How to Sell Digital Products on Creative Market

by | Mar 7, 2024 | Creative Market, How to Sell Your Art Online

Check out my YouTube Video on “How to Sell Digital Products on Creative Market”

If you’re a creative person, content creator, or small business owner, having a shop on Creative Market can help you with some additional passive income every month. Creating the right product can also help make you continued and consistent sales over time.

I first heard about Creative Market back in 2015 from a good friend in San Diego who started a shop and inspired me to create my own. I have always wanted to live a creative lifestyle and to live my life on my own terms. I wanted to find a way to have more freedom and flexibility in my schedule and I was determined to figure out how I could make this dream into a reality. I love graphic design, illustration, and teaching people how to create things in Photoshop.

After 10+ years of working as a freelance designer and illustrator in Los Angeles and San Francisco, I was burnt out. I was churning work and burning the midnight oil just to finish projects and to earn a living from my trade. I was bogged down by multiple clients, tight deadlines, and low paying wages. At the end of 2015, I had had enough of the unsustainable lifestyle that I was living. Something needed to change, I needed to change for my own sanity.

I first started a shop back in early 2016 after testing out and creating Digital Tie-Dye Patterns on Society6, I was finally ready to launch my first Digital Tie-Dye Photoshop Brush set in May of 2016. At the time there wasn’t anybody creating tie-dye brushes to use for surface pattern design and I wanted to create a product that I could eventually sell on my shop. As I created more Digital Tie-Dye Photoshop Brush sets, I started getting feedback from my customers and other designers and small business owners alike. They were coming back to my shop with pre-made digitally painted brushes that you can insert into a digital pattern, surface pattern design, and seamless repeating patterns. I had tapped into a market that I didn’t know existed! Thus began my journey into selling work on Creative Market.

In the last 6+ years being a creator and selling digital graphics on Creative Market, I have made over $84k in total revenue!

I don’t however work on creating digital assets full time, I do have a day job so my time is limited. However, for any creator out there who wants to go full speed into creating work full time, make sure you have some money set aside and saved! There’s no telling whether your products will do well at first. The first 6 months I started making sales with my Tie-Dye Photoshop Brushes but it wasn’t enough to quit my freelance client work. I tested so many different products on my shop early on and decided to retire and take down because they didn’t fit with the overall theme and branding of what is called “The Gypsy Goddess” today. They were also not a product that any designer can use.

My simple advice to any designer or creator wanting to start an online digital shop on Creative Market or any other platform is this: make sure the products you create are products that can be useful for others and that fit within the current design trends. Creative Market tends to highlight and promote shops with products that are marketable on their platform.

I recommend watching my video on YouTube, in it I highlight some of these things below which I’ve summarized.

Sign Up for a Creative Market Account

  • First things first, sign up for an account on Creative Market or sign into your existing account. You’ll get on their mailing list where they will send you information on weekly trending goods or trending and popular designs. Also do your research on trending designs, specific to the market.
  • They used to send 6 free goods but now they do this when you become a member of Creative Market. 
  • If you make it on their list, Creative Market will feature you in one of their newsletters and that in turn brings in shop exposure which = to sales!

Your Earnings on Creative Market:

Creative Market keeps 40% of every product sale and you keep 60% so you might want to think about how you price some of your products. Since Creative Market now takes a larger chunk of sales, (used to be 30%) you might want to price your products slightly higher so that you can make back some of the money and you also want to make sure your prices are competitive with what’s out there in the marketplace 

Licensing Explained:

Who can create a Creative Market Shop?

Anybody! Creative Market used to have a lengthy process of getting a shop approved. But since Creative Market now owns Dribbble, you can sign up and pay for a Dribbble Pro account (yearly subscription) and you can start selling right away! Check out my write up on the Dribbble Blog here.


Research the Product Categories on Creative Market

  • Walk through some of the product categories to figure out what you already create.
  • If you are a designer or content creator, how can you leverage some of the skills you already have?
  • Do you have tools, templates, graphics that you can repurpose that you have lying around in your digital files?


Staff Picks, Curated Content on the homepage:

  • Creative Market defines this as: Our “Staff Picks” (formerly known as “Handpicked”) section is a curated selection of new products we love. Our team selects new items, usually based on overall quality, a complete, detailed listing, and at least 3 – 4 effective product displays.
  • Take a look at why some of these products are doing well and ask, where do you fit in? What niche can you start creating products for? 

Have 2-3 products created before you create a shop

  • Launch one product every week to test different products in the marketplace and so that your followers have something to look forward to. Be consistent in posting a new product every week, survey your market. 
  • I get emails from people interested in my products and they often give me great ideas for new products to create

Consistent Branding & Shop Images 

  • Create shop images that stand out and have consistent mockup images throughout your product line.
  • You can do a google search on free mockups, check out my video on creating mockups here.
  • This creates the idea of how the buyer can use the designs, gives them the inspiration for where these products would be most useful for.
  • I go all out in my shop images so that I can give the buyer of what they are getting, tell them what they can use it for. I also add text to some of my mockups to give them more information on the product.
  • Product Descriptions:Details of what they are getting, linking to other similar products on your shop will also help others to find something similar and will get them looking at other products that they may be interested in. And adding as many keywords as you can! The more the merrier, whatever you think people are going to search when they are looking for products like yours.

Dashboard Analytics 

  • Analytics will kick in over time to give you the most liked or most sold products so that you can see what products sell the most – Photoshop brushes, trending products in your shop. This can also inform you on what products to stick to and to keep making more of in the near future.

Creative market Affiliate Program

  • Sign up to become a Creative Market Affiliate, refer other shops’ products and earn a small cut when someone makes a purchase.
  • There a few different ways to promote, embedding the products on your website or blog. You can also create collections on Creative Market directly
  • pinning the products on Pinterest and creating boards

If you like content like this, please let me know! I’m always open to creating more content.

RELATED POSTS:

  • “How to Get Approved for a Creative Market Shop”
  • “How to Use PSD Mock-Ups to Create Shop Images on Creative Market”