I never like to review a product or service until I have been able to spend a significant amount of time using it so that I can provide a meaningful review. Having done over $65,000 of transactions with Gumroad, I feel like I can provide that review.
Gumroad is a website service that allows you to upload a product (now with capability for physical goods as well) and create a very simple landing page for your customers to buy the product and get the download.
What I Liked About Gumroad
The main draw to Gumroad is simplicity, design, and dependability. I have had trouble with similar services such as e-junkie when customers purchased a digital item but were not given the download. I didn’t have even one such complaint from my customers who purchased through Gumroad.
Although I found the design of the landing page inflexible, I did like the design that Gumroad chose for the landing page. It’s clean, simple, and allows for a large video on the sales page.
What I Didn’t Like About Gumroad
I had many customers who disputed their purchase because they didn’t recognize “Gumroad” on their bank statement and my customers told me no number was provided for them to call and confirm what they had purchase. This created quite the headache for me months after the sale, but it only represented about $500 of the $65,000 in purchases.
I don’t love the idea of passing customers to a third-party website to complete a transaction, and using their functionality to set up payments on your own site through Gumroad was clunky.
Virtually no options are given for the design of the sales page. Take their design or leave it–only minor tweaking is available.
Another aspect of the service that I don’t like is that they do not have functionality for collecting sales tax. They can tell you what sales happened in your state so you can pay the tax, but the tax comes out of your own pocket and isn’t collected from the customer.
They cost way too much for what they are doing. If you are selling an eBook or other digital download and expect sales to be under $5,000 it may be a good option. If you think you may sell a higher volume, it is worth it to process your credit cards via Authorize.net and skip Gumroad in order to save on fees.
The fatal flaw: No support for Paypal. Knowing from past experience that 50% of my customers choose Paypal when given the option, I knew it wasn’t an option to go only with Gumroad. That meant I had to create a checkout experience for Gumroad, and a separate checkout and delivery for Paypal. Since I was already going through that work, it defeated the purpose of the simplicity of Gumroad. I completely understand why Gumroad does not support Paypal–Paypal is a complete disaster to work with; however, my customers want it, so I demand it.
Conclusion
Would I use Gumroad again? Yes, but only if it were selling a small digital product that I didn’t expect to earn much money. Otherwise, it isn’t worth losing so much of the sale and being forced into their inflexible design and checkout.
For smaller online sellers who want the simplest possible way to sell their goods online, Gumroad is perfect. But serious internet marketers with the savvy to put a checkout in place themselves will likely find better results with a more customizable and cost-effective solution.