In today’s world, e-commerce is the lifeline of almost all startups. With the world connected to each other on the world wide web, websites must be interactive and captivating enough to give customers the little push they require to buy a product.
With E-commerce, there is no physical interaction between customers and sellers. Therefore an e-commerce seller must ensure that their website is good enough for customers to stay. Without a properly designed website, no product can be sold. Once a customer has decided to purchase something, a seller has to make the most of the rush and complete the transaction as smoothly and quickly as possible. But how do they do that? For that, sellers need to have the perfect shopping cart for their customers.
Usage
Built to ensure that freelancers and side hustlers can build a side income, Gumroad is a solution to simplify the payments process for your business. Selling products on Gumroad is a seamless and easy process. It does not require you to have any previous coding experience and allows you to start earning right away. Gumroad revolves around being simple to use, and hence, the layout and presentation are minimalistic. The payment process is simple for customers, and the gateway accepts all major cards and modes of payment.
Gumroad uses a proprietary payment gateway, ensuring that the transactions are very secure instead of being routed through a third-party gateway. However, there are certain limitations relating to the online payments on Gumroad as it accepts payments only from Paypal online and no other methods.
Prospect Conversion
The object of any shopping cart is to convert prospects into sales. Though Gumroad has a simple and minimalistic approach, it has a good number of features that can help you attract more customers. For example, there are various elements like buttons, forms, etc., that you can customise using basic CSS knowledge to suit your products and audiences.
Gumroad also provides a “Purchase Flow” method that allows you to design profiles that can help you showcase your products all in one place. It also allows for automation like thank you notes, welcome notes, etc., to send to your customers after the purchase for upsell purposes.
Customer Experience
You expect your sales platform to provide a smooth experience to the customers. In that respect, Gumroad has features that can definitely help you make your customers appreciate the buying experience. From providing automated pre-order lists for customers so that they are never left in the dry to providing specific memberships, Gumroad has most of the basic features required to build a strong customer base. It also allows you to import your existing email and customers list so that you can build on existing customer relations.
Should you invest in Gumroad?
Gumroad is a platform that is built for sellers that provide a product more than it is suitable for sellers that provide a service.
It is a platform that seeks to provide a common ground where sellers from different backgrounds and products can sell their products. Its main goal is to boost sales and make the transaction process easier and simpler for the consumer. This, in turn, will help increase customer reach and conversions.
While this Gumroad review provides a brief of how Gumroad is designed to support a business, it does also list the drawbacks that Gumroad has, the prime one being the limited amount of integrations that Gumroad supports. It takes away from all the creative and experimental options that you can get for your business.
On the one hand, Gumroad has an easy-to-use UI, making it suitable for beginners and sellers not used to technology. But at the same time, it also limits sellers’ options in terms of A/B testing strategies, the different payment options and interface designs. Hence it is essential that as a seller, one understands if Gumroad can help them increase their sales. It is designed to sell products and favors consumer brands with products more than sellers that are looking to provide a service.
Alternatives to Gumroad
Gumroad vs Graphy
Graphy is an all-in-one online course platform which helps creators create, market and sell their online courses under one roof. The platform is super easy to set-up and has multiple in-built features.
Creators prefer Graphy over Gumroad because it offers a more comprehensive and white-labeled platform for creators to create, market and sell online courses. Graphy offers white-labeled mobile apps in its higher plans & Gumroad doesn’t offer that at all. Moreover, if as a creator your audience is international then Graphy also offers you dynamic pricing. Graphy currently has 40,000+ creators who sell their courses, memberships and digital downloads.
Gumroad vs Sellfy
With a free trial of 14 days, Sellfy already looks like a good alternative to Gumroad. Starting in the same year as Gumroad, Sellfy holds an advantage over Gumroad as it does not require sellers to have a website to sell their products. There are various tools in terms of payment options, discounts and various others to help sellers create a proper online store within a less amount of time.
Sellfy also provides an email marketing tool that sellers can use to send emails and other automated messages to their customers for upsells and advertisement purposes. For those sellers without a website, Sellfy also provides a storefront along with providing an integration option for sellers that already have a website.
Gumroad vs Sendowl
Designed for conversion rate optimisation, Sendowl is one of the best e-commerce back-end platforms in the market. It links the value of a product with the conversion optimisation of the product. Sendowl, therefore, helps create a shopping cart that will help sellers track all the items they have sold along with the conversion that they bring from new customers.
Despite being well designed to increase conversion rates, a drawback of Sendowl is that it does not provide a storefront for its sellers. It requires integration with the seller’s website but provides integration options with all major web development services. Sendowl also provides cart abandonment support, and the data provided can help sellers get more sales by converting the abandoners into customers with constant emails along with options to upsell more merchandise to loyal and first-time customers alike.
Gumroad vs Podia
A better platform than Gumroad for selling products and services, Podia is a well-known e-commerce software. It is designed to make the purchasing experience of customers as impeccable as possible. The basic requirement of Podia is that the seller has a website where they sell their products. Once the website is integrated with Podia, sellers can target their audience and make the most out of a niche.
Podia also features an automated mail service and provides the opportunity to maintain an email list of your customers. That way, you can retarget after you have gone through the entire list. It also helps you to run and manage an automatic drip campaign. The data that is produced by Podia can be used to track the changes in two different items sites and can also be integrated with Google Analytics to get a better overview of the data produced by your website and the current sales that you are seeing.
Conclusion
Gumroad is an excellent software that has been built to allow more artists, freelancers, and other types of sellers that want to start slowly. It has an easy to use UI and also provides features that allow you to provide better customer care and improve the targeting of your products. There are various other templates of the checkout page that can be used with Gumroad. While Gumroad is designed to make selling easier for everybody, it does have some drawbacks. It does not accept all types of online payments, and it also does not provide features to A/B test various types of the sellers’ products.
There are various other alternatives that can be used instead of Gumroad, a few of which are Sellfy, Sendowl and Podia. Each of them provides certain features that are not available in Gumroad. But besides not having certain features, Gumroad is very useful and allows beginners to get done with their selling of products as quickly as possible. However, one major limitation of Gumroad is that it is biased towards sellers that have a physical product from their startups and not startups that provide a service or subscriptions. Overall, Gumroad is very good for beginners and can help them grow in the long term.
FAQs
- What are the important features of Gumroad?
The important features of Gumroad include customisable CSS templates of widgets and other objects, an automated email system, basic analytical data and an option to integrate it with the website of the seller.
- How is Sellfy different from Gumroad?
Sellfy provides an interface and a shop for sellers to list their products and hence does not require sellers to have a website also.
- Can Gumroad accept all cards and online payments?
Gumroad accepts all credit cards and debit cards and also supports online payments from PayPal and no other vendor. It uses a proprietary gateway to process payments done by customers securely.
- Is Gumroad free to use?
Gumroad is not free to use and requires the sellers to take a subscription or a plan in order to use all the features of the integration.
- Can Gumroad be used for services or products?
Gumroad can be used for all services and products but is better suited for consumer startups that produce tangible products. It is not optimised for sellers that offer services instead of products.
