Say you’re looking to start your online store but you’re concentrating on selling digital products only. As such, you don’t need all the additional features for also selling physical products that only add to the price.
SendOwl was devised and designed from the start to fill exactly this gap. It was founded in 2010 by George Palmer and is based in London, UK. Unlike the typical ecommerce solutions such as Squarespace or Shopify, the storefront is not included in the service.
The service instead connects your website with a payment provider and after a successful payment, delivers the digital product to your customers. This means that you can “retrofit” an online store to your existing website or social media profile. You can also add it to an existing email list so that you can start selling your digital products.
Pros and cons of SendOwl
SendOwl offers many features that are expected from a traditional shopping cart software. Interestingly, it offers features that go beyond that such as subscriptions, memberships, and affiliates. For many of these features, you’d have to install additional plugins with the traditional ecommerce solutions.
Pros
- Free trial without the need to enter credit card details
- Multi-language support
- Simple set up and easy to use
- Supports 29 currencies
- Multiple product types
- Flexible payment models such as a free trial, subscriptions, and plans
- Solid and efficient marketing toolset
- Affordable pricing
Cons
- No live chat support for emergencies
- No free plan
Who is SendOwl for?
With SendOwl, you’ll have an easy way to sell your digital goods, be it software, music, videos, ebooks, courses, and other digital files. You can set it up for subscriptions and memberships as well. It caters to bloggers, individuals, and small to medium-sized businesses.
Although SendOwl describes itself as a “digital products” shopping cart, you still can sell physical products. It just requires more work from your side – that is, it’s can feel more cumbersome to set up. You can even use it to sell your services. Just look at your services as a digital product but without the option to download a file.
How easy is SendOwl to use?
The design and user experience of SendOwl is well-thought-out. So it’s was possible to complete the signup process without entering my credit card details which can be a deterring factor.
Once you’ve completed the signup, you’ll be taken to the backend where you manage your online store. You’ll find your way within minutes as everything is clearly labelled and organised. There are also no confusing endless submenus.
It takes only a few moments to add a new product and configure its checkout. You’ll have several options to share your product page with customers.
The marketing and sharing options are available right after you’ve set up your product.
SendOwl design
Don’t expect themes or templates of SendOwl as it’s not offering a storefront. You can however customise the checkout template. Under the main settings section, you can choose between 3 styles or create your own. If you need more information from your customers, you can add extra fields for the checkout. To match the checkout to your branding, you can tweak the CSS.
It’s worth mentioning that the templates are applied globally to all products. In other words, you can not assign a specific checkout template to a specific product.
But, you wouldn’t want to do that because you don’t want to confuse your customers. Think of it like this: You consistently have the same checkout process every and so make the user experience uniform. You’d also don’t want to go through a different checkout for every product you buy on Amazon, or would you?
If you create your own checkout template, you won’t have any design restrictions. If you have web development skills (HTML, CSS, and Javascript) you can build a custom checkout template that adheres to your branding completely.
SendOwl integrations
Even though there’s plugins or integrations repository or market in the classical sense, you’ll still find you can extend SendOwl with the help of Zapier.
If you’re working with a developer or are coding yourself, you can use SendOwls API to build a custom integration.
Marketing features
Even if you’ll be missing a dedicated way for you to add meta tags to your products for SEO, SendOwl puts many other marketing options at your disposal to build and nurture your audience or to boosts sales such as
- Abandoned cart
- Bump offers and upsells
- Discounts
- Gifts
- Pay what you want pricing
Affiliate and email marketing can be a robust source of referral traffic for your online store.
Affiliate marketing
SendOwl’s built-in system for affiliate marketing can handle affiliate sales for individual products with tracking, reporting, and other managing tasks.
With SendOwl’s approach, you’ll have set up your affiliate marketing within minutes. The downside of it is that it lacks granular control over your commissions, and you’ll also be missing options to set up tiers for primary and secondary affiliates.
Mailing list
You can connect SendOwl with the major email marketing platforms with just a few clicks. After you’ve integrated your main list, you can add subscription options to your checkout page and so grow your list.
Analytics and reporting
To improve your marketing and sales, it’s always a good idea to keep an eye on customer activities. SendOwl lets you generate reports and analytics so that you can optimise your efforts.
The generated reports are easy to understand and you can break them down by currency, gross, and dates.
Payment options
You’ll find all the usual payment gateways such as PayPal and Stripe. You’ll be amazed by how flexible SendOwl is: You can add several payment gateways to your payment page and set a free trial period.
SendOwl security
All transactions within SendOwl are transferred through a secure HTTPS channel. If you chose one of the hosted options, SendOwl manages and maintains the servers.
SendOwl also generates a software license key for you. It will take care of everything needed for generating, storing, and disturbing the keys. If your selling PDFs, you can configuring SendOwl to automatically stamp them with the buyers’ names and email addresses.
SendOwl support
After you’ve signed up, you’ll receive a mail from SendOwl with links to its knowledge base and the email to contact support.
The knowledge base is well-organized and clearly illustrated.
SendOwl pricing
SendOwl itself is subscription-based and charges you a monthly fee. There’s no free tier, but you can test out the service with its 30-day free trial period.
SendOwl has 3 general categories of prices:
- Standard
- Self-hosted
- Subscriptions
If you have a lot – that is, you have several thousands of products, you’ll go with a plan of the category self-hosted. Should you be concentrating on subscriptions, then choose a plan of the subscription category. The pricing is fair, as you can start selling for $9 per month. SendOwl doesn’t levy transaction costs.
Is SendOwl the right solution for you?
SendOwl gets the balance just right: It simplifies a complex task just enough giving you a robust ecommerce solution with a respectable feature list. If you’re selling a limited number of products, mainly digital goods and services, SendOwl ticks all the right boxes. It has enough power to scale with you.
If you’re selling a large number of products, especially if these are tangible goods, you’d be happier with a classical ecommerce solution.
Original post here: SendOwl review
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