How do you earn a living with your work as a creator? No matter if you’re a writer, musician, youtuber, or an artist, you want to make money from your creativity. You want to monetise your work, whether it’s by selling merchandise, videos and images, or subscriptions to your content.
Nowadays, there are countless tools that promise to help you get a store up and running. While some tools promise ease of use such as Shopify or Squarespace, they still come with a steep learning curve due to their many bells and whistles.
Unlike Shopify or Squarespace, Sellfy doesn’t try to handle everything. This means it focuses more on digital products and subscriptions. Although it’s not touted as much, you can also sell physical goods.
This focus means that Sellfy is basically offering tools for selling digital goods such as music, artwork, videos, or ebooks and for selling merchandise. Hence it’s geared towards creators such as musicians, writers, designers, film makers, and artists.
When you hop over to its website, you’ll see that Sellfy says you can get a store up and running in 5 minutes. Probably most users would take more time or want to take more time, but that’s how confident Sellfy is for how easy it is to use its service.
The shopping cart software is also quite versatile. It comes with the expected standalone shop front and the backend to manage your store. The shop front isn’t the only place you can sell your work. You can also embed products and buy buttons on an existing site, Facebook, or YouTube.
It was launched back in 2011 as a service for selling digital goods only. Since then it has added more and more features and turned into an all-in-one shopping cart.
Pros and cons of Sellfy
Sellfy is hosted solution geared toward creatives who want to sell a combination of physical, digital, subscription, and print-on-demand products. You get a standalone store front and the backend as well as options to embed a buy button on websites and third party platforms like social media.
As a hosted all-in-one solution, you don’t need to worry about installing anything, maintenance or coding. Instead, you pay it a monthly subscription fee.
Pros
- Easy to use
- You can sell a combination of digital goods, merchandise, and content subscription
- You can set the language of your store to English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, French, or Russian
- Embed options allow you to sell anywhere that allows embedded code
- Its mobile app allows you to manage your store on the go
Cons
- Only 5 themes to choose from
- No blogging tool
- Only 6 integrations
- The ease of use comes with very limited customisation options
Who is Sellfy for?
Sellfy is geared toward creators, ranging from musicians over to writers and to videographers. If you’re looking to remove any roadblocks that you may encounter when using other tools such as Shopify, Sellfy is a good place to start, although you have to keep in mind that it’s also not meant to be used to create an online store with all the bells and whistles you could think of.
If you’re planning on selling a combination of subscriptions, digital goods, and merchandise, Sellfy makes it easy for you to get a store up and running. But if tangible goods are your main money maker, you need to research options that also have tools for shipping the goods.
How easy is Sellfy to use?
It’s always nice if a service doesn’t ask for your credit card details when you create an account. This means you can test the service without pressure and don’t need to always think of cancelling it in time.
After your first login, Sellfy helps you set up your store with a 5 step checklist. It will help you go through all you need for creating and customising your store as well as selling and managing your products.
It really is a matter of a few minutes to finish the checklist. Which confirms Sellfy’s claim that it can get your store up and running in mere 5 minutes. Take this with a grain of salt. This only applies if you really only have one product and don’t mess with the default theme.
Nonetheless, even if you’ve never worked with a website builder or a shopping cart software, you’ll find your way within minutes. It has an intuitive interface and everything is well-labelled.
Sellfy prebuilts 9 pages for your store front. Default, or as Sellfy calls them “Built-in pages” are
- Home
- Product
- Category
- Checkout
- Purchase confirmation
These are needed in order to have a store front so that you can list and sell your products. The custom pages are
- Products
- About
- Contact
- Terms
You can easily add or change the custom pages. With the drag-and-drop editor, it’s easy to customise the built-in pages and custom pages. You can change the layout and its content, adjust the colour schemes and customise the header, buttons, logo, and so forth.
You can do the adjustments easily and without prior knowledge, but the downside is that the degree of freedom is limited and you don’t get advanced customisation options.
Sellfy design and themes
When your account was created, it comes installed with the default theme Lumière. You’ll find all 5 of the themes within Sellfys website editor. They’re included in the plans.
How to manage your ecommerce store in Sellfy?
Running your store is a cinch. Sellfy has one of the easiest product management systems I’ve encountered so far. You’ll find everything you need under the tab products in the left side menu. The Products tab is divided into
- Digital Products
- Print-on-Demand
- Subscriptions
- Physical Products
- Freebies
Organising your products into these subcategories helps you to manage your inventory more easily. You can host your digital products on Sellfy itself. Sellfy doesn’t limit your storage space but recommends that individual files should not exceed 10GB in size Each product can have up to 50 files. In the tab Orders and Customer, you’ll see the list of purchases and paying customers.
Sellfy integrations
To integrate and automate tasks, Sellfy gives you the option to integrate with Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and Pixel as well as Twitter Ads.
If you need customer support or want to give your audience the possibility to chat with you, you can use Facebook live chat. You can offer your products on your Patreon page.
If you want to integrate it with another service, you can use Zapier. Or you can use webhooks to make your own custom integration.
What marketing and SEO tools does Sellfy have?
Sellfy features a built-in analytics tool. Then, depending on what account you’ve subscribed to, you get to add discount codes, upsell, recover abandoned carts, and email marketing.
SEO
You can edit the page title and URL slug. You can also add a description for each file or product.
Blogging
Sellfy doesn’t include a blogging tool that you can include in your store front and manage in the backend.
Embed options
Every time you finish adding a new product, Sellfy gives you several different embed options so you can increase your visibility and promote your business.
You can also embed your entire Sellfy store, not only certain products, or connect with your Facebook page. Lastly, you can add product cards to your content.
Payment options
Sellfy payment options are Stripe and Paypal. Sellfy doesn’t tack on any transaction fee, so it’s only what these payment gateways charge for each transaction.
Sellfy security
Since Sellfy doesn’t handle payments but Stripe and Paypal. Both secure your customers’ details with encryption. All projects built with Sellfy are secured with SSL.
Since Sellfy hosts your digital files for delivery, it can track downloads and is quite effective in preventing unauthorised distribution of your digital goods. The main security steps of Sellfy to protect your files are:
- PDF stamping
- Unique download links
- Limited download attempts
Sellfy customer support
You can contact the support team via email 24/7. If you’ve subscribed to the Premium plan, your mails are treated with priority. There’s also the searchable help centre.
Sellfy pricing
Including the free one, Sellfy offers 4 plans. The good thing is that it doesn’t add transaction fees. There are also no hidden costs. Compared to something like Shopify, it’s quite affordable, especially if you really don’t need all the features that Shopify has.
Is Sellfy the right tool for you?
Building a store is hassle-free. And it gives you the freedom to use its store front or you can embed your products on an existing site that you run or third-party platforms. If you don’t need a full-fledged online store, Sellfy is worth it.
It’s great if you sell a combination of digital products like ebooks, courses, graphics, and merchandise. It’ll also help if you want to add subscriptions.
Original post here: Sellfy review – website builder for creatives
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