Tried Selling Digital Products on freelance marketplaces like Legiit and Learned a Hard Lesson About Competition

One thing I didn’t really appreciate until I started selling digital products online myself is how much the level of competition on a platform affects your ability to get traction.

A couple years ago I experimented with selling a few small digital services and templates online. Nothing huge. Just some niche marketing and SEO related products I figured people might find useful. I started on Fiverr because, like most people, that’s the first marketplace that comes to mind.

What I ran into pretty quickly was just how crowded it is. There are hundreds of thousands of sellers on Fiverr. When you’re brand new with zero reviews, it can feel like you’re invisible. Even if your offer is solid, you’re competing against people with hundreds or thousands of reviews who have been on the platform for years. Getting those first few orders can take a while.

Later I started looking into some of the smaller freelance marketplaces and came across Legiit. What surprised me was how much smaller the seller pool actually is.

Legiit has supported about 100,000 businesses and around 25,000 freelancers with close to a million total orders. Fiverr, by comparison, has something like 700,000 active sellers and millions of buyers. That’s roughly a 28x difference in the number of sellers competing.

For someone trying to get started, that difference is huge.

With fewer sellers on the platform, the buyer to seller ratio is simply better. That means it’s generally easier to get those first few orders, start building reviews, and create some social proof. Another thing I noticed is that pricing pressure seems lower. On Fiverr there’s often a race to the bottom on price, whereas on smaller platforms people seem more willing to charge and pay more realistic rates.