Intre­pid e‑commerce man­agers and e‑commerce ana­lysts with an ear to the ground for busi­ness suc­cess sto­ries will be impressed by the mod­est but seem­ing­ly inex­orable rise of the Lat­vian-based start­up, Sellfy.

The com­pa­ny is an e‑commerce plat­form that lets dig­i­tal con­tent cre­ators sell dig­i­tal prod­ucts straight to their fans or fol­low­ers via a sin­gle link. Fur­ther­more, it’s just announced an expan­sion to its options for pay­ment. From now onwards, in addi­tion to Pay­Pal, it will per­mit Paymill cred­it card pro­cess­ing in Europe and Stripe in the U.S./Canada.

Steady growth

From its home in Vil­nius, Sell­fy is aim­ing to rival its U.S. equiv­a­lent, Gum­road. The signs show that this is no mere pipe dream; its cus­tomer base has tre­bled since June 2012 from 3,000 to 9,000 self-pub­lish­ing sell­ers and it can now claim brag­ging rights over 16,000 prod­ucts for sale. These include music files, pho­tos, videos, eBooks – any type of dig­i­tal file, in fact — which can then be shared on Twit­ter, Face­book or Sellfy’s own site via a sin­gle click on a short URL.

Accord­ing to the firm’s co-founder and CEO Maris Dagis, Sell­fy tar­gets the Long Tail of dig­i­tal con­tent cre­ators’ prod­ucts, and ear­ly signs are that eBook authors are par­tic­u­lar­ly impressed. The eBooks sec­tion is show­ing the most trac­tion cur­rent­ly, Dagis says, and there’s a good rea­son. Sellfy’s trans­ac­tion fees are extra­or­di­nar­i­ly com­pet­i­tive. Amazon’s Kin­dle Direct Pub­lish­ing claws back a hefty 30 per­cent cut, where­as Sell­fy gets by on just 5 per­cent. No won­der many authors pre­fer it.

Sell­ing with­out expen­sive marketing

Dagis wastes no time in high­light­ing this point, explain­ing, “It’s because there is a huge dif­fer­ence in trans­ac­tion fees and if you are not among Amazon’s top sell­ers you end up dri­ving cus­tomers and doing all the mar­ket­ing your­self anyway.”

Now that’s a sol­id point. There are vir­tu­al­ly no dis­tri­b­u­tion bar­ri­ers when it comes to dig­i­tal con­tent, and sup­ply near­ly always out­paces demand, which basi­cal­ly means that all the real effort (and the expense) goes into mar­ket­ing, most of it to an already-exist­ing con­sumer base.

As Dagis puts it, “Many authors/creatives have built a sig­nif­i­cant online pres­ence (blogs, web­sites, social net­work chan­nels) and it is get­ting eas­i­er to sell direct­ly to their audi­ence through plat­forms like Sell­fy, with­out going to marketplaces.”