Gumroad is a shopping cart software geared towards all kinds of creators. They position themselves as an easy-to-use ecommerce service for people selling music, films, books, courses, memberships, and so forth. Looking at the products, you might think you can use Gumroad only for digital products, but you can also sell tangible products.
In 2011 Gumroad was founded by Sahil Lavingia. He wanted to better serve artists and creatives with a simple to use shopping cart without them needing to be tech-savvy.
Since then it has become the go-to platform for countless bloggers and creators. Unlike others in the website builder and shopping cart market, Gumroad is both a platform and marketplace for artists to host and sell their products. For this review though, we’re only looking at the platform.
Pros and cons of Gumroad
As mentioned, Gumroad is both a marketplace and website builder with ecommerce capabilities. You can sell both physical and digital goods.
Pros
- It’s free to sign up and you don’t need to enter your credit card details
- Forever free plan
- Easy to set up and use
- Easy to add to any website, newsletter, or social media profile without coding
- Fair pricing
Cons
- Only email support
- Not for creatives with lots of products
- Limited advanced features and options
- Not for selling services
Who is Gumroad for?
Gumroad makes it easy to sell products for individuals such as artists, bloggers, freelancers, educators, and other creatives who don’t have a lot of tech skills.
You’ll be happy to know that you can set up Gumroad to sell your products and services individually or allow your customers to sign up for a subscription so that they can pay periodically, be it monthly or annually. You can even set up a rental service.
How easy is Gumroad to use?
Setting up an account in Gumroad was a walk in the park. The user interface is clean and uncluttered, so much so that you could say it’s very basic – but in a good way. You’ll not be distracted or confused with superfluous features or functions hidden behind endless menu and submenus. You should be able to find your way and use the service within minutes since everything’s self-explanatory.
After signing up, you’re ready to add your first product. You’ll be walked through each step of adding a product. Gumroad thinks you’ll be mainly selling intangible goods, so you’d have to toggle the physical goods switch.
Your Gumroad account is the backend of your online store. You’ll be managing your products, in short doing all the tasks for selling once you’re logged in to Gumroad.
Gumroad design
You can change the theme and styling of your Gumroad pages. There are three main pages:
- Profile page
- Follow page
- Product page(s) including the checkout page
Unlike known ecommerce services such as Squarespace or Shopify, you use your customised product page as a landing page, or you can embed the form on your existing website, similar to Ecwid.
Gumroad integrations
Gumroad behaves more like an integration itself since you can embed it as a form on your website or just use the link to your product page in your communication, be it on social media or newsletter.
Nevertheless, you can still integrate Gumroad with other services. The most notable built-in integration is with Zapier, which opens up a broad range of options.
What marketing and SEO tools does Gumroad have?
Out of the box, Gumroad provides you with ample tools to track and monitor your landing pages and sales. You have a dedicated section for analytics that reports key performance figures such as conversion rates and sales, but also how much your following has grown.
SEO
Gumroad automatically adds meta tags for your pages. You can, however, enable Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel.
Workflow
If you don’t want to add another service to your tech stack, you can set up a basic workflow to automate follow-up emails when someone follows you for buys something.
The automation is more like a multi-step autoresponder. If you need a more complex workflow that includes conditional steps, you need to use another service (such as MailerLite, Moosend, Sendinblue, and more).
Of course, you can use the workflow for events like when you update a product that you’re selling or new items in your product range so that you can inform your audience.
Affiliate programme
Gumroad gives you a basic affiliate centre, to help you boost sales. It will automatically track the sales per affiliate marketer that you have added and pay them accordingly. However, you need to add your affiliate manually and they themselves need an account in Gumroad.
Discovery feature
Since Gumroad is both a platform and a marketplace, you’ll find “Gumroad Discover” in the settings. When this is enabled and for a fee of 10%, Gumroad recommends products to buyers who have bought similar products.
Payment options
You can connect your Gumroad account with Paypal and it accepts all major credit cards and debit cards. However, it processes the credit card itself – that is, Gumroad is its own payment gateway, similar to Stripe.
Gumroad security
Your pages are secured with an SSL certificate. As Gumroad acts as hoster for your files, they protect paid content in their backend. They give you a safe way to upload and store your digital products as well as deliver them to your customers.
Since Gumroad is its own gateway, it tries to detect fraudulent behaviour with its risk models.
Gumroad customer support
Even with such a clear and self-explanatory interface, you still can get stuck. Most of the time, you’ll find an answer in Gumroad’s knowledge base. Should you not find the answer, you can reach out to Gumroad’s support via email. The team usually replies within a day.
Gumroad pricing
You can use Gumroad for free forever, but it has a limited feature set and you’ll be charged a transaction fee of 8.5% + $0.30 per sale.
The paid subscription for less than 1000 customers is $10 per month. This tier too charges a transaction fee. It’s 3.5% + 30¢ per sale.
Is Gumroad the right tool for you?
If you’re a creative professional and starting out, Gumroad is a good place to start. It’s easy to sign up for a free account, upload your content, and you can immediately start selling. It also works well when you’re a software developer and want a simple shopping card that generates license keys.
In general, Gumroad is a good option to start with its free plan and as you grow, you can upgrade and further down the line move to a more advanced shopping cart platform.
If you have more than a handful of products, especially if you want to sell services, Gumroad is too simple or in other words too restrictive. It also misses advanced marketing and shopping cart features.
Original post here: Gumroad review
No comments:
Post a Comment