Getly
Every guide to selling digital products contains the same two instructions: write a better description, add more images. We were able to check whether either one is what separates the sellers who sell from the sellers who do not, across every Getly store with at least one live product, on 29 August 2026.
Neither one is.
| Has made a paid sale | Has not | |
|---|---|---|
| Stores | 57 | 1,544 |
| Average description length | 1,323 characters | 1,244 characters |
| Average images per product | 2.0 | 2.0 |
| Average live products | 5.7 | 2.6 |
Six percent more description. Identical image counts. The one column with real daylight in it is the last one, and it is about how much they published, not how well.
Why this is worth saying out loud
Listing-polish advice is comfortable. It gives you something to do that feels productive and carries no risk: nobody ever regretted rewriting a description. That is exactly what makes it dangerous as a default. A seller who has written 1,244 characters and added two images has already matched, on both measured axes, the sellers who are making money. A third rewrite is not what stands between them and an order.
We want to be careful about what this does and does not show. Description length is not description quality — a well-aimed 800 characters beats a padded 2,000, and a character count cannot tell them apart. The honest claim is narrower and still useful: whatever separates these two groups, it is not volume of listing effort, because the volume is the same.
What the data does point at
Three differences show up elsewhere in the same catalogue, and they are all about decisions rather than polish.
Price. The median live listing costs $6.51; the median product that sold cost $9.99. The sales are not happening in the cheap half of the shelf. If a seller's response to slow sales is to cut the price, the catalogue does not support that move.
Persistence. The median store made its first sale while holding a single product, but stores that have sold now carry 5.7. The catalogue grew after the sale, not before it. Sellers who publish two things and stop stay at two things.
Being findable at all. A product with no category does not appear on any category page and has no breadcrumb trail. We had 93 live products in that state earlier this year, all of them created through the API, and every single one had zero sales and zero downloads. Not "fewer" — zero. Being invisible is not a soft disadvantage.
The largest number in this dataset
Nearly two thirds of the people who create a store never list anything at all.
That dwarfs every optimisation in this article. The gap between two images and three images is invisible in the data; the gap between zero products and one product is the entire game. If you are reading this with an empty store, the highest-value thing you can do today is not on any listing checklist.
How to use an article like this
Not as permission to stop caring about listings. A description that does not say what the file is, what format it is in, and who it is for will lose sales no matter what the averages say — and we have watched that happen one support ticket at a time.
Use it instead as a reason to stop re-polishing. If your listing answers the buyer's real questions, it is done. The next hour is better spent on the next product, on the price, or on making sure the thing is filed where someone might find it.
