Gumroad Review (My personal experience)
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.
Dear Jim:
Now this is very valuable, practical information! Could you kindly give us a little more insight on these pesky sales tax issues?
I am living outside the U.S. so obviously the last thing I need is to get tied up in U.S. tax knots.
Have you found the right functionality for collecting sales tax (tax jar)?
Are you segmenting for sales taxes on info product sales directly from a WP blog?
Thanks,
HG
Hey there Jim, how’s it going?
I always find it interesting to read the different use-cases for eCommerce platforms, and in your case it’s clear that PayPal is a big deal! Hope you don’t mind me mentioning this here (couldn’t find a direct email) but our eCommerce platform at Paddle allows you to take payments via an Overlay module with both PayPal and credit/debit cards. We couldn’t ever imagine leaving PayPal out, it’s just too popular.
Would love for you to check it out and get your thoughts via email; check out https://paddle.com/sell if you’re interested!
Thanks for the great review.
>>The main draw to Gumroad is simplicity, design, and dependability.
There is a major problem with that simplicity and design, however. I discovered that many customers using a certain very popular ad blocking software can’t use the Gumroad site. It’s not that the site has ads, but whatever it is they do have in their code is making their site unusable for millions of users. Implement Gumroad at your own risk.
BTW, I did bring it to their attention and they didn’t seem to care.
With respect the comment from Fabio about Paddle – it took me half an hour of investigating Paddle to discover that it’s not for downloadable products like ebooks – it’s for selling apps and games and not, as they declare on their home page, for “apps and content”. Very annoying to mislead people into thinking your product will work for them and leave them to find out later that it actually won’t. I’d avoid Paddle – incompetents who confuse games with content and waste people’s time!
I’m using gumroad and some people are saying they can’t buy the ebook sometimes.
I may change to paypal soon.
Fatal flaw is that they don’t have live customer service. Limiting the mechanisms by which the company interacts with business customers is not a smart move – getting the reply “sorry but we don’t have a phone helpline” isn’t going to cut it for a business when problems need to be resolved.
Compare carefully to other more responsive providers.
GY
I have a very bad experience with gumroad. I was a customer for 5 months, they suspended my account without explanation and sales until this dates they did not payout. Gumroad… No more
I have also had students dispute the sale because of Gumroad’s lousy way of taking people’s money and not warning them what the charge will look like on their credit card statement. I’m still waiting for things to get solved, and meanwhile I’ve had my account suspended as well. And I have never encountered such rude support people. I can’t believe the way they wrote to me, and as far as customers, they refer to them as having “little minds”. I can’t wait to get my account unsuspended so I can leave Gumroad for good and take my course elsewhere.
Sounds like that was probably a joke.
The support for the customer is incredibly rude, verging on scam-level. They now offer Paypal payments, but ask the customer (using astoundingly rude phrasing) to close their Paypal complaint before they will refund any money (in this case for an e-book that was not received). Is there any reason to do so beyond that the customer has no recourse after closing the issue in Paypal? As a seller, you would be represented by a company with a level of customer service that appears to strive to be insulting.
I know folks who used to work in the risk department at Gumroad. Just offering some context:
Accounts are only suspended and sales are refunded to customers if you are violating the Terms of Service or your sales were made fraudulently (i.e. a majority of sales are made on stolen cards or show evidence of being illegal). Ecommerce sites are hotspots for scammers who are running stolen credit cards on small transactions.
The customer service of Gumroad is actually (quite interestingly) the guy who founded the company, way back when…..I’m fairly certain he runs the support channel, their Twitter feeds and from what I understand, most of the whole operation.
I have several accounts with Gumroad – one personally which i rarely use – and one with a few partners on a project which we do – and their technology is really good – they do some cool things very well (for memberships/courses + automation especially, by dint of workflows that target subscribers/purchasers/etc) that in my view, are just much better designed than the stuff found on other similar platforms. The design chops + user engagement elements are really beautifully done – and that’s no surprise based on his pedigree – and the original team.
The thing that is somewhat funny (or not, predicated on where you are in this firehose of attention) IS in fact, some of the cavalier comments the founder will throw at folks who are customers/clients/etc – he has almost an insult comic approach to some CS issues (as the first commenter pointed out above) – it’s not a joke – he’s a very smart dude who deals with a lot of people (i presume) who don’t share his intellectual bandwidth – and some of his responses to issues (especially on Twitter) are almost mean spirited and insulting.
Gumroad remains a great deal for what you get – you can literally implement super cool automation that some services base their entire (premium) email marketing around for $10 bucks (or so) a month – in combination with landing pages, memberships/course communities, products/etc – price is certainly not a barrier of entry. (although the insult comic approach to customers – while sometimes very comical to see – obviously ain’t a way to engender lots of long term trust 🙂 It’s a shame they’ve not developed the product more over the last few years – but it remains really good and unique – and in some ways, is one of my favorite tools to use.
Gumroad is not a professionally well-organized type of online retail tool for retailers, why someone would use this format to retail there goods is beyond me. Why let someone take a slice of your profit for doing nothing more than taking your clients money and then giving you a slice of your products sales revenue. Come on guys use your brain cells and add a shopping cart to your website
AS an end user, I can’t say enough bad things about my experience with Gumroad. Apparently they have a server problem — you’ll find many references to it if you search online for “Gumroad reviews” — that blocks some email addresses, so customers may never receive a link to download the software they ordered. Their solution? Send a snotty automated email saying the customer must have entered their email correctly. That’s it. That’s the solution. You never get a download link nor a refund.