Without a doubt, eCommerce platforms have made creating and running an online store easier for beginners without having to write a single line of code. In other words, they’re ready-made solutions for anyone eager to start selling goods or services online even without much experience.
Sellfy and Gumroad are just two of the many eCommerce platforms that allow you to sell stuff online without much effort on your part.
The feature-rich tools are designed to help you sell more items or services online and rake in profits. However, it may not be easy to determine which of the two you should go with.
This comparison review explains everything you need to know about Sellfy and Gumroad so you can make an informed decision as to which one to use for your business.
Sellfy vs Gumroad: Overview & How They Work
Sellfy
Sellfy is a simple, hosted eCommerce tool that’s designed for selling digital products, though you can also sell physical items.
The user-friendly platform allows you to build a fully-functioning store in just minutes, and enjoy a whole slew of built-in features for a smooth experience.
Founded in 2011, Sellfy was created to empower creators to earn from doing what they love, and so far boasts more than 270,000 creators, who have sold more than 1.2 million products.
If you create items like music, comics, ebooks, design assets, or other digital files, you can sell their goods by opening a storefront on the platform. In turn, Sellfy will host your products and handle payment processing as well as send downloaded emails and deliver products.
How Sellfy Works
To get started on Sellfy, there are a few steps you need to take as follows:
- Verify your email address so as to receive important alerts about your store, customer messages, sales, and other news.
- Customize your store to match your brand using the powerful customization tool
- Add a payment method for example setting up your PayPal email or configure Stripe to accept direct credit card payments so you won’t have to wait long for payments
- Upload only the type of products Sellfy allows (Read more about the disallowed products), write product descriptions, and make product images that will capture the audience’s attention
- Next, add pricing and then embed a Buy now button, your store page on your site, or a single product if you want
- Get your first sale or use tools such as email marketing, discounts, or retarget visitors of your store using Facebook and Google ads
Gumroad
Gumroad is also an online platform that lets you sell items to your customers directly without high fees, lower conversion rates, or other hassles of a marketplace.
The platform offers payment forms that you can share on your site or across the web, plus insights into who your target audience and customers are, how they find you, and how you can ensure they keep coming back.
If you have a physical or digital product that you want to sell directly on your site or social channels, you can use Gumroad and start getting paid for your work.
Gumroad is built with designers, musicians, writers, educators, filmmakers, and software developers among other creators who want to make and sell stuff online. You can do this through email newsletters, integrating it on your site, selling on social media, and using affiliates to help you sell.
How Gumroad Works
To start using Gumroad to make money as a digital creator, take these steps:
- Create an account with Gumroad
- Set up your payout information
- Create a product (see prohibited items) and upload all its associated files
- Publish your product
- Share the link with your target audience via social media, your site, and newsletter among other platforms. Once your followers or fans get your link, they’ll enter their payment details and receive the download link
Gumroad will verify your account and sales, after which you’ll receive your payouts (sales minus Gumroad fee) every Friday. If you sell physical products, Gumroad will process payouts on your behalf but you’ll be in charge of shipping to customers.
Gumroad vs Sellfy: Features
Sellfy
Products
Sellfy allows you to sell digital goods and print on demand products or earn recurrent revenue through subscriptions.
You can sell videos, ebooks, music, audio, AI or PSD files, and more, or print on demand items like mugs, hats, t-shirts, and hoodies.
The platform offers automatic printing services for incoming orders and delivers them to your customers. You can also create and sell digital subscription products and charge customers at different time intervals (weekly, monthly, and yearly), or offer video streaming on-demand and reduce risks such as piracy and download issues.
Customization
Sellfy allows you to build a beautiful customized storefront effortlessly by adding your logo, changing colors, and creating the layout to match your tastes or your brand.
You can also connect your domain to your store, add a shopping cart, and give a translated version of your store based on the customer’s location. Plus, you can create a mobile-optimized store and offer an easy, flawless checkout experience on different platforms.
Marketing
Sellfy allows you to market your products better and outrun competition to grow your business easily. You can use:
- Discount codes to engage customers and increase sales
- Email marketing to send product updates to your customers or collect newsletter subscribers.
- Upsell to users who go through checkout or increase order value
- Add social media tracking pixels for Facebook and Twitter to create ads for your own store and track their performance
Embed
If you want to sell items directly from your own site, social media, or other platforms, you can use:
- Buy now buttons, add them to your site and turn the pages into a store
- Product links to sell on social media, via SMS or direct communication
- Product cards to embed to your site and monetize your existing content
- Store embed to turn any site into a store by embedding your products into your store. You can also increase traffic to your store using Sellfy on cards and end screens in YouTube videos.
Payments
Sellfy offers reliable payments and world-class security to help you accept payments from across the globe and keep your customers and store safe.
You can use PayPal and Stripe to accept payments in over 200 countries or offer credit card payment options. Sellfy is also PCI-DSS-ready meaning buyers’ payment information is handled securely by trusted payment processors.
Another security feature is PDF stamping that adds buyers’ emails automatically to every page of the PDF product file for every customer to receive a uniquely marked file.
With the Limited Downloads feature, buyers won’t be able to share your product files online. This is done by issuing unique download links with limited attempts to download the files.
Gumroad
Storefront
If you want to tell your audience about yourself and what you do, Gumroad gives you a landing page you can personalize by changing some colors or using CSS to style whatever you want. You can embed a follow form on a website or blog by simply copying and pasting some lines of code.
Audience Builder
With this feature, you can create a profile for your product and build an audience for it. This means higher selling chances, and you can do this by importing your existing list of followers, contacts, customers, prospects, and more.
You can also engage with your audience through workflows or content and get guidance through the audience-building challenge and launch program.
Some of Gumroad’s audience building tools include:
- Bring your old friends, which let you import your email list and export customers or followers
- Update and share that allows you to deliver content and engage with audiences with posts and workflows
- Universal analytics that gives you access to what works and what could work better through powerful data
- If you need help, Gumroad has a 14-day product launch and five-day audience building challenges to help you get started with your storefront and audience
Selling digital products
To help you sell your digital products, Gumroad offers easy offer codes to give customers discounts, a pay-what-you-want feature that lets audiences pay what they wish, and license keys for selling software.
Plus, you can sell products and increase conversions by selling in your audience’s currency and allow buyers to get different versions of your digital product.
If you want, you can pick your own release dates – early or later – for products and customers cards will be verified but charged on the release date.
You can also offer your products for rent e.g. a film, which customers can watch within a certain period of time, and turn off product downloads using the PDF stamping and lightweight DRM feature.
Gumroad also lets you sell any size of physical items and buyers pay for shipping rates based on their location. You can mark packages as shipped and send your customers tracking numbers for updates.
Checkout
Give your audience a world-class checkout experience that’s easy and simple to use as they pay with any major credit card or PayPal. Your customers can also create accounts to store their content in one place, plus read, listen, and watch what they buy immediately after they buy it.
Memberships
Gumroad offers membership business features that let your customers pay for your work or all they can on a monthly, quarterly, biannual, or annual basis, giving you more revenue upfront.
You can use license keys to sell software by combining subscriptions and even give customers access to your content library as long as they’re subscribed.
Discover
Gumroad’s Discover feature helps you grow your audience and find more who are interested in and care about you and your creations.
The feature recommends your products to potential buyers and customers who browse the platform and any products they buy will be subject to an extra 10 percent fee even if they’ve bought from you before.
Insights, Data, and Reporting
Gumroad gives you access to powerful data so you can gain insights about your audience and sales for better success.
This way, you can learn what works and what doesn’t work. Through the insights, you can send customers updates via email about products they’ve bought or set up automatic workflows for your upsells, notes, and more.
Another feature, Consumption Analytics, is included that lets you see how customers interact with your work, so you can use this to build a loyal database.
You can also get live notifications on your phone through the Gumroad Dashboard app, and use the Analytics Sales dashboard to view sales, views, and conversions on your products and profile page, plus your customers’ referral sources.
Other dashboards include the Following dashboard and Consumption dashboard to help you track how many followers you have, their location, and see how they interact with your work.
Security
Gumroad prioritizes the security of its customers and creators. All credit card details are processed in an environment that meets PCI compliance and that’s certified by an independent author.
Every single purchase on the platform happens on an encrypted HTTP Secure connection and information on the customer is only stored if the customer creates an account for the purpose of making future purchases quickly.
Gumroad offers rentals and streaming only features, as well as PDF stamping for filmmakers.
Plus, download links that your customers use are secure and only expire after one use. However, before downloading again, verification is required and their computers are tagged only to verify their identity – especially if they use a different device from the first one they made a purchase with.
Soundscan reporting
If you have a product you want reported to Gumroad’s Soundscan, you need to provide the product URL, UPC code, release date, and reporting end date.
Sellfy vs Gumroad: Integrations
Sellfy
Sellfy integrates with other services and apps including:
- Google Analytics – to gain insight into traffic and website visitors
- Webhooks or HTTP push API – to track what’s happening on your store and get real-time data and updates
- Facebook Messenger Live Chat – for customers to interact directly with your business
- Patreon – which lets you give discounts and freebies to your patrons
- Zapier and Zapier filtering – to link apps to triggers based on your Sellfy account events and collect data about your product orders respectively
- Twitter Ads – to track and attribute conversions beyond the last link click
Gumroad
To help you enjoy what you love doing while making a living, Gumroad also joins forces with some plugins and sites, making selling on the platform simple and effective. To this end, Gumroad integrates with the following platforms:
- Zapier – for easier connection to other popular services like MailChimp, Infusionsoft, Aweber, and more
- Convertkit – for you to drip out email courses, tutorials, and create effective and simple opt-in forms
- Booklaunch – to help you prepare and launch an effective landing page for your book in just minutes
- Gumroad WP Plugin – which brings the Gumroad overlay to your WordPress site without writing any code
- Infusionsoft – which helps you organize leads, handle customer tags, track affiliates, and track lifetime value
- IFTTT – which connects to various web services to trigger various actions
- YouTube Annotations – from where you can link Gumroad to a YouTube video
- Sketchfab – for publishing, sharing, and embedding content online (includes Gumroad products)
- Drip – which is another email marketing tool that lets you deliver content and courses over time, use tagging, and create follow-up sequences
- Order Desk – for importing your Gumroad orders and submitting them to a fulfillment warehouse for shipment
- Pabbly Connect – for automating manual tasks using automated workflows
Gumroad vs Sellfy: Pricing
Sellfy
Sellfy offers simple pricing with no hidden costs or transaction fees in three plans:
- The Starter plan costs $19 per month and gives you benefits such as up to $10,000 sales, unlimited products, no transaction fee, discount codes, store customization, domain connection, advanced VAT, and tax settings
- The Business plan costs $39 per month and offers all the features in the Starter plan plus up to $50,000 in sales, product upselling, free migration, removal of Sellfy branding, and 10,000 email credits
- The Premium plan costs $89 per month and you get all the features in the Business plan plus up to $200,000 in sales per year, 50,000 email credits, and priority support
If you have more than $200,000 in sales per year, you can reach out to the Sellfy team for high volume seller offers.
Included in all plans are multiple payment options with instant payouts, selling physical/digital products or subscriptions, embeddable Buy Now buttons, shopping cart, mobile-optimized, and powerful analytics.
Free trials are available for each plan, but you can refer to the Sellfy pricing page for more details.
Gumroad
Gumroad has a free and paid plan with different benefits as follows:
- The Getting Started plan is free and is the default account you get when signing up. The free plan offers unlimited products, customer management, limited workflows and posts, real-time analytics, SD streaming, and a 5%+charge fee on sales.
- The Creator plan costs $10 per month for less than 1000 customers. You also get Gumroad branding removal, add your own CSS, use your own domain, unlimited HD streaming, unlimited workflows and posts, and 3.5%+30¢ per charge only.
You pay credit card and PayPal processing fees, file hosting costs, chargeback and refund fees, email server costs, and other associated fees.
If you’re an affiliate, there are no additional fees. See the Gumroad pricing page for more details.
Sellfy vs Gumroad: Similarities & Differences
| Sellfy | Gumroad | |
| Platform | Ecommerce | Ecommerce |
| Products | Physical and print on demand products | Digital goods (physical optional) |
| Unique features | Discount codes, add social media tracking pixels, upsell, email marketing, Product cards, Buy now buttons, Product links | Discover, Audience builder, Landing page builder, Security PCI-compliant, Soundscan reporting |
| Embeddable forms, buttons | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Sell downloads | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Sell on social media | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Clean checkout | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Digital file security | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Built-in email marketing | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Upselling feature | ✔️ | ❌ |
| Pricing | Starter plan $19/month Business plan $39/month Premium plan $89/month | Paid plan starts at $10/month |
| Mobile app | ✔️ (Android and iOS) | ✔️ (iOS) |
Gumroad vs Sellfy: Pros & Cons
Sellfy
Pros
- Includes online store hosting
- Neat, simple, user-friendly, and organized interface
- Native support for digital, subscription, and print on demand products
- Native upselling and email marketing feature
- Pay what you want feature
- Embeddable buy now button
- Mobile app
- Hassle-free, fast checkout
Cons
- No free plan
- Limited app integrations and customization options
- Products can’t be filtered or sorted
- Works best for digital products though you can sell physical ones
Gumroad
Pros
- Clean and customizable checkout page
- Easy to create discounts and coupons
- Basic but usable built-in affiliate center
- Easy to understand interface
- Free plan available
- Multiple integrations including through Zapier
- License keys can be generated to sell software items
Cons
- Mobile app limited to iOS devices
- No way to offer free or paid trials
- Lacks A/B testing tool
- VAT on checkout
- Panel may work or load slowly
Sellfy vs Gumroad: Which One Is Better For You?
Now that you know what each of these two platforms has to offer, it’s easier to pick out the one that will work for your business.
Besides having more powerful features, Sellfy has a better app design, allows you and your store to be found by interested buyers, and gives instant payouts when you sell.
While Gumroad is easy to use and has a decent amount of features, you still have to incur some costs that stack up, which may not be ideal if you’re a professional seller.
Both options are fighting quite close but for this round, we recommend going with Sellfy.
