Should you give away a free product alongside your paid ones?
The short answer
The sellers who carry both are far ahead, and it is the widest gap on this site that survives a control — but this data cannot tell you the free product caused it. Among the 1,281 sellers in this sample with more than one listing, those carrying both free and paid products have a median of 31 ratings against 5 for the paid-only sellers. Read the causation section before you act on that.
Why the raw comparison is not the finding
Mixed sellers carry more products: a median of 4 against 2 for paid-only sellers. Since catalogue size tracks demand weakly but positively, part of that headline is just bigger storefronts. The table below holds catalogue size roughly fixed; the number in brackets is how many sellers are in the cell.
| Catalogue size | Paid only | Free and paid | Free only | Mixed ÷ paid |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 products | 3 (589) | 14 (40) | 25 (26) | 4.7× |
| 3–4 | 5 (293) | 15 (47) | 20 (12) | 3.0× |
| 5–9 | 10 (159) | 42 (33) | — (5) | 4.2× |
| 10 or more | 16 (52) | 91 (23) | — (2) | 5.7× |
The gap survives in every band, and it is widest where the catalogues are largest. The free-only column thins out fast — there are 45 such sellers in the whole multi-product sample — and a dash means the cell is under 8 sellers and its median would be noise. It is printed rather than dropped so you can see where the sample runs out.
What the sellers who do this actually do
They add one free product, not a free catalogue. 109 of the 143 mixed sellers (76.2%) carry exactly one. That is the lead-magnet shape, and it is what the comparison above is mostly measuring — not a free tier, not a freemium ladder, one giveaway sitting beside paid work.
It is also uncommon: only 11.2% of multi-product sellers here do it at all, and 245 of the 3,262 single-product sellers have made their one product free, which is a different decision entirely and not measured on this page.
The two reasons this might be backwards
A seller who is already selling has every reason to add a free product. Nothing in a snapshot records the order things happened in. If lead magnets are something sellers add once they have an audience worth feeding, this table would look exactly as it does. That possibility is not ruled out here and no cut of this data can rule it out.
Free listings are harder to find in a crawl. A seller's free product only appears in this sample if it ranked in the first three pages of a category search, so some sellers filed here as paid-only do carry a free product that was not seen. That error runs one way: it moves sellers out of the mixed group, never into it — which, if anything, understates how many sellers do this and pulls the two medians together.
The one bias that runs in the finding's favour
Demand is measured in ratings here, and free products convert to a rating at a lower rate per unit than paid ones — 4.1% against 3.9% on the subsample with real unit sales. A mixed seller's rating total therefore understates their units by more than a paid-only seller's does. The gap in the table is a floor on the gap in units, not a ceiling.
The listing-level figures point the same way: 65.7% of a mixed seller's listings carry at least one rating, against 54.9% for paid-only sellers, and only 7.7% of mixed sellers have no ratings anywhere at all against 25.0% of paid-only sellers. Whatever is going on, the mixed storefronts are much less likely to be completely silent.
What to do with this
If you have one product and it is paid, this page is not about you. The comparison is only defined for sellers with two or more listings. Adding a free product to get into the mixed group is exactly the move this data cannot endorse.
If you already have several paid products and none free, this is the cheapest thing in the sample worth trying. One giveaway, not a catalogue. It costs a listing, the sellers who do it are the least likely group here to be sitting at zero, and the downside is bounded in a way almost nothing else on this site is.
Do not read it as a pricing strategy. Free versus paid at the product level is a different question measured on a different sample, and it says free listings collect ratings without telling you anything about money. This page is about what sits beside the paid work, not what you charge for it.
What these figures are a lower bound on. A seller's product count is what this crawl found — three pages deep per category node — not their catalogue, so every band above is a floor. Demand is ratings, which are a floor on buyers rather than a sales count. The free/paid split is taken from observed listings, with the miss direction stated above. Nothing here is a revenue figure and no seller's earnings are known.
Which sample this is, and why it is not the other one
This page, the catalogue-size guide and the category-breadth guide are the three derived from the category walk — 8,322 products from 4,543 sellers, 204,971 ratings — because it is the only sample that records who sells what. Every other guide here is measured on a separate sample of 1,344 products drawn from 42 category searches. The two are never averaged; each is published as it was measured.
This page says a free product beside your paid work is the cheapest thing in the sample worth trying. What the paid work should be — which category is an opening and which is a crowded room — is the report: all 42 categories read together and each one classified. You are paying for the interpretation, not for the rows. The rows are free, above and in the repository. If the data is all you wanted, take it and skip this.
Read the report — $249 Read three sections free first Or take all four CSVs free
The sample is the method sections lifted unedited out of the report — what was measured, the background rate, and the limits in full. Every section that says what to do is in the paid one. The free mirror is $0 with a $0 minimum and asks for an email at checkout. The same files without one: the data folder. The report carries a money-back guarantee, stated on the checkout page: full refund, no reason needed, and you keep the files.
Check it yourself
Every figure above comes from
the seller CSV (4,543 rows,
one per seller, with a free_products column) and the
listing table it derives from, with
the derivation alongside them. Both
are in the DOI-archived record, CC BY 4.0, no signup.