Digital products

What sets digital products apart

Digital products are not shipped but provisioned. That includes licences, templates, courses, e-books and tool access. The economic appeal is obvious: no goods, no warehouse, no shipping cost, and one product can be sold any number of times. Those very traits also create the special cases.

The first is the borderline of media. A physical medium, such as a USB stick with templates, is legally goods with shipping. A download is not. That difference decides tax treatment, withdrawal rights and invoicing.

How delivery works

• Provisioning: A protected download link or access in the customer account. The link must be tied to the order and valid for a limited time.
• Repeat access: How often downloading is allowed. Five to ten retrievals or permanent access in the account are common.
• Invoice: Required for every service, regardless of whether anything is shipped.
• Updates: Whether later versions are included. That question must be answered before the purchase, not after.
• Scope of use: For how many people and for which purposes the product may be used.

Withdrawal and consent

Withdrawal lapses for digital content only under conditions. The customer must expressly consent to performance beginning before the withdrawal period ends, and must confirm that the right of withdrawal is thereby lost. If either statement is missing, the right of withdrawal remains and the shop must refund even though the content was already downloaded.

In practice that means a separate confirmation in the final checkout step, logged for evidence. A mere notice in the terms is not enough. Anyone implementing that confirmation properly has already excluded the most frequent dispute around digital products.

Tax and invoicing

For digital products the location of the customer applies, not the location of the seller. For sales to private customers in other EU countries the VAT of the destination country applies, and depending on the overall volume the cross border procedure kicks in. For shops this means storing tax logic per country and reporting revenue separately.

Second, the invoicing duty is not lifted by value, and services to businesses require additional details. Third, refunds create special cases, because a licence already used cannot simply be handed back. A rule in your terms describing the scope of refunds for partial use and justified defects is sensible.