Okay, seriously, somebody has to explain to me what all the hype is about Gumroad!
I've been looking for the perfect sales platform and the perfect course platform for a really long time. The truth is, I found something. I love ThriveCart. You've seen me write about it. You've heard me talk about it. You’ve seen the emails. You know I love it. For many reasons.
And if you’re new here, check out my articles about ThriveCart.
The Complete Guide to Selling Your Online Product
Here's the thing. Everybody thinks that Gumroad is the next best thing. And honestly, I just don't understand why. What I decided to do is to check out what Gumroad is all about and what the hype is.
People are really enticed by the fact that you don't pay anything in order to use it.
When you don't pay anything, you are the product.
(You know this, right?)
In order to use Gumroad for any sale of up to a thousand dollars, you have to pay 9%.
If you sell a product for a hundred dollars, you're paying $9. If you’re selling a product for $10, you're paying 90 cents. Now that may seem like a minor issue, but that means that you're not really earning everything that you could possibly be earning.
The percentages go down, the more sales you make, but by very little. They go down from 9% of sales, up to thousand dollars to 7% for sales, up to $10,000 to 5% for sales, up to a hundred thousand dollars to 3%, up to a million dollars, then to 2.9%, and it continues on, which is very much the standard for Stripe and PayPal for non-international sales.
But that’s not all.
They also take 30 cents on each transaction. Even though you think you're not paying for it, you're definitely paying for it with every sale.
They're making money off of your knowledge, your courses, and your product.
It’s not really free.
It’s free to use.
But not free to sell products.
The Layout
The second thing I want to talk about is the layout.
Newsflash: It's horrendous.
You have very little control over the general layout of the sales page. You have very little control on what color to pick for the layout of your sales page. You have very little control on what the buttons say and on how the text is laid out. They give you a little bit of freedom, but not that much. You have no control over the font sizes of certain areas. Sure, you can upload images and a thumbnail. And that's great. But it’s really far from enough.
One thing they do have is that they do sell your products in a general sales portal, if you’d like.
That means you may have more accessibility to others to your product, but honestly, it's not worth what you're getting here. And how is that different from Udemy or other general course platforms that are also marketplaces?
You have different products that you can sell.
You can:
✅ Sell a digital product.
✅ Sell a course, tutorial, or an eBook.
✅ Create a newsletter membership.
✅ Make episodes for a podcast.
✅ Let customers listen to an audio book.
✅ Sell anything that actually needs shipping.
✅ Allow customers to leave ratings.
But again, the control you have over all of this is really limited.
On the sales page, you can define a price for each product. But you have only one price that you can define per product. And not multiple options like on other sales platforms.
Plus, there’s very limited control of the customer journey. Forget branding, even where you send your clients and what information you can give them on the checkout page or thank you page is limited.
I don’t think there’s any point in going into the different options you have for each of the listed product types. What I will say (again), is that you are very limited in how you can set this up. Branding is basically non-existent. And you are actually limited to what the platform determines is the right way to do things. Even if you think differently..
You have various integration options (connects with Twitter and HypeFury), but truth be told, it just doesn't make sense to use this.
Quite frankly, there are better options.
If you look at tools like ThriveCart:
👉 You have control over the checkout page.
👉 You have control over the thank you page.
👉 You have full control over the customer journey.
A tool like that gives you so much more.
Plus, it's a one time lifetime payment, and that's it.
Every dollar that you make after that is yours.
You're not sharing your profits or revenue with anyone.
Let's talk about Gumroad’s payment options. They accept credit cards. There is no option to integrate with your Stripe or your PayPal.
Basically, what they're telling you to do is: We'll collect credit card information from your customers. We'll take a fee for that expense and then you'll get whatever is left.
Now you can collect money through credit cards, but you're paying 9%.
That's just way too much plus 30 cents on the transaction.
If you’re selling a $50 product you're going to be making less than $45, which is just such a shame.
Oh, and there’s more: you don't have control on where the money goes.
So in my case, the money would be automatically imported into my Israeli bank account, which is actually not where I want it to go, because I'd be losing fees on the conversion.
I would really love the money to go to my Wise account, which is a virtual bank account, but a bank account, nonetheless, and people pay me in dollars there. And that's where my business account is held. I don't have that option for pay-outs either.
Seriously. I don’t get the hype.
I get using a freemium tool. I am all for using a freemium tool.
The problem with this tool is that it's not freemium at all.
You are paying through your sales. And to reach that point where you pay 2.9% plus 30 cents on the transaction, like you would through Stripe, you have to sell over a million dollars worth of products. I don't know many people who are getting to that level. Especially at first.
It's so easy to make back the cost of ThriveCart. It's not funny. And every dollar you earn is yours. You're not sharing it with anyone.
Yes, you are going to have payment processing fees, but you would anyway. Just choose the option where you know that it's the least amount of fees for you and the best location for your needs. Apple Pay. Google Pay. Authorized.net. PayPal. Stripe. You choose!
Somebody please write me an email and tell me why do you love Gumroad?
And have you tried something that has more flexibility than ThriveCart?
Hey, I would love to know, because I don’t get it.
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