If you’re looking to sell digital goods, you don’t necessarily need all the bells and whistles of the usual shopping cart software. You don’t need certain features such as a way to print shipping labels but on the other hand, you need a way to allow downloads only to those who’ve paid.
Payhip is a shopping cart software geared towards people who sell digital products such as ebooks, music, in short, all types of digital files. When you look at shopping cart software, on the one hand, you can take a self-hosted solution such as WooComerce and on the other hand, you can use an all-in-one service such as Squarespace.
Payhip takes from both worlds: It’s both an all-in-one service and you can use it to embed it into your (self-hosted) site to sell your work. It was founded in 2011 in London by Abs Farah and Kahin Farah.
- Pros and cons of Payhip
- Cons
- Who is Payhip for?
- How easy is Payhip to use?
- Payhip design
- How easy is managing your ecommerce store with Payhip?
- Payhip integrations
- What marketing and SEO tools does Payhip have?
- Payment options
- Payhip security
- Payhip customer support
- Payhip pricing
- Is Payhip the right tool for you?
Pros and cons of Payhip
Although Payhip is best known as an ecommerce platform for digital goods, you can also sell physical products.
Pros
- It’s free to sign up with a forever free plan
- Easy to set up and use
- Fair pricing
- You have different marketing tools such as upsell, cross-sell, coupons, and affiliates, out of the gates
- You can embed your store in your website or other platforms
- No limits on products and revenue for all 3 plans (but charges transaction fees)
- EU VAT is handled for you
Cons
- Limited integrations
- No SEO features
Who is Payhip for?
Selling digital goods can make an awesome revenue stream if you’re a blogger, musician, author, photographer, that is if you’re a creator. It’s a great way to monetise your expertise.
How easy is Payhip to use?
Signing up for an account was a breeze. You’re welcomed by a 3 step wizard that helps you set up your account so that you’re ready to sell. The user interface is clean and uncluttered making it very easy to learn and navigate.
You can customise your store with Payhips editor. You can add more sections and products. Once you’re done, you can connect it to your domain.
Payhip design
The design is modern, very clean, almost simplistic but does the job well in putting your products centre stage. You can customise the colour and fonts.
How easy is managing your ecommerce store with Payhip?
If you’re considering Payhip, it’s safe to say that most of your products are digital. Payhip supports all kinds of digital files, including software, media files, font files, and more.
You can find all you need to manage your products in the tab Products. And should you also have physical products, you can add SKU and weight. You even can set up shipping rates for different regions. Which brings us to EU VAT. You’ll be happy to know that you can set the tax rates for different countries and even let Payhip handle digital products EU VAT automatically for you.
With digital goods, you may possibly become a victim of copyright infringement or illegal distribution. To prevent this, Payhip gives you the option to limit how many times a customer can download a product. The other way to protect your products is to stamp the PDF with the email to the customer.
Payhip integrations
Payhip integrates with the known email service providers such as Aweber or Mailchimp so that you can automatically add new customers to your mailing list.
You can also use the always handy Swiss Army knife Zapier to integrate with other services or create your own custom-made integrations with webhooks.
What marketing and SEO tools does Payhip have?
If you’re using Payhip as your storefront, you’ll want to track its performance. For that, you can add your Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel. As for SEO, everything is generated for you.
To help with your marketing efforts, Payhip has put together the following tools under the tab Marketing
- Coupons
- Social discounts
- Affiliates
- Mailing lists
- Cross-selling
- Referral
- Upgrade
Blogging
For Payhip, blogging belongs to your storefront. So, you’ll find its blogging tool under the section Store. Writing a blog post feels the same as adding a product. It has the same easy-to-use interface. Just don’t expect that you have advanced blogging features such as scheduling a post.
Payment options
You can connect your account with Paypal and Stripe to accept payments. The usual Paypal and Stripe fees apply.
Payhip security
Your pages are secured with an SSL certificate. Paypal also helps you protect yourself from copyright infringement or illegal distribution.
Payhip customer support
Even with such an intuitive interface, you can still get stuck from time to time. If you’re working in the backend, you’ll always find the chat icon to contact support. They usually answer within a few hours. There’s also a searchable help centre.
Payhip pricing
It’s nice to see that all 3 plans include all features and don’t limit products or revenue. The higher you go, the lower the transaction fee gets.
Is Payhip the right tool for you?
Payhip makes it easy for anyone to start selling digital goods without worrying about a monthly fee or about the technical stuff.
It’s great to test a new product without much overhead.
As Payhip is focusing on digital goods, it doesn’t provide tools optimised for selling tangible goods. So, you’re better of with an all-rounder shopping cart such as Squarespace or Ecwid if you want to embed it.
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Original post here: Payhip review
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