Sellfy lets you sell your digital goods through Twitter and Facebook

You’ve all no doubt used eBay, Amazon and the countless other e-commerce tools out there to shift your unwanted items. And they’re all great platforms for selling and shipping physical goods.

Now, Sellfy, a Latvian startup, is offering a drag-and-drop Web app to help users sell digital goods via Twitter and Facebook. By digital goods, we mean products such as design templates, graphics, eBooks, photos, music and such like.

You upload your digital goods to your site – this could be a personally hosted website, or somewhere like SoundCloud. You then log-in to Sellfy, enter a desired price and embed the off-the-shelf “Buy Now” Sellfy button on your site. It takes a 5% fee once your product is sold, and it requires a PayPal account for the transaction, though we’re told that credit cards and other payment methods will be added soon.

The Sellfy system also taps the social sphere to help propagate an item for sale, and lets merchants offer discounts for their products in exchange for a tweet or Facebook Wall post. The buyer gets a discount, the merchant get their product out there, everyone’s a winner.

How it works…

You can either create an account directly with Sellfy, or use Facebook Connect. Once you’re in, you upload your content, set the price and start selling using a short URL for your product.

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Sellfy merchants can promote products by offering discounts for buyers in exchange for a retweet or Facebook share. It helps products get some organic airtime.

Once you’ve entered the descriptions and various messages, you click ‘create product’ and the wheels are set in motion, and you can embed ‘buy now’ buttons for your site and links. However, nothing goes out until you start sharing the link or embed the button on your website.

Here is one example of the ‘Buy Now’ button in action, with a host of PSD files up for sale. Users also have the option to use a URL so that it can be attached to a button of their choice:

And here’s an example of an eBook for sale through Sellfy:

Given that it’s a link, you can harness the power of the social sphere to spread the good word:

Buy eBook 101 Prepus sellfy.com/p/S0AG CC @fabianaco

— David Lillo (@davidlillo) March 3, 2012

There has, of course, been a number of similar initiatives in recent times. Only last year, we reported on Soundrain, which was created at a Music Hack Day in San Francisco by a company called Minno. Integrating with SoundCloud’s API, the result was an interface that allowed music creators to connect their SoundCloud account with SoundRain and select tracks they wish to sell for a one-off payment of 99 cents per download.

“We have been doing well these few months since our launch in mid-November, and it has received lots of traction,” says Maris Dagis, co-founder and CEO at Sellfy. Indeed, at the time of writing, Sellfy has 1,500 merchants signed up. “I think this demonstrates that such a platform makes it very easy to start earning from stuff that people create,” continues Dagis. “It’s really that easy.”

➤ Sellfy