5 "Hidden" Gumroad Features that Help Me Make Sales

It is a tough world out there. Lots of products are battling for attention and sales. One way to stand out is with personal touches and a unique, consistent brand image in both your product and your customer service. Here are five stories from my efforts as a creator that highlight small things that make a big difference.

Before we get started, I just want to take a moment to apologize to my former professors for disgracing my entire college by using my degree to write a listicle on the internet. But hey, sometimes you just have five things that the people need to know.

1. Buy a Product as a Gift

The other day, I got a really cool email. I won't share the email itself because private communication is like that, but the summary was:

Hey,

- I run a magazine.
- This magazine runs a contest where the prize is a book of the winner's choice.
- The winner ran up the stakes by asking for a copy of your book, which they heard about on a podcast.
- How can I buy it for them so that I get the receipt to run by accounting for a reimbursement, but the book itself gets sent to their email?

Best,
A cool customer from the Internet

So understandably I was stoked to receive this email, and fortunately Gumroad has the feature this customer needed. I sent them this help page which explains how to purchase a product on Gumroad for someone else (whether or not that person has a Gumroad account). A couple of hours later, the money was in the bank. As a bonus, I now have both of their email addresses in my customer database for devious schemes like sending free product updates. Great feature, great day.

2. Customer Support Docs

Hopefully everyone reading this is familiar with the extensive creator documentation that Gumroad publishes on https://help.gumroad.com. I now spend some of my time updating these docs and let me tell you they are exhaustive in more ways than one, if you catch my drift.

Just as lovingly maintained, but less often referenced, are the customer support docs at https://customers.gumroad.com. Gumroad made these docs for one reason: to reduce the amount of time and effort it takes for you to provide great customer support. In the previous story, I was able to explain to the customer exactly how to buy the book by pasting a single link into the email. Please take advantage of these resources to cut down on your customer support workload. Your customers are awesome and they deserve clear guides with product-use GIFs that take way too long to make but we make anyway.

3. Customer Sales CSV Export

The analytics page on Gumroad is pretty great and gives me the highlights I need at a glance. That said, I'm a trained programmer and I got an B+ in a Data Science class one time so sometimes I like to have my own deeper heart-to-heart conversations with my data over a nice candlelit iPython notebook. That is where the Customer Sales CSV Export feature comes in clutch.

All of the data about your sales is available for you to download. (Continuing my favorite theme, here's the help page.) You can find all sorts of interesting insights in this data, and these findings tend to make good tweets (19K views for 19 minutes of effort). So go digging, you never know what you'll find.

4. Receipt Customization

Any chance to talk to my customers is one that I happily take. Sure, most people are going to delete the receipt without reading it. But I like to leave something special for the ones who do peruse the bill.

Dear Reader,
Thanks for purchasing a copy of Writing for Software Developers! I put a ton of work into researching and writing this book and I hope it delivers the actionable insights that you are looking for.

If you find the book helpful, it would mean the world to me if you left a five-star review on Gumroad, Goodreads, or Twitter. If it didn't live up to your expectations, remember that I offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, just send me an email and I'll refund your purchase. If you have any questions or concerns, or you just want to tell me how awesome the book is, you can always reach me by email at [email protected].

Happy Writing,
Philip Kiely

People look at the receipt because they are either dedicated customers or unhappy with their purchase. I tell the dedicated ones to leave a review and remind the unhappy ones about my refunds. This helps me score positive reviews and avoid bad ones, and more importantly, lessen the risks of chargebacks by making it easy for my very few unhappy customers to get full refunds.

5. Customizing Product Pages

There is a concept in branding called "look and feel." Basically, it means a consistent and recognizable design, logo, and so forth. To me, it means asking myself if I've slapped the one good headshot I have on the profile image and set my accent color to #630000 (my color, you can't have it, chose your own, there are a bunch of them out there.) This is useful because it increases customer trust when you have a consistent brand and it makes it easier for people to identify your work.

You can upload a profile photo or keep a synced photo with Twitter or Facebook, but that's table stakes. Setting custom colors and custom CSS can help you match your brand book or just appease your artistic eye. I have a TODO in my system to give my profile and product pages a real custom CSS glow-up, so why don't you beat me to it by fixing up your products with a fresh look.

P.S. Help docs: https://help.gumroad.com/article/104-styling-your-product

6. API (Bonus!)

So clearly writing this much listicle has robbed me of my ability to count. Here's a bonus tip.

Gumroad has an API for power users and integrations, and if you've used the previous five tricks, congratulations, you're officially a power user. Once you've built a huge customer base with all of this customization, you can use the API for analytics and automation. Some of our biggest creators have built awesome custom dashboards on the API. I'll be writing more about how to use the Gumroad API in the future, but for now, as always, I'll link the docs. As signature moves go, linking the docs is not a terrible one. https://gumroad.com/api

Thanks for checking out these features. Small tweaks to your product page and support strategy in pursuit of consistent, personal branding can have a big impact on the overall customer experience. That's it for now, I'm all out of pro tips (but I'll never run out of [https://help.gumroad.com/](links to the docs)). Let's keep leveling up together and creating great things!