Hey all,
Being from Israel, it’s not easy to find a good payment gateway that works with services like DPD or SendOwl.
Gumroad’s great in that it does the actual payments and transfers it to the seller.
They’re pricey because of that, but that’s something I can live with before I have enough sales to warrant a different approach.
Is there anything like Gumroad that I should be checking into?
Thanks!
@mijustin Not being able to use Stripe means I can’t use most services, but would also like having a gumroad-like middleman to handle tax, EU VAT, etc. For example, withcoach.com doesn’t allow me to charge customers with a credit card, only PayPal, and I’ve got to take care of EU VAT myself.
Not optimal for me.
Would Paddle work for you? They seem to do a good job of handling EU VAT and you don’t need a Stripe account to use Paddle.
Gumroad have been handling EU Vat for more than a year now.
@SteveMcLeod Paddle seems very interesting, thanks! 
@shantnu I know, I was wondering if there are other alternatives I should consider with the same capabilities.
If you try Paddle, please let us know how it goes. For my new project, I’m currently deciding between using Stripe (and manually coding up the EU VAT stuff) and using Paddle, and letting them take care of it. Your experience will help me decide!
Fastspring.com is another alternative, similar to paddle. One thing fastspring offers is to send companies in the US invoices, which they can pay by bank transfer. They also handle VAT etc.
I see stripe as cheaper per payment, but once you take into account the extra cost and hassle of invoicing and tax declarations with VAT, fastspring and paddle look quite good.
@SteveMcLeod : Don’t try to handcode EU VAT, there are so many exceptions (see Spain’s islands with special VAT regime etc.). Use something like stripe + quaderno.io or fastspring / paddle.
Fastspring is terrible, as I wrote here.
Paddle is good, but Gumroad is the best. Not found anything as easy to use.
I like FastSpring and used to use it with Poker Copilot. However I stopped due to FastSpring not letting me denominate my account in euros. As most of my customers are in the euro zone, and I’m in the euro zone, having to change funds from EUR -> USD -> EUR was a major leak in my finances. (I wouldn’t advise most people to worry about such a thing, but as my product is mature and sales are not really growing that much, it was worth my time fixing such leaks.)
I changed to Stripe (which denominates my account in EUR), implemented the EU VAT stuff myself (not a good idea, I know, I know…), and now net significantly more money.
Another advantage over Stripe compared to FastSpring is that as I could hand-roll my own payment page, I could get rid of a lot of the extraneous fields FastSpring has as part of a generic solution. The simpler the payment form, the more sales completed, goes the logic.
@shantnu I can’t comment on your experience, but my experience is good. They now have a more minimal checkout form in addition to the full length one.
However the main advantage for me compared to gumroad is: Fastspring allows your EU customers to put in their company VAT-id in the invoice. That means they don’t have to pay the EU VAT. This is not possible for gumroad, and is unacceptable for B2B in my view.
@avivby I recently moved away from Gumroad myself. Finding a new solution was a painful and frustrating process. I ultimately settled on the Easy Digital Downloads WordPress plugin.
Hey guys just saw this and thought I’d jump in as the founder of one of the products mentioned (SendOwl). Accepting card payments outside of Stripe realm is a pain at moment. If you have a local payment gateway in Israel then I’d recommend going with Shopify who have a cut down version now that just does payment buttons. They integrate with a lot of gateways so if you’ve got one already I’d expect you’d be covered there.
Re EU VAT most companies take two approaches 1) provide tools so you collect the right amount but you then have to submit/pay yourself (like SendOwl) 2) collect + pay for you. The later ones have to be the legal seller of the item though so you’ll end up paying a percentage fee rather than a fixed monthly amount.
FWIW there’s a threshold coming in on EU VAT expected to be in a years time: https://www.sendowl.com/blog/eu-vat-update-dec-2016.html
Ex Gumroad user. I’ve made through them over 20K USD but had to move away - horrible support, slow product development.
Hi Unstoppable; curious what you switched to. I also have been frustrated with Gumroad. I have a video series on there and I think a no-brainer functionality would be the ability to set one main purchase price and also a recurring (small) yearly/monthly fee to retain access to the library. I suggested this to the owner and he said they weren’t able to work on that at all. Now I’m considering finding another solution.
Anyone have any recommendations for platforms for selling a library of digital content (video or otherwise)? I really like Gumroad in all other ways but this lack of what seems to me a pretty no-brainer and easy implementation is bothering me.
Have you looked at SendOwl? They support subscriptions so you can charge a regular fee for access to your content, as well as one-off sales. You can also let customers stream video, which can be a good option, rather just downloading it. They’ve also launched one-click upsells, a cart abandoment feature and lots of payment options (like Apple Pay, Bitcoin and EU payment methods) in the last year or so.
I guess the main difference with Gumroad, features aside, is that SendOwl charge a monthly fee but if you’re making between $200-$300 per month, or plan to scale, you’d be better off with a monthly fee anyway. The % fee can seem good when you’re starting out but it gets a bit putative when you’re making a bit more money. So, depends on your business plans!
Best yet though, SendOwl are bootstrapped so aren’t going to have the problems that have messed up Gumroad, poor guys.
as of 2020-1-5, instabuck is 404 now
It seems they have been sold.