSV tool in Downloads » Tools » Import/Export. Both platforms offer CSV exports. Check your marketplace’s help documentation for the specific export option.
Already have an existing EDD store on a different domain? That’s a different process. See the domain-to-domain migration guide for payment gateway, subscription, and licensing-specific considerations.
How to Drive Traffic to Your New Store
The biggest shift when you leave a marketplace: you’re now responsible for your own discovery. Marketplace traffic doesn’t follow you. But what you build instead is traffic you own, and it grows over time.
Build Organic Traffic With SEO and Content
WordPress has a full blogging platform built in. Write about the problems your products solve, and buyers who find you through search arrive already trusting you.
Use AIOSEO to optimize your WordPress site.
For strategy, review the basics of SEO for digital products.
Then see how to:
- Get your products found by AI search
- Optimize digital product pages
- Promote your products through your blog
- Effectively marketing digital products
Email Your Existing Customers First
Your email list is your best launch asset. Send a launch email with a discount code as a thank-you for following you to your new store.
EDD has discount codes built in.
Go to Downloads » Discounts » Add Discount to create a launch offer.
Convert Visitors Before They Leave
Most first-time visitors won’t buy on their first visit.
OptinMonster helps you capture email addresses and present relevant offers before visitors leave with exit-intent detection, popups, and floating bars. It’s the fastest way to grow the owned audience you’re building alongside your store.
Run a Launch Giveaway
A launch giveaway generates buzz, grows your email list, and picks up social media followers all at once. RafflePress makes it easy to set up a contest. Participants enter by subscribing to your list or following your social accounts.
FAQs: Moving From a Marketplace to WordPress
Moving off a marketplace raises a lot of questions. Here are some of the most common ones.
How much can I save by moving from a marketplace to my own WordPress store?
It depends on your revenue and which marketplace you’re on. An Envato author earning $5,000 per month who was previously keeping 87.5% of their revenue will see that drop to 50% starting July 2026. That’s $2,500 per month going to the platform. On your own WordPress store with Stripe, you’d keep around $4,850 of that same $5,000. The higher your revenue, the more the difference compounds.
Can I sell on a marketplace and my own WordPress store at the same time?
Yes. Running both in parallel is a common and effective strategy, especially during the transition period. Keep your marketplace listings active for discovery and use your own store for direct sales and customer relationships. With Envato removing exclusivity requirements, ThemeForest and CodeCanyon authors can sell on their own sites without platform restrictions.
Will I lose my existing customers when I leave a marketplace?
Not if you’ve built an email list before you move. Most marketplaces don’t share customer contact details, so start collecting emails now. Send a transition announcement with a discount or launch offer to bring current buyers to your new store. Keep your marketplace listings active after launch and use them as a discovery funnel pointing buyers to your site.
How long does it take to set up a WordPress store with Easy Digital Downloads?
You can have a basic store live in an afternoon. Hosting setup takes minutes, and EDD’s Setup Wizard walks you through the initial configuration, like connecting a payment gateway. Adding your products can typically take a few hours depending on your catalog size. Our support team is also available to help you through the process. Building meaningful organic traffic through SEO and content takes longer; expect several months of consistent work before it becomes a primary channel.
Should I delete my marketplace account when I launch my own store?
No. Keep your listings active and use them as a discovery funnel. Update your profile to point buyers toward your website for full support, updates, and your complete product catalog. Removing your listings eliminates an existing source of traffic and brand visibility without any real benefit.
What’s the best WordPress plugin for selling digital products?
Easy Digital Downloads is the leading WordPress eCommerce plugin built specifically for digital product sellers. It handles file delivery, payment processing, discount codes, customer management, and reporting out of the box — with no physical product overhead to work around. For advanced features like software licensing, subscription billing, and content restriction, EDD Pro plans expand the platform further.
Migrate from a Marketplace to WordPress
Every month you stay on a marketplace, a portion of your revenue goes to a platform you don’t control. Fees go up. Terms change. And your customers stay theirs, not yours.
Remember: ThemeSelection made the move from ThemeForest and now saves $5,000 to $6,000 every month on fees alone. That’s not an exception; it’s what happens when you stop paying for access to your own customers.
Get started with Easy Digital Downloads today.
Want to learn more? Check out how to customize your EDD store. Or explore how you can use EDD to build your own digital marketplace.
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