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Interesting. I've been a customer of theirs for ~2 years. It's been really great until a couple months ago. Then something seemed to change. Rather than just be
by mattjaynes 11y ago
Interesting. I've been a customer of theirs for ~2 years. It's been really great until a couple months ago. Then something seemed to change. Rather than just being a great payment provider, they seemed to change direction in order to become a "platform".
In emailing with Sahil about my concerns about Gumroad's new direction, he said "We want Gumroad to be the core channel for everything. We started with sales, and are moving into audience/list management."
He made it clear that they want me to import my audience lists to Gumroad and that they don't plan to support future integrations with CampaignMonitor, Mailchimp, etc. That makes sense, since those email platforms are now the competition I guess. It's bad news for me though - if I wanted to stay with Gumroad, I'd now have a project on my hands to move everything over to a (currently) much less powerful email platform.
I imagine this will work for many of their customers, but there are customers like myself that don't want to be pushed in this direction. I prefer to keep my audience management separate from my payment provider. I don't want my payment provider deciding that my customers are now their customers that they can now spam and upsell them in order to grow their platform. I'm not saying that that is Gumroad's plan - but I'm increasingly worried that it might be. Particularly if they get in a "desperate for growth" situation like this article hints at.
Again, they've been great for years and I really appreciate that. The new direction just seems too risky and not a good fit for folks like me who don't want their payment provider as the middle-man for communicating with their audience.
I guess there's an argument that they're not a payment provider, but a "sales platform" or something.
Currently I'm looking for a replacement payment provider (or whatever they should be called) to use. SendOwl looks promising. If you've used them, or have another provider you'd recommend, please let me know!
- angelbob 11y agoOof. I sell through Gumroad as well, and now I'm a lot more worried :-/ I had been using hand-rolled Stripe integration. They're not bad, but I really like the invoicing in Gumroad, and that they accept PayPal. They've been great while I've used them, though.
- SingAlong 11y agoI was part of GumRoad's recent 10-day challenge called Small Product Lab. I had this feeling that they were getting very good at their business. I'm about to finish up work on my ebook. I was to go with GumRoad. As per my research, they were THE best in terms of design, seller pricing and payment experience for end-users. The next best would be PulleyApp.com by BigCartel. Costs $6/month. Nowhere near Gumroad's percent-per-sale pricing. But BigCartel.com has been around for a long time (I remember they focussed on helping people sell tshirts online). PulleyApp is just their digital variant. The main downside of most GumRoad-alternatives is that if the product's sales go down or just die out. Unless seller has made huge amounts of profits (say $10k), then paying $6/month to keep it alive for previous customers might slowly leak out profits previously made. If anyone is to buy Gumroad, it should be Twitter (or Facebook?). They have the buy button and GumRoad would be a nice fit for small sellers.
- jasonglaspey 11y agoI would encourage you to look around before deciding on Pulley. While I haven't used them in a while, when I did I was really blown away by how little support, features, and service they provided. It felt very half-assed and very slow to grow. I emailed them once about something and they seemed annoyed that I'd have a feature request. I left immediately after that, and that's when I went to Gumroad. Been happy there since. However, should I launch something new, I'll definitely look at SendOwl
- SingAlong 11y agoThanks for tipping me off about PulleyApp ~! Didn't know that they were that bad at support :( I did checkout SendOwl after reading posts on this thread. They look like the best alternative if switching was required. Their video show a very slick & kickass experience for buyers (I tried the demo too). B/w it looks like Gumroad is sticking around. Going by Sahil's tweets. They do understand very well that a lot of people love Gumroad a LOT and depend on it.
- jerrell 11y agoI've been using SendOwl for a few years now to sell music education eBooks and albums directly through my website. I can't recommend it highly enough. Here are a few things I like: - It works 100% reliably, has never let me down - The checkout process is easy and neat from the customer's perspective - Supports PayPal and Stripe which is the ideal imho - Integrates with all popular email providers so you can do product-specific followup sequences with bonus gifts, etc. after purchase - Provides simple support for running an affiliate program - Support it absolutely superb: personal, swift and effective - They handled the EU VAT mess better than anyone else I saw - Monthly fees are very reasonable, I think I pay just $20-30/month - It's easy to issue refunds and/or re-issue download link emails if you need to, so customer support can be handled quickly for those things - You can create product bundles to support multiple products or discounted versions of products. After trying e-junkie and Clickbank before SendOwl, I can't tell you how much easier this feature alone made my life! - You can do upsells/cross-sells during (or after) checkout - They've been continually improving and extending the features offered in substantial ways - but without making a total mess of things. - The reporting/analytics is simple but effective. - In integrates effortlessly with e-commerce in Google Analytics so your sales (including dollar amounts) just show up in GA automatically. Okay, that turned out to be more than a few things. I love SendOwl.
- sampotts 11y agoSo you... work for them?
- PaDuerriel 11y agoUse Selz. Do everything Gumroad does/did but also plugs in stuff like Mailchimp, Aweber, Campain Monitor etc etc. Don't know anything about SendOul.