Gumroad Review

Gumroad started its journey as a hosted online store builder in 2011 and offers a simple shopping cart solution for creators. But is Gumroad the best choice for you? In this review of Gumroad, we will look at its features and try to find out the answer.

Gumroad is a hosted eCommerce platform. Unlike platforms like Shopify and Sellfy, it lets you create your online shop for free.

But, does it mean that Gumroad is the best online shop builder? Let us discuss further.

Onboarding
Customizing the Storefront
Products to sell
Adding a custom domain
Pricing
Adding discount coupons
Affiliate programs
Payout processing
Managing customers
Integrations
Gumroad Discover
Advantages of Gumroad
Limitations of Gumroad
Summary

Gumroad Review – How To Use Gumroad

Getting started with Gumroad is easy, fast, and free!

Head over to Gumroad and click on the button Start Selling.
You can sign up with your email. If you prefer, you can also sign up with your existing Facebook or Google account.

After you create your free account you must provide some basic information on your shop.

For example, you must provide

The name of your Gumroad store.
An optional bio of your shop.
Your country.
The type of business or the Gumroad community.
You must also select an appropriate user name.

If you opt for the Gumroad free plan, your shop will exist as gumroad.com/user-name.

After you provide all these basic details, you can add your first product.

Gumroad lets you sell the following types of products.

Classic – These are the products that are already ready to sell.
Preorder – These are products that are not ready to sell yet.
Membership – This will let you sell subscriptions charging your customers in a recurring way.

In short, Gumroad lets you start selling as soon as you complete the account creation. And this can happen without any upfront investments.

Gumroad Review – How To Customize Gumroad storefront

Like Payhip, Gumroad lets you tweak your hosted storefront only to a limited extent.

You can only select one of the few themes.
You can customize only the background and colors of buttons.
You can personalize your shop with a custom background and a profile photo.
Gumroad also lets you connect your online shop to your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

If you have more than nine products in your shop, you will find filters appearing on the left side by default. The filters help your customers browse your products easily. They can sort and filter the products in your shop.

If you do not want these filters for your customers, you can disable them.

If you know CSS, you can customize your store a little bit further. But you cannot have a completely unique look for your Gumroad store with a custom theme, etc.

Gumroad Review – What Can You Sell with Gumroad?

Gumroad lets you sell ready to ship goods as well as preorders. You can sell both digital goods and physical products.

You can sell eBooks, pdfs, movies, courses, music, and so on. You are even free to sell many versions of the same digital product. For example, you can sell PDF, ePub, Mobi version of your eBook. For physical goods, you can define different product variants.

If you plan to sell software, Gumroad can handle license keys for you. You can even sell memberships to regularly charge your customers. If you are selling PDF downloads, you can stamp your pdf files with the buyer’s details. This is another interesting feature available even in the free plan. This can help in reducing the illegal sharing of downloaded files.

If you prefer to use Gumroad to rent your videos, you can offer your video for rent at a lower price. Your customers will have 72 hours to watch it within 30 days.

Gumroad lets you manage the shipping of physical goods. You are also free to restrict shipment to specific countries. The platform lets you charge shipping fees to your customers. It also supports sales tax handling to some extent.

One of the key features I liked in Gumroad is its ability to sell preorders on your online store. You can set a release date in the future and accept preorders.

But, remember that you cannot sell services with Gumroad.

Gumroad Review – Can you add a custom domain in Gumroad?

If you are a free plan user, you can access your Gumroad store with the URL: gumroad.com/user-name. You cannot connect a custom domain to your Gumroad store.

But, if you upgrade to a paid plan – you will be able to point a custom domain to your Gumroad store giving a boost to your branding.

Gumroad Review – Pricing

Gumroad offers two plans for its customers.

Gumroad Free

By default, all new customers get subscribed to the Free Plan and can start selling on Gumroad for free. This is a perpetual free tier and there is no monthly fee in this tier.

You have to pay a 5% transaction fee in the free Gumroad plan.

Gumroad Free plan has the following features:

You can add unlimited products
You get basic yet solid analytics of your store.
You can have limited posts and workflows
SD streaming
Customer management

Gumroad Creator

The Gumroad Creator Plan starts from a monthly price of $10 for up to 1000 customers. You get a discount if you pay upfront for the whole year.

The creator plan has different tiers depending on the number of distinct customers you have within a year. The tier and fees get adjusted automatically as your customer count changes.

There is no transaction fee in the Gumroad creator plan.

In the paid Gumroad plan, in addition to the free plan features:

You can use your custom domain.
You can have unlimited posts and workflow.
You can have unlimited HD streaming.
You can remove the Gumroad branding.
You can have custom Delivery products.
You can add your own CSS.

Note that Gumroad does not charge you for any free products. Also, you need to pay the payment gateway fees in both these plans.

Gumroad Review – How To Add Discount Codes in Gumroad

You can create discount codes in Gumroad. You can create a discount code manually or accept an auto-generated one.

Discounts can be by percentage or amount.

You can enable the coupon for a specific product, or all products in your store.

Gumroad Review – Setting Up An Affiliate Program In Gumroad

Setting up an affiliate program in Gumroad is easy.

You can create your own affiliate program and offer commissions to your promoters.

Note that you can offer a commission between 1% to 90% of the total sale amount.

Gumroad Review – Payout Processing in Gumroad

If you live in the USA, UK, Australia, or Canada, you must receive payments in your bank account. If you live elsewhere, you can only receive payment via PayPal.

Gumroad does not support any other payment modes for payout. In other words, you cannot use Gumroad if you cannot use Paypal.

Gumroad will pay you via Direct Deposit or PayPal only if your minimum payable reaches $10. Also, the payouts happen only on Fridays.

Gumroad accepts all major credit cards and Paypal for transactions. This includes Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Diners Club, and JCB. In short, your customers can buy with any valid credit card or Paypal.

Like Payhip, Gumroad lets you offer free products in your store. You can even set a pay what you want price for your products with or without a base price. This allows your customers to pay any price higher than the base price you set for your product.

Moreover, Gumroad lets you sell in different currencies based on the location of your customer.

Gumroad Review – Customer Relationship Management with Gumroad

With Gumroad features like posts and workflows, you can easily connect with your customers and followers.

You can use email marketing tools to connect with your customers and followers. Gumroad lets you create and embed a subscribe or follow form on your store and website.

If you want to use email marketing with your followers you can use software like Mailchimp. Zapier integrations can connect Mailchimp and Gumroad.

Gumroad Review – Supported Integrations

Gumroad is a hosted eCommerce platform. This means that you do not need to host the eCommerce software yourself.

While you can sell your products on your Gumroad store, you can also sell them on your own website. Gumroad offers two solid features known as Gumroad overlay and Gumroad embed to achieve this.

Gumroad Overlay lets you place a button or link on your website. Gumroad embed allows you to embed your product on your web page.

If you have an SSL certificate set up, the buying process happens right on your website. If your site is not secured with HTTPS, you can redirect customers to the payment form in a new and secured tab.

In addition, Gumroad has seamless integrations with the following site builders:

Weebly
Squarespace
Tumblr
WordPress

Gumroad Discover

Gumroad Discover is an interesting but paid Gumroad feature.

If you opt for this, Gumroad recommends your products to people browsing Gumroad Discover often leading to an increase in conversions.

If a product is sold using Gumroad Discover, you will pay an additional transaction fee of 10%.

Gumroad Review – Advantages of Gumroad

As an online store builder, we found Gumroad is having several advantages. A few of these are:

Gumroad has a perpetual free tier.
Gumroad has competitive transaction fees
Gumroad is an easy and intuitive eCommerce platform.
There is no limit to the number of products.
It gives you solid inbuilt analytics.
Gumroad supports preorders.
You can sell digital goods, physical goods, and memberships.
Gumroad supports the lightweight security of digital products.

Gumroad Review – Limitations of Gumroad

Before you choose Gumroad as your store builder, you must be aware of its limitations as well.

You can not connect a custom domain in the free plan.
Gumroad creator plan can become very expensive if you have many customers.
You can not use any custom themes or plugins in your Gumroad store.
There is no support for third-party affiliate systems.
There is no inbuilt email marketing solution in Gumroad.
Gumroad does not support Stripe, Payoneer, etc.
The payouts are not instantaneous and happen only on Fridays. Moreover, you need to have a minimum balance of $10 for payouts.

Have you checked the Strikingly platform? This website builder is powered by multiple impressive features, tools, templates, and utilities to build a storefront for you. Interestingly, Strikingly also has an impressive free plan that can help you to explore the platform without making any monetary commitment.

Wrapping Up Our Gumroad Review

Gumroad is a basic but feature-rich online shop builder. The free plan is perfect to start an online business without spending any upfront money. If you want to add eCommerce capability to your personal blog or website, Gumroad can be a good fit.

But, we did not find it impressive for full-fledged online businesses. The limitations of customization kill the prospect of branding your business. Moreover, the Creator Plan becomes too expensive as your customer base increases.

Shopify and Sellfy are always a better option if you are looking for a paid online store builder. And if you are interested in free eCommerce platforms only, we recommend you to look at Payhip.