By the end of this Gumroad Review, I promise you’ll have a clear understanding of Gumroad to see if it’s the right eCommerce platform for you.
So, to get started, imagine you want to start selling digital products or physical goods online.
You’re an expert at what you do. You want to jump into the online marketplace.
You have the talent and ideas, but you don’t know where to start.
Like many others, you might be a bit skeptical about the online marketplace. You might also feel a bit overwhelmed by all the work needed to set up an online store.
What if I told you that there’s an eCommerce platform that will help you sell your information products, digital or physical goods, and subscriptions with just a couple of clicks?
You can do all of these things with Gumroad.
This my Gumroad review!
I’m here to show you everything you need to know about Gumroad.
What is Gumroad?
In this Gumroad review, we’ll go through all the main features of the service.
So, to begin, let’s talk a bit about what is Gumroad.
Gumroad is an eCommerce platform where you can buy and sell digital goods, physical products, and subscriptions.
They describe themselves as “super-simple e-commerce for creators.”
Gumroad was launched in 2011 and has become the ultimate platform for creators such as writers, artists, and bloggers.
Since Gumroad’s inception, they’ve helped creators collectively sell over $277M in videos, courses, music, books, and much more.
Furthermore, what Gumroad makes stand out from the rest is that Gumroad is both an eCommerce platform where you can sell your products and also a marketplace where products are displayed for others to buy.
This means that Gumroad will also promote your products on your behalf – they call this feature “Discover.”
As a Gumroad user myself, I’ve benefited from their Discover feature – I mean, I wouldn’t have written this Gumroad review if I weren’t a user of their service!
That said, imagine waking up to an email that says, “You made a sale!” without even promoting your product.
It’s a nice addition to an already incredibly simple-to-use platform.
Gumroad Review: Pros and Cons
Gumroad’s Pros
- Easy to use interface
- For digital and physical goods
- Free plan, fantastic for beginners
- Discount codes available and you can automate promotions
- Accepts all major credit cards and PayPal
- Can be integrated with your own website
- License key generation to verify purchases
Gumroad’s Cons
- No upsells
- The affiliate features are still in their early stages
- No Apple Pay (Yet)
- No live chat – only email support
- Help Center needs more work
Is Gumroad safe?
A lot of people are scared of selling online. Some avoid purchasing from “weird” places.
See, there’s a lot of complexity out there. This sometimes results in people taking advantage of others by abusing other people’s good nature.
In light of this, Gumroad has taken important preventive measures to secure your information.
Without being too technical, when you buy or sell something on Gumroad, they handle each payment with the utmost care.
For instance, they don’t store your payment details. Gumroad doesn’t even have access to your credit card information nor your PayPal credentials once you become a seller or a customer. And, even if Gumroad gets hacked, nobody will be able to access this your credit card or PayPal information because they don’t store this information on their database. Hence, your data is safe.
Not to mention they also have a Risk, Fraud, and Payments team that handles any weirdness that might happen.
See, whenever they detect any fraudulent activity surrounding your account, they’ll send you an email stating so – something that actually gave me the creeps when I first got this email couple of months before writing this Gumroad review (maybe they should try changing the email subject line).
Here’s a screenshot of the email they’ll send you when they detect something fishy.
Gumroad transactions are processed using PCI Compliant service providers.
So, it’s as safe as any other eCommerce platform.
Gumroad free plan
Is Gumroad free?
The short answer is: yes, they offer a free plan.
Now, you can keep their free plan as long as you have under 1000 customers.
That said, if you decide on paying them from the get-go, you’ll only pay $10 a month and get access to all their premium features
Their pricing structure looks like this.
How much does Gumroad cost?
Gumroad has a starting price of $10 per month.
Compared to other eCommerce platforms, Gumroad is one of the most inexpensive services on the market.
Now, as your business grows, Gumroad’s monthly pricing tiers will also change.
This is because your billing tier is based on the number of customers you have. So Gumroad will automatically adjust the tier you belong to as your customer list grows.
Once you break the 1000th customer, you’ll start paying $25 a month.
When you get more than 2000 customers you move up a tier to $50/month.
And so on.
Here are Gumroad’s billing tiers.
As you can see Gumroad offers great value for money.
What payment options does Gumroad have?
Gumroad accepts all major credit cards (American Express, Discover, Mastercard, Visa, Maestro, Diner’s Club), and PayPal.
At the moment of this writing, they’re working on accepting Apple Pay. It is currently set to launch mid-2020.
Gumroad doesn’t support payment processing services such as Authorize.net or Skrill. It also doesn’t accept Bitcoin.
In short, Gumroad will handle all the payments for you!
Most noteworthy, what makes Gumroad really stands out from the rest of the eCommerce platforms is that it doesn’t require you to follow complicated steps to start accepting payments.
All you need to do is set up your Gumroad account, add your bank account details if you live in the USA, UK, Austalia, or Canada, or link your PayPal account to it if you live outside of these countries. That’s all you need to do. And you’re good to go!
Gumroad takes care of the payments, chargebacks, refunds (that you can manually perform), and much more.
For this reason, Gumroad is of the simplest e-commerce platforms for people who want to avoid getting lost on technical configurations.
How often does Gumroad payout?
Gumroad pays out every Friday.
They’ll send you the money to your bank account if you live in the USA, UK, Austalia, or Canada, or to your PayPal account if you live outside of these countries.
How does Gumroad work?
When you register an account, you’ll be able to add your digital goods, physical goods, and subscriptions fast and safely to the platform.
Next, they’ll prompt you to add your first products.
Finally, they’ll present you with three choices: Classic, Pre-order, and Memberships.
My intention with this Gumroad review to inform you well, so I don’t want to let the simplicity of this fool you!
So let’s expand upon these three options Gumroad gives you for creating your products.
These three options will let you sell various kinds of digital products, physical products, and memberships.
With the Classic option, you’ll be able to create add your products to the platform to start selling it today if you wanted.
With the Pre-order option, you’ll be able to sell your products on pre-order. This will allow you to get paid while you’re giving the finishing touches to your goods.
And with the Memberships option, you can charge your customers on a recurring basis – recurring income, baby!
Once you decide on the type of product you want to sell, all you need to do is add its name, price, description, featured image, and upload the files you want your buyers to get.
Done? Hit the publish button, and then copy/paste the link Gumroad provides you on your social media accounts or send it directly to your clients and audience over email.
Once someone clicks on your product’s link, they’ll be able to purchase it.
How does Gumroad make money?
If someone purchases your product, you’ll get paid and Gumroad takes a commission.
Gumroad takes an 8.5% commission + 30¢ from each transaction if you have the free plan. And 3.5% + 30¢ if you have the paid plan.
Gumroad offers freelancers, content creators, artists, writers, musicians, and many other people from different industries an easy path to making an extra income selling their goods online to their audience.
What can I sell on Gumroad?
- Digital goods
- Physical goods
- Subscription-based services
What can’t I sell on Gumroad?
According to their website, “We do not allow any activity that promotes or encourages discrimination based upon race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation or age. This includes any content sent out using our email services, or as part of any products sold on Gumroad in any capacity.”
Here’s the full list of things you can’t sell on this platform.
Gumroad integrations
One of the places where I think Gumroad could improve is to increase the number of platforms with which it can be integrated.
For the moment, these are some of their current integrations:
- Zapier (I’ve integrated Gumroad with Zapier)
- ConvertKit (I’ve integrated Gumroad with Convertkit)
- Booklaunch
- WordPress (I’ve integrated Gumroad with Convertkit)
- Infusionsoft
- IFTTT
- Drip
While I wished the list would be a bit longer, you could always use Zapier and IFTTT to integrate Gumroad with the other services you might be using at this moment.
Personally, I’ve used Zapier to integrate Gumroad with a WordPress membership site I developed in 2019. It worked out fine.
You can find the full list of integrations here: Gumroad Integrations.
Gumroad Features
Here’s a comprehensive list of Gumroad’s top features:
- Workflows
- Gumroad following
- Custom library
- Custom profile
- On-demand streaming
- Pre-orders
- Memberships
- Digital product versions, physical products variants, and membership tiers
- Discount codes
- Affiliate marketing tool
- Analytics
- License key generator for software
- Landing pages for your offers
Workflows – Gumroad’s Email Marketing
In the online marketing world, Email Marketing is the king.
One of Gumroad’s most powerful features is its Workflows (that’s how they named their email marketing automation feature)
Best thing? You can use Gumroad’s email marketing feature with the free plan! But you’re limited to one automation – or workflow, as they call it.
Now, what’s a workflow? It’s just a set of automated emails – in email marketing, this is called an email sequence.
You can use Workflows to schedule updates and send automated emails to your buyers and audience.
You can use this feature to create a product that delivers a fixed amount of emails in which you teach something.
Or you can use it to send complimentary materials to your customers.
Now, Gumroad Workflows isn’t an all-powerful email marketing automation service.
It has its limitations.
For example, you cannot send emails to a custom set of your buyers. But you can send emails to people who have purchased a particular product.
At the moment of this writing, you can send emails based on the products someone purchased, but you can only select one product at a time.
Let me explain.
Let’s say Linda purchased your Web Design course and John purchased your Graphic Design course.
If you want to send Linda and John the same email text, you’ll have to send two different emails. One for people who purchase your Web Design course and another for those who bought your Graphic Design course.
Also, you cannot automatically insert your buyer’s name on the email, nor their email address, nor any other information that Gumroad stores on their profiles.
All that said, you don’t actually need people to purchase your product for them to receive emails from you.
They can also subscribe to your Gumroad email list – more about this right now!
Gumroad following
Gumroad lets you grow what they call a “Following.”
Now, unlike Twitter or Instagram, people don’t actually follow you. What they do is subscribe to your Gumroad email list.
For example, my “follow page” looks like this.
But, as you can see, this is nothing more than an opt-in form to subscribe to my Gumroad email list.
One of the good aspects of Gumroad’s following feature is that you’ll be able to see its analytics.
Here’s a preview of what you’ll get:
Custom Gumroad Library
“When your customers purchase a product on Gumroad, it will appear in their Library.” – Gumroad
This means that Gumroad’s users will have access to all of the products they’ve purchased using Gumroad.
This is an awesome way to offer even more value to your customers, as they’ll never lose track of their purchases as everything they purchased on Gumroad will be stored inside their personal Library.
Custom Profile
As a creator, you’ll get very own creator profile page.
In it, people will be able to find all the products you’ve added to Gumroad.
You’ll also be given the option to rearrange and hide products from your profile page.
And you’ll also be able to collect emails.
As with every other feature, editing your profile is a thing of ease.
On-demand Streaming
Imagine you want to sell a video course to your audience. Gumroad will not only let you upload the video files, but it will also allow your buyers to stream the videos on demand.
This is a great opportunity for people who want to sell tutorial videos, how-tos, documentaries, and indie-films.
Gumroad also allows you to disable file downloads with only one click.
This adds an extra layer of security to your videos, as people won’t be able to share or embed your videos on other sites.
Pre-orders made easy with Gumroad
Gumroad lets you accept pre-orders both for digital and physical goods.
Imagine the following scenario.
You’re about to finish creating your brand new product but you’re eager to start selling it because your audience has been asking for it for a while.
Here’s where pre-orders chime in.
You can create a product a pre-order, set its price lower than the original price, and encourage your audience to purchase it before the release date.
Then, after the product is launched, you increase the price to the original price you had in mind.
This is a powerful way to encourage people to purchase their products and get paid while creating them.
If you take anything from this Gumroad review, I hope it’s a new-found appreciation for the ability to be able to launch your products on pre-sale. I mean, just imagine getting paid while still giving the finishing touches to your product! Gumroad lets you do this.
Memberships
There are gazillions of subscriptions platform that can help you sell memberships to your audience.
But why use a different one when you can also use Gumroad to sell your memberships?
Gumroad lets you charge your customers on a recurring basis.
And not only that, you can offer different pricing options depending on months the buyer decides to join in.
Digital product versions, physical products variants, and membership tiers
Something I’ve noticed Gumroad creators have a problem understanding is what are versions, variants, and tiers.
On this Gumroad review, I’ll try to give them (and you) a definitive answer to this misunderstanding.
You can set up different versions for your digital products, different variants for your physical products, and different tiers for your membership.
So version, variants, and tiers are basically synonyms within Gumroad.
Digital products have versions. With versions, you can offer additional content on top of your digital products.
Physical products have variants. Variants let you create multiple versions of the same item without setting up a new product. Imagine you’re selling t-shirts. Some variant examples of the t-shirt might be, Small – Red, Medium – Blue, Large – Pink.
Memberships have tiers. Gumroad also allows you to set pricing tiers for your memberships, which will let you offer additional content to higher paying customers.
Gumroad discount codes
If you ever want to run a promotional offer without changing the original price of your product, Gumroad lets you create discount codes for your offers.
Gumroad autogenerates the discount code for you, but you’ll also have the ability to create a custom code if you chose to.
You decide on discounting by a fixed amount or a percentage. And you can set the number of orders that can use the discount code – if you set a quantity, Gumroad will disable the discount code after the number of sales is reached.
Gumroad Affiliate Marketing
“Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s (or company’s) products.” – Pat Flynn
Gumroad offers a simple affiliate marketing tool.
They provide creators with the tools to generate affiliate links.
See, being able to create affiliate links is a great addition to an already great platform.
In the first place, you can use them to encourage your customers to promote your products for you.
Secondly, they also help cultivate a deeper relationship with your audience. Why? If they know they can get a commission from promoting you.
And lastly, every time someone purchases the product using this special link you create for your affiliates, they’ll get a commission on the sale made through their link – and you too get paid.
Everyone wins, right?
This feature can help you arrange a win-win situation with your audience!
Now, Gumroad’s affiliate marketing feature isn’t all-powerful.
So what can you currently do with Gumroad’s affiliate marketing feature?
- Create affiliate links.
- Decide on the commission the affiliate will get for each sale is made through their affiliate link.
- See how much each individual affiliate has sold.
Things you cannot currently do with Gumroad’s affiliate marketing feature:
- Know how much income you’ve made through your affiliate program (you’ll have to manually add up the sales).
- Filter through your affiliates.
- Mass import affiliates.
While Gumroad’s affiliate marketing tool is still in its early stages, it’s powerful enough to give its users the ability to add people into their affiliate program.
According to Gumroad’s public 2020 roadmap, their affiliate marketing feature will be improved during May 2020.
(I’ll make sure to update this Gumroad review by then to keep you up to speed!)
Gumroad Analytics
One of my favorite Gumroad’s features is its Analytics.
Not only do you get to see a trend of your sales and amount of view your products are getting, but you’ll also get a glimpse of the referrers from where the traffic is coming from. Plus, it will show you your conversion rate!
You can also choose to view the data for your whole Gumroad account or on a product basis.
With just a couple of clicks, you can change the information Gumroad displays on your screen.
License key generator for software
While I won’t be diving deep into this feature during this Gumroad review, I bet that if you’re a software developer, this feature might blow your mind.
Gumroad offers you the ability to create a unique license key for each purchase.
Therefore, you’ll be able to use this key to enforce users to verify their purchase by inserting the license key on your software.
Landing pages on Gumroad
Every product you create, get its own landing page.
If you want your audience to focus on a single product, all you need to do is promote the link to your product’s landing page.
There’s a caveat though.
At the moment of this writing Gumroad review, their landing pages cannot be overly customized.
For example, the landing page editor lets you add text, photos, and embed videos from Youtube and Vimeo.
You’ll be able to set the font to bold and italic and add underlines to the text, but it won’t let you center the text nor the images.
Here are the current styling options Gumroad offers you:
- Bold text
- Italic text
- Underlining text
- Adding links
- Adding heading
- Quotes
- Bullet points
You won’t be able to create columns, alined stuff in the middle, change the font colors on command, nor make the landing page look different for mobile and desktop.
However, don’t’ let this discourage you.
For instance, you can get creative with the way you use images to spice up your landing pages.
And the fact is that most people purchase through their smartphones. And, as you might have noticed, most webpages (and landing pages) look the same on mobile devices.
Personally, I long realized most of my buyers purchase through their mobile devices. So I’ve actually stopped caring too much about how my landing pages look on bigger screens – however, this is not universal advice for every industry, therefore take this observation with a grain of salt.
An Introduction To Gumroad
Conclusion
The online world is waiting for you. And Gumroad is a solid eCommerce platform choice at a very inexpensive price.
So, if you’re looking to sell information products, physical goods, and memberships, give Gumroad a try – it’s free to use for up to 1000 customers.
Gumroad virtually eliminates all the technical hurdles of selling stuff online.
Now, while some of its features are still their early stages (affiliates, for example), their platform is rock-solid and steady in 2020. I’ve been using Gumroad since October 2018 and I’ve rarely seen any downtime – so when your audience clicks on your link, they’ll actually see your offers on their web browsers.
Hopefully, this Gumroad review served its purpose: help you decide if Gumroad is for you.
If so, make sure to click the link below to subscribe to Gumroad.
