Getly
We read every file attached to a Getly listing to work out what a buyer will actually receive. That gives an unusually direct answer to a question sellers ask a lot: what format do digital products on this marketplace come in?
| Format | Files attached |
|---|---|
| 2,219 | |
| PNG | 1,443 |
| JPEG | 1,269 |
| WebP | 30 |
| GIF | 14 |
PDF is not just first, it is larger than either image format on its own. E-books, planners, workbooks, colouring pages, guides, templates — the marketplace runs on documents.
Three things a buyer cannot check
A PDF is opaque until it is open, and a buyer cannot open it before paying. Three questions come up over and over in support, and all three are answerable in a sentence by the seller:
How many pages is it? The single most common question about any document product, and the one buyers most often have to guess at. Page count is the closest thing a document has to a size, and "50 pages" and "5 pages" are different products at the same price.
Is the text selectable, or is it a picture of text? A scanned or flattened PDF cannot be searched, cannot be copied from, and cannot be read aloud by a screen reader. For a novel that may not matter. For a reference guide it is the whole value.
Is it printable at the size it claims? A printable priced as a printable, exported at screen resolution, is a refund. Paper size and DPI are two more sentences.
What Getly shows automatically, and what it will not guess
Getly reads these facts from the file itself and shows them on the product page: page count, whether there is a real text layer, the format, and the total size. The seller does not enter them, which means they cannot be wrong by accident or optimistic on purpose.
There is one deliberate gap. When a file is too large to read completely, no page count is shown at all rather than an approximate one. That rule was written the hard way: until 29 August 2026, page counts came from reading only the first part of a file, and a seller wrote in because his 295-page book was listed as 10 pages. He was right, and he put the principle better than we would have — he did not want to enter a number he knew was wrong, and he did not want us guessing one either.
1,426 listings were affected. All of them understated the file, never the reverse, so no buyer was ever promised more than they received. They have been recounted.
What a seller should still write
The automatic facts cover what the file is. They cannot cover what it is for, and that is where a document product is won or lost:
- What is inside, in order. A contents list for a 200-page workbook does more than any adjective.
- Is it fillable? A PDF with form fields you can type into and a PDF you print and write on are different products, and the file format alone does not distinguish them.
- Print size and margins. A4 or Letter, and whether it is designed for borderless printing.
- What language the content is in. Germany is the second-largest buyer country on this marketplace; the listing gets translated, the file does not.
The unglamorous conclusion
PDF wins because it is the only format that opens identically on every device a buyer owns, needs no software they do not already have, and cannot be half-broken by a missing font. Those are dull virtues, and they are exactly why 2,219 files are PDFs.
If you are choosing an export format for a document product and weighing something more sophisticated against a plain PDF, the catalogue has already voted. Ship the PDF, and spend the saved effort on telling people what is in it.
