Alva Digital Downloads is a Shopify app that lets K-12 teachers and curriculum creators leave Teachers Pay Teachers and sell worksheets, lesson plans, and full unit bundles direct to buyers — keeping roughly 95% of each sale instead of TPT's 55%. Bundle a whole unit (lesson plan, worksheets, answer key, anchor charts) into one pack. Push a Common Core update and every past buyer picks up v2 automatically. Stamp each buyer's name into the PDF footer to discourage district-wide sharing , and absorb viral Pinterest traffic on unlimited bandwidth.
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Drag the lesson plan, 20 worksheets, answer key, four anchor charts, and the unit assessment into Alva's uploader. Group them into one pack, bind it to a single Shopify product at $14, publish. One pack, one price, one signed download page — no zipped folders for the buyer to unpack in the staff room.
A standards revision drops. Replace the worksheet PDFs inside Alva with the aligned versions and every past teacher's customer account page surfaces v2 on their next visit. No re-emailing a 400-buyer list, no re-uploading to a newsletter tool. ZipVersionHistory keeps v1 retrievable for any teacher mid-year on the old edition.
Turn on PDF stamping for the unit pack. At download time Alva writes the buyer's name and order number into the footer of every worksheet page. A teacher who paid $12 for one classroom licence will think twice before emailing the file to 40 colleagues when their own name sits on every page. Stamping is per-order, so every copy is unique.
An anchor-chart bundle goes viral on Pinterest at dinner. Orders pour in, customer account portals serve fresh signed links per click, and downloads stream from Cloudflare R2. Every paid plan includes unlimited bandwidth — no per-gigabyte meter, no overage email from the marketplace, no rate-limit on the busiest night of the school year.
A complete unit is rarely one PDF. It's a lesson plan, five worksheets, an answer key, two anchor charts, and a set of task cards. Alva packs group every file under a single Shopify product at one price. The teacher buys once and lands on a signed page with every file of the unit — no zipped folder to unpack, no missing attachments.
Standards change. A Common Core revision, a new state alignment, a typo a buyer flagged. Replace the PDF inside Alva and every past teacher's download link now points to v2 on their next visit. ZipVersionHistory keeps the old version retrievable too, so a teacher mid-year with the old worksheets printed can still find v1 if needed.
A teacher buys your fractions unit in October and needs it again every September for six years. Alva's customer account portal gives every buyer a permanent page listing every unit they own, every version available, and a fresh signed link per click. This collapses the "I lost the file, can you resend?" support queue that eats TPT sellers alive.
TPT sends every download email from the TPT domain. On Shopify + Alva, delivery mail ships from your own custom sender domain with your classroom logo, your colours, your signature. Per-product email settings let a math catalogue use one template and a science catalogue use another. The teacher buying knows it came from you, not a marketplace.
District-wide sharing of a single-classroom licence is the educator's piracy problem. Alva stamps the buyer's name and order number into the footer of every PDF it delivers. The worksheet still prints and teaches the same, but the copy sitting in a Google Drive shared across 40 teachers is clearly tied back to the original purchaser. Polite deterrence, zero buyer friction.
Teacher-catalogue traffic spikes follow Pinterest, not the calendar. One viral pin can drive 50,000 page views in a week and 3,000 worksheet purchases. Alva's storage is on R2 with flat-rate pricing — no per-GB egress fee, no bandwidth overage, no billing surprise when a back-to-school pin hits. Every paid plan ships with unlimited bandwidth.
A worksheet PDF is 200 KB to 2 MB. A full unit with lesson plan, 20 worksheets, answer keys, and anchor charts lands around 15–40 MB. Even a 200-product TPT store rarely tops 10 GB of storage. Most educators migrating from TPT fit comfortably on Basic. The binding constraint is unlocking PDF stamping, per-product branded emails, and unlimited bandwidth for Pinterest spikes — not the byte budget. Compare the flat 95% seller share to TPT's 55% standard / 80% premium split.
Every paid plan includes unlimited bandwidth, unlimited orders, version updates, licence keys, packs, per-product branded emails, Shopify POS, and Shopify Flow actions. Trial starts only after the first live order.
The same four-step migration covers sellers leaving Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT), Etsy, Made By Teachers, Boom Learning, and Classful. Etsy sellers export order CSVs with buyer emails directly; Boom Learning and Classful sellers export deck/resource lists from their seller dashboard and re-upload each as a Shopify product bound to an Alva pack. The pattern is identical — marketplace export, Alva upload, Shopify product page, re-capture the list you can reach.
TPT does not expose a full buyer email list — but it does give you sales reports with buyer usernames and partial contact history. Export everything Seller Dashboard → Sales → Export allows, plus any email addresses captured through your TPT Q&A or external newsletter. Those are your re-buy targets.
Drag the lesson plan, worksheets, answer key, and anchor charts for each unit into Alva's uploader and group them into one pack per Shopify product. Boom card decks, task cards, and classroom-decor bundles follow the same pattern. One teacher download, one signed page, every file delivered on one click.
Turn on buyer-name PDF stamping for every worksheet so district-wide sharing is traceable. Write a real Shopify product page per unit — grade, standard, cover preview, table of contents. Unlike a TPT listing crowded against competitors, this page is yours and ranks in Google on its own merits.
Post your Shopify store URL in every TPT listing, inside the cover pages of PDFs past buyers re-download, and across your Pinterest and Instagram bio. Email any addresses you already own a launch coupon. Now you own the customer relationship, not the marketplace — and every future buyer re-downloads from your customer account portal, not TPT.
"Left TPT after the 55% seller tier landed. Moved 80 unit bundles into Alva over a weekend. I keep roughly 95% of every sale now and my regulars buy direct."
"Pushed a Common Core update to 600 past buyers in about 30 seconds — replaced the PDF inside Alva and every customer account page showed v2. That used to be a week of customer service."
"PDF stamping ended the district-wide forwarding problem. Teachers see their own name in the worksheet footer and my re-buy rate per building doubled in a semester."
Bundle lesson plans, worksheets, answer keys, and anchor charts as a single unit pack product on Shopify.
Deliver resources via email, thank-you page, order status page, and customer account so every teacher gets their files.
Install Alva. Drag a unit pack — lesson plan, worksheets, answer key, anchor charts — into the uploader, bind it to a Shopify product, place a test order and watch the signed download page land. Push a Common Core update and every past buyer picks up v2 automatically. Keep roughly 95% of every sale instead of TPT's 55%. Trial starts only after the first live order.