Gumroad Review 2022
A solid platform for letting digital creators sell directly to consumers
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Founded in 2012 by Sahil Lavingia, Gumroad is an online ecommerce platform designed to help digital creators sell their products directly (cutting out the typical middleman). It’s used by a wide variety of professional creators: among others, these include writers, designers, developers, musicians, filmmakers, and educators.
That said, while its main focus has always been on selling digital products, it can also be used to sell physical products. This makes it viable for those who want to sell digital items with some accompanying merchandise (podcasters selling branded clothing, for instance).
Note that Gumroad is not an online marketplace, but it's also not a comprehensive ecommerce website building platform. Instead, it provides a set service through which you can list your products for purchase and download. When you create a Gumroad account, you’re prompted to create a business profile and whatever product pages you require.
You can then share those pages with your prospective customers however you like, and they can use them to pay for your digital products and download them immediately after. If you’d rather go through your distinct website, you can either open Gumroad in a window when needed or embed your page and checkout to make things easier.
Benefits
- A straightforward and easy way to sell digital products directly to customers
- Support for digital subscriptions and payment plans for products
- Enough free functionality to sell effectively without paying
The main selling point for using Gumroad is simply how easy it makes it to sell digital products. With no grand configuration or customisation to go through, you need only create your profile, define your products, upload the files, and choose the payment models you want to offer (Gumbroad supports one-time downloads, rentals, and subscriptions).
Pricing
Gumroad offers two account types: free and premium. Every new account defaults to the free tier, and you can choose to upgrade to the premium level by agreeing to pay a monthly fee. If you’re willing to pay for a year upfront instead of issuing monthly payments, you can save 10% on your total.
Regardless of the type of account, however, Gumroad functions through taking a percentage fee from each sale (along with a flat $0.30) — the percentage is simply lower for premium users, dipping by 5% relative to what free users pay.
This percentage fee stacks with any other fees you need to pay for the use of particular payment gateways. Accordingly, you’ll pay twice if you decide to use something like PayPal to take the payments for your Gumroad sales. This isn’t ideal, but it also isn’t exorbitant.
Gumroad Discover
Enabled by default, Gumroad Discover is a native system for promoting products throughout the Gumroad marketplace. The digital products you add to the system will then be added to this searchable range and advertised via the receipts and download pages for related sales.
Whenever someone who hasn’t bought from you before decides to order one of your products through a Discover recommendation, you’ll be charged an extra 10% on top of the normal fees. A free account holder will pay 18.5% + $0.30, while a premium account holder will pay 13.5% + $0.30. You can view further details below.
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Gumroad premium account billing tiers
How much you pay per month for a premium account depends on how many customers you need to serve. Here’s how the monthly cost goes up with the customer allowance:
Account type | Free | Premium |
Cost | - | $10 - $250 per month based on number of customers |
Gumroad fee | 8.5% + $0.30 (USD) per sale | 3.5% + $0.30 (USD) per sale |
PayPal processing fee (if applicable) | 6% per sale | 1% per sale |
Gumroad Discover fee | 18.5% + $0.30 per sale | 13.5% + $0.30 per sale |
Features | Create and customise your Gumroad storefront Sell as many products as you want Use custom CSS to stylise your page Send out up to 4 updates per month Create free products up to 25mb in size Add third party analytics codes Custom delivery page - redirect to your own thank you page after purchase One automated workflow | The ability to remove Gumroad branding from product pages and receipts HD streaming for uploaded video files Unlimited posts and workflows for your customers Use of custom domains Create free products up to 250MB |
Gumroad premium account billing tiers
How much you pay per month for a premium account depends on how many customers you need to serve. Here’s how the monthly cost goes up with the customer allowance:
Number of customers | Monthly cost |
Less than 1,000 | $10 |
1,000 - 1,999 | $25 |
2,000 - 4,999 | $50 |
5,000 - 9,999 | $75 |
10,000 - 14,999 | $100 |
15,000 - 24,999 | $150 |
25,000 - 49,999 | $200 |
50,000+ | $250 |
You don’t need to pay anything to have all the functionality you need to sell your products in a basic way. You also have some customisation options for your storefront and the page your customers will see when they’ve completed their purchases.
That said, if you want to remove any signs of Gumroad branding from your storefront, product pages, and receipts, you’ll need to sign up to one of the premium accounts. How much that bothers you will depend on your situation, so think about it.
Ecommerce Comparison Features
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Overall Rating | ||||||
Price | From $9 | Free to Install | Free to Install | From $29.95 | From $2.99 | From $5.00 |
Themes | 100+ | 1000+ | 1000+ | 120 | 15 | 500+ |
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Our Review |
Gumroad Features Summary
Dashboard
The dashboard in your Gumroad account is fairly simple and easy to navigate. There are five tabs: Products, Customers, Posts, Analytics, and Profile.
- Products: This offers an overview of all your product pages (live pages and drafts).
- Customers: Here you can view all the sales data for your customers. You can also view your Workflows (these are automated emails set up to send to customers at certain times).
- Posts: You can update the people who 'follow' your Gumroad profile via posts. Here, you can manage your scheduled and published posts.
- Analytics: This shows you data about your followers and your sales.
- Profile: Here you can view and edit your Gumroad profile.
In the top right-hand corner, you can click on your shop's name to find your Gumroad balance, general settings, a page to create affiliates for your products, and a link to invite others to use Gumroad.
Themes
Under the Profile tab in your account, you can style your profile page. There are various themes to choose from, but you can upload your own image for the background and customise the background and button colours. If you really want to make your page stand out, you can even add in some custom CSS.
Image: Gumroad
With a free account, you can edit the attributes for your products, tailor the payment form, and add custom fields. It's also possible to set a custom note for the receipt that each shopper will see once they’ve completed their order.
The customisation options for your product pages are particularly limited if you're using a free account, and it's not possible to remove the Gumroad branding from your product pages or receipts unless you pay for a premium account. With an account upgrade, you can do more, including entering customer CMS for those pages.
Content Management
Gumroad allows you to create posts to engage with your customers and followers. These posts can be sent as emails and/or published directly to your Gumroad profile page (it’s akin to sharing an update on Facebook).
A free Gumroad user can only post four times per month, but premium users can post as many times as they like. You can choose to share your posts with your followers (people that have signed up to receive updates about your store), your customers, or both. Depending on that choice, you can narrow your audience down using signup dates or products purchased.
Image: Gumroad
Plugins and Extensions
Relative to other platforms, Gumroad has a very limited range of integrations. That said, integrations for Zapier and IFTTT allow you to use over 250 other applications including Mailchimp and various other industry-leading ecommerce and marketing tools.
Aside from those two connective services, Gumroad offers the following integrations:
- ConvertKit: email marketing automation
- Booklaunch: landing page building tool for book sales
- Gumroad WP Plugin: bring your Gumroad products into your WordPress site
- Infusionsoft: customer, lead, and affiliate management
- YouTube annotations: link to Gumroad from within a YouTube video
- Sketchfab: publishing, sharing, and embedding interactive 3D content
- Drip: email marketing automation
- Order Desk: order management platform
- Pabbly Connect: integration platform and workflow automation
Checkout
Gumroad accepts payments from all major credit cards, including American Express, Discover, Mastercard, and Visa. It also accepts payments through PayPal.
Payments are secured by TLS, a grade of security higher than SSL, and all payments are processed using PCI Compliant service providers. If you use the Gumroad checkout on your own website, all transactions take place within a secure iFrame, but it is up to you to set up an SSL certificate.
As noted earlier, Gumroad will take a percentage fee from each sale that you make, and the amount depends on which plan you are on. After that fee has been taken, the remaining money can be sent to your bank account or PayPal account.
Gumroad pays sellers every Friday via Direct Deposit or debit card (in the USA, Canada, the UK, and Australia) or PayPal (everywhere else). Each payment will include all profits from sales dating back to the previous payment, meaning that Gumroad may hold onto the money from a sale for an entire week. It can retain your money for longer if you have less than $10 in your Gumroad account, as you won’t receive any payments when that’s the case.
You can find fee details, payout dates, and your account balance under the Balance Tab. Each time you get paid, you will be able to download a CSV invoice with full details of all sales and amounts from your Gumroad account.
Tax
If you live in the USA, Gumroad will not add sales tax to your digital products, though it will calculate and detail the sales tax you should pay in the sites where you have nexus.
Users in the EU are not responsible for sales taxes on sales of digital products. If you sell a digital product to an EU customer, Gumroad will charge VAT because it’s the seller on record: this means that you are not responsible for adding it, charging it, or reporting it.
For Canadian users, Gumroad does not calculate or remit Canadian sales tax, and has stated that there are no plans to add this feature.
As for users in Australia or India, Gumroad will automatically charge and remit GST for them if they specify in their account settings that they need to charge it.
Currencies
Gumroad will process all transactions in USD. You can display the prices of your products in various different currencies, but customers will be charged in USD when they issue payments. This means that customers outside of the USA might be charged extra for their international purchases, depending on their chosen payment methods.
Chargebacks
If a customer issues a chargeback (effectively cancels the payment through their credit card provider), Gumtree will automatically provide proof to the card provider (or PayPal) that the payment was genuine and the customer intended to make the purchase. It will also email the customer with their order details, and if the chargeback goes through then Gumroad will cover all the fees and provide them with a full refund of the sale.
Shipping
Digital products
Customers who purchase digital products through Gumroad can download the files directly and immediately once they’ve paid for them. Customers can also set up Gumroad accounts for storing the files they’ve purchased, making it easy to access them whenever they want without needing to get fresh links.
Sellers can add any files types they want to sell, and any given product listing can feature as many files as needed (though there’s a single-file size cap of 16gb). This makes it easy to sell multiple versions of a single product on one page: you could offer a PDF version and an audio version of a book, for instance.
You can also deliver rental media and software through Gumroad, allowing customers to pay for temporary access to the files. Be mindful of DRM, though: if you’re going to have timed access then you need a way to prevent someone from simply making backups.
Physical products
When you're listing physical items, Gumroad allows you to specify which countries you will ship to, and will automatically adjust shipping charges based on where your customers live. As needed you can manage shipping notifications and automatically update your customers to let them know when their orders are going to be delivered.
Inventory Management
Using Gumroad, you can sell digital and physical products. You can't sell services, though: Gumroad doesn't allow recurring business payments so you can't use it for billing customers or clients for ongoing services.
The primary requirement is that you must have created any product you intend to sell. While other platforms focus on reselling wholesale products or second-hand items, Gumroad is pointedly about creators. There are also some product-based limitations: you can’t sell items such as pieces of jewellery, food products, medical products, or beauty products.
When you sign up, you're asked to state what product types you’re planning to sell, and how you respond will inform the rest of the setup process.
Frustratingly, there's no way to organise your products within your Gumroad account. They will simply appear in a list under the Products tab in whatever order you have added them, and you can’t just group certain products or tag them to appear in categories. You can find specific products by using the search bar, though.
While these limitations won’t prove particularly significant if you’re only using Gumroad to sell a handful of products, you may well run into product management issues if you start to significantly expand your inventory.
Customer Management
Besides sharing posts with customers and followers, Gumroad has a feature called 'Workflows' which you can find under the Customers tab. It allows you to create automated email messages to go out after particular actions (an order being completed, someone following your store, etc.) or at particular times of your choosing.
In most cases, these workflows will be used promotionally. You can send a follow-up to each customer after a certain amount of time, for instance, offering them information about related products that might interest them (or simply providing them with a personalised thank you).
These workflows aren’t solely for marketing purposes, though. You can also use them to distribute your digital products over time, which can be very useful for those who produce digital magazines or regular learning materials.
You can send your workflows to set groups of people: all your customers, customers of specific products, all your followers, or all customers and all followers. Each email will go out using the full name you’ve provided for your account, but the listed address will be support@gumroad.com, so it’s not possible to use your own branded email.
One of the biggest limitations is that you can only send one workflow to each group. For example, if you set up a thank you email to go out to every customer who bought a particular product, you won’t also be able to queue up a promotional email for that group. This is a tough limitation that makes it much more appealing to use a third-party mailing solution.
Marketing
Gumroad wasn’t developed to be good for marketing. It provides basic tools for updating and engaging customers and followers, helps people to find your products through the Discover section, and makes it easy to share products to your social media accounts. That’s about where the marketing features end.
If you just need a platform for selling your products, Gumroad can offer you that, but if you want to promote them then you’ll need to use other channels and simply link to your Gumroad pages when you’re nearing the point of conversion.
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Social Media
It's easy to share a Gumroad link to your social media accounts, thankfully. When you do, you can simply add a small amount of promotional information to explain your product and encourage the reader to click through to learn more.
Ecommerce Comparison Features
Buy Now | ||||||
Overall Rating | ||||||
Price | From $9 | Free to Install | Free to Install | From $29.95 | From $2.99 | From $5.00 |
Themes | 100+ | 1000+ | 1000+ | 120 | 15 | 500+ |
SEO Tools | ||||||
Ease Of Use | ||||||
Functionality | ||||||
Customization | ||||||
Security |