Last beginning of October we got quite a scare. Gumroad.com, our payment processor and product storefront provider suddenly didn’t support PayPal payments any longer. In fact, PayPal withdrew from doing business with them.
Now, we have put quite some effort in diversification of our website as for the topics we cover and the type of eBooks and Video Workshops we offer (in order to spread the financial risks), but we didn’t provide for diversification in payment processing and/or storefront options.
We already work five years with Gumroad, a company that provides storage and a storefront for digital products and does the payment processing (against a fee, of course). By the way, payment processing involves taking and handling payments with debit and credit cards, PayPal, Google Pay (G-Pay), Apple Pay, and so on.
In fact, it’s not easy to find a suitable digital storefront provider that provides for your needs. In our case, we want one that allows a Pay What You Want pricing model, a shopping cart to be able to add multiple products for checkout, different payment options for our clients, video uploads, an easy checkout, a reasonable fee structure, and one that allows “adult content,” among other features we really want or need.
Of course, efficient and timely support is also very welcome, but unfortunately Gumroad has never been a real star in customer support (mind that we as a website are the direct customer of Gumroad, and only on a second plan our website visitors are). But Gumroad provided in most of our other needs, so we took their lack of support as a necessary burden.
As for our “adult content,” well it’s really not pornographic or obscene or something … it’s about genital and erotic massage modalities and sexual trauma release, or massage and bodywork that’s about resolving sexual disorders, and so on, but unfortunately the world is getting increasingly puritanical, and hence many storefront providers and payment processors don’t accept you selling “sexually oriented content” any longer. Gumroad does, in a kind of “stealthy way,” (like some other storefront providers) so that suits us well.
Anyway, Gumroad’s issue with PayPal forced us to think about diversification. We really want PayPal as a payment option for our customers, so we went looking for an additional storefront provider. We finally registered for Payhip.com (a UK business), which allows credit and debit card payments and PayPal, and of course also offers most of the functionality we need.
That sounds perhaps simple, but we needed to port and configure more than 65 product to the Payhip platform and in addition facilitate our website to support different storefront providers for each of our products. Payhip also allows “soft” adult content, so okay, we went for it. Nevertheless, PayPal and Stripe (Stripe is the cards payment processor in the background of storefront providers) are quite strict on sexually oriented stuff, so we also opted for yet another storefront provider who more explicitly excepts adult content, which is Itch.io.
It’s also important to realize that storefront providers either do customer payment processing via PayPal or Stripe for you and give you a weekly or monthly accumulated payout to your bank account (or to Paypal or Payoneer, or whatever they support doing a payout to, etc.) or facilitate direct customer payments to your own Paypal or Stripe account for each sale (taking an immediate fee for each sale). In the latter case you run somewhat more risks of a block on your own Stripe or Paypal account if you sell so-called adult content. So this also is a thing we need to be careful with.
Therefore, as it is now (and it was a lot of work, almost taking a month of daily efforts porting our products), we work with three different storefront providers (Gumroad, Payhip, and Itch) to facilitate different payment options and also enabling us to selling soft adult content. It’s been a drag (and it still is), but we don’t have other options. On the other hand, the Gumroad-PayPal feud forced us to spread the risks by paying more attention to diversification. All taken together, I feel it has been a good thing within a bad thing after all.
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