Connecting PayPal directly to your Gumroad account
Due to changes in PayPal's policies, we are going to have to change how Gumroad helps creators collect payments via PayPal. Please read this post to understand the changes that are coming. We're not thrilled about this change (it was forced on us and we've had relatively little time to adapt and
gumroad.com
It's a bummer. The good news is Gumroad will still handle VAT and sales taxes if you connect PayPal.
Literally some good news. I like that now I can connect my PayPal account directly to Gumroad. It will help me to maximize my profit. I create clothes by myself. I sell all my clothes online so I use Paypal to get the money. I was paying to different sites to sell my clothes, and I was losing some money. Now I can connect my PayPal account with Gumroad so I can sell my products directly to the consumers. I like to use more than one Paypal account. Unfortunately, you can't make more than one verified Paypal account, so that is why I buy my accounts on cvv shop.
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https://cvvshop.to/
It's very disappointing that this was announced with basically no notice.
PayPal is no hero in this story, but my trust in Gumroad has been eroding over the last several months and the way this was handled is more concerning than the change itself.
Agreed, the tone of the blog post rubbed me the wrong way for whatever reason.
I've been experimenting with Paddle recently as a payment gateway alternative (they handle VAT too) for one of my products after I saw Framer and a few other well known digital products used it. Overall, I'm quickly becoming a fan. My only real negative feedback is that payouts are monthly rather than weekly with Gumroad, but other than that it's been great and support is responsive. I also had no adjustments to Pay by PayPal over there for whatever reason.
Hey, I wrote this post. This comment is OBO Philip, not Gumroad.
It is my first time doing a public announcement like this. I'd appreciate any tips on tone for whenever I have to write the next one.
It is my understanding that PayPal's policy applies to all sites like Gumroad, and if they haven't announced associated changes yet, they will have to in the future.
We announced literally as soon as the engineering work was done. I personally only found out about this a few days before you did, and we negotiated to get the deadline for creators extended as far as possible, giving a full month of notice to creators.
I'm personally running an experiment for the next few months to see if I even need PayPal, I'll be selling without it and seeing if there are any complaints.
I think the article was well written. Deep down, I was hoping for an alternative solution. From the tone of the piece, I did feel some comments brushed off the issue as no big deal, but for some creators, it may be bigger than the thought of initially. Anyway, just my thoughts.
Hey Philip, thanks for taking the time to respond.
Overall the announcement was great (especially now knowing it was your first), and for me personally, it was just "The Problem" section that I was referring to since it felt unnecessary (the problem was mentioned at the start) and didn't really add anything but additional fear (in my opinion). Also, the last point in that section about Creator X not having to worry about it so you shouldn't need to worry about didn't sit right either since I imagine there is some degree of variance between creators in terms of payment methods used (again, I just felt it didn't add much and was an attempt to down play the situation).
With that said, overall the announcement was done well and I think a lot of individuals are aware it mostly falls on PayPal. Not only that, the most important part was included as well: you provided us with solutions going forward. The only other thing I would maybe suggest is emphasizing more about what Gumroad is doing behind the scenes in these types of situations. For example, I had no idea Gumroad negotiated a longer deadline (unless I missed it in the article) for creators, but this is something that gives me more confidence and something I think should be mentioned.
Hope that helps a bit, keep up the great work!
Thanks for the detailed feedback. My initial approach was this "solution sandwich" where we say what we're doing, why we're doing it, and then discuss edge cases. I wrote "The problem" because I've read so many soulless announcements of huge changes in business policy, and even though this one is relatively minor in the long run it feels huge.
I'll make sure that in the future when I'm adding a personal voice to posts like this, I do it in a way that does not evoke unnecessary emotion and gives even greater transparency to the process that brought us to the announcement.