Anybody sell in Gumroad before?
Anybody ever sold a software product on Gumroad before? How has your experience been? I'm looking to possibly use Gumroad to distribute my IDE plugin Spellbook as the current marketplace I'm using is kind of restrictive with the license models they provide for selling products. I'd like to move away from subscriptions and towards a one time fee perpetual license and Gumroad appears able to support that.
Also, do you have any experience with trial periods for products sold on Gumroad? It appears that maybe I can just upload a specific trial version of my product and then restrict the number of usages of the generated license, but just wondered if maybe there was a way to restrict it by number of days.
Any feedback about using Gumroad to sell would be appreciated.
Thanks all!
Your current solution (JetBrains plugin marketplace) is an established marketplace that also gives you some free traffic of buyers who are ready to pay.
You probably don't want to lose this traffic so you should keep both the existing solution together and your new one.
Selling digital goods is different than physical goods. This is why platforms like Gumroad exist, which are build and tuned around an optimized experience of buying digital goods. Also, their back office is optimized to work with digital goods (e.g you do not need the size-color variation, or the stock quantity, but you might need digital delivery from their servers).
At an additional refinement level, selling software vs static digital assets (e.g. PDFs, music, graphics) also has its differences. For example, a software product is constantly releasing new versions while a digital asset has usually one release (or only a few editions in the case of books).
Therefore, you might want to see the platforms that are specialized primary for software sales (paddle, 2checkout, FastSpring, to name a few).
I too was on a similar search and I have published on my website my shortlist of platforms for selling software. You can visit it if you what to see more options.
https://www.starmessagesoftware.com/e-commerce-software-publishers
I've sold about $80k worth of PDFs via gumroad and it basically does what it says on the tin. It doesn't drive meaningful traffic, so you need to provide your own.
They offer a couple different options for checkout (model, widget, page). The support staff and founder are responsive. The customer analytics, invoicing, refunds, and tax situation are all handled well. Documentation is good. The fees are low and transparent. They deal with chargebacks very well.
As a minor negative, some percentage of my gumroad customers (1-3%?) end up having trouble with the purchase confirmation email and I need to send them their stuff directly. Not sure if it's a spam filter or simply an email UX issue. It's infrequent enough that it doesn't really bother me.
I haven't used their subscriptions or trials though, so I can't speak toward that.
Cool. Sounds like your experience has been very good. This is good info. I'm not looking to use Gumroad to sell subscriptions just one time fee licenses to a software product. Thanks for your review!
Sold only PDFs, but I would like to see others dealing with Software product. I remember there was this licence generator provided on Gumroad, but even they are saying it's only that, you need to provide a mechanism to validate/invalidate those licences
Gumroad is great for both authors and buyers. Simple interface, easy to use, low fees.
I switched to Gumroad from CodeCanyon and I'm very happy with it so far. Sold for about $2000 in 3 months without any major issues, just one chareback.
Which marketplace are you currently using to sell products?
Because my plugin is specifically for JetBrains IDEs at the moment, I'm using the JetBrains plugin marketplace for distro. They only offer subscription license models though, which I've come to realize isn't the best model for selling this particular plugin.
Ah gotcha! I thought I'd ask since I'm building Memberstack which does have the ability to add both one-time & recurring payments on your own website so you can keep the experience/checkout process on your own domain. Feel free to email me if you have questions.
Hmm interesting. I will definitely check this out. Thanks.
Maybe some opinions from trustpilot might help?
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/gumroad.com
Thanks for the link. It's interesting. Very mixed reviews here. It appears that most people who have a problem with Gumroad have the same problem - the accounts get flagged for fraud, suspended, and any sales in their account are refunded. Gumroad seems pretty transparent about this however. Basically if their algorithms flag an account as fraud, it's out of their hands as to the action taken. They have to suspend the account to appease their banking partners. I guess I can understand that. I guess my only concern would be how exactly does ones account get flagged as fraudulent and is there anything you can do as a seller to make sure that doesn't happen. Thanks for the link again. This was helpful.