SendOwl vs Gumroad – Pros and Cons for Selling Courses Online

It can definitely be confusing to find an appropriate platform to sell your online courses on, especially if it’s your first time.

Luckily, there are online e-commerce platforms such as SendOwl and Gumroad that can host your online courses easily.

Both platforms are great to sell any type of digital product but we will analyze them to determine which one’s better to sell online courses.

Features	SendOwl	Gumroad
Pricing	4 stars	4 stars
User-Friendliness	3 stars	4 stars
Customizability	4 and a half stars	3 stars
Payout Process	4 stars	2 and a half stars

Let’s have a closer look at both platforms to figure out which one’s more suitable for you:

SendOwl Review – Affordable with Extensive Customization

SendOwl is a great platform to start your online course business as it allows you to quickly construct a one-stop shop for your students to gain access to all you have to offer.

It’s quite affordable and you can get your landing page set up in a matter of minutes. The great thing about SendOwl’s pricing is that it offers a flat monthly fee. 

This means you won’t have to pay more money to the platform if your online course business starts to become more profitable. 

SendOwl also has convenient integrations with all popular social media platforms so you can utilize them to market your online courses and lead potential customers to your landing page. 

You don’t have to worry about the setup of payment gateways and payment processors either as SendOwl handles all of that for you. 

You just need to utilize the Quick Sell feature which allows customers to quickly buy your most popular products. This reduces customer annoyance and increases sales. 

Pros	Cons
• Access to tools that make course creation easier • Affordable monthly fees • Extended integration with third-party marketing tools • Supports many currencies worldwide • Intuitive, simple interface	• No A/B testing options for different templates • No community forums

Benefits of SendOwl

The very first great thing about SendOwl is the way its pricing works. 

With many similar e-commerce platforms, you’re normally charged based on how popular your digital products are. This means that if you sell a ton of online courses every month, then you’ll have to pay a percentage fee based on that. 

This can prove to be quite expensive when your digital products start to gain traction. 

On the other hand, SendOwl does not price its services like this. Instead, they offer a flat, monthly fee according to whichever plan you choose. This means that no matter how popular your digital products get, you’ll still pay the same fee. 

In addition to this, SendOwl also offers a 30-day free trial that you can take advantage of to determine whether it’s the right platform for you or not. 

It also contains a great library of templates for your landing page as well as the checkout page that you can utilize so you don’t have to build your online course store from scratch. 

They are great to use as foundations that you can customize in order to make the landing page fit your personal branding. 

As mentioned earlier, you don’t have to worry about the setup of a payment gateway with SendOwl either. 

This is because they handle the payment gateway(s) as well as the payment processing so your customers have no trouble when they send you money to buy your online courses.

Factors to Consider Before you Decide to Buy SendOwl

Pricing

SendOwl’s pricing is fairly simple and also quite reasonable. 

They have four plans: The Basic, Standard, Business, and Premium plan. 

• Basic Plan (costs $9 per month) – Support for up to 10 products, customization, and 1GB storage. While this is okay since you’ll start off with only one online course, you may find that the 1 GB storage may hinder you when you upload course content.
• Standard Plan (costs $15 per month) – Support for up to 30 products, PDF stamping, customization and 3GB of storage. We feel this plan is perfect for new online course creators. 3 GB worth of storage is perfect to host your first online course.
• Business Plan (costs $24 per month) – Support for up to 100 products, upsells, video streaming, PDF stamping, customization and 5 GB of storage. You can go for this plan if you want to host more online courses on your page or if the single online course you have is bigger than 3 GB.
• Premium Plan – (costs $39 per month) – Support for up to 250 products, upsells, video streaming, PDF stamping, affiliates, multiple users, customization and 15 GB of storage. This is something you should only get when your business has become extremely popular and you plan to scale it up with a wide variety of courses. 

User-Friendliness

SendOwl does a great job of balancing functionality with ease of use. 

If you’re a novice that doesn’t know much about landing pages and galleries to showcase your online courses, SendOwl has many templates to choose from that you can just select. 

Once they’re selected, SendOwl provides you with easy drag-and-drop customization options that you can utilize to effectively build a storefront exactly to your liking. 

On the other hand, if you’re a veteran that requires more control, SendOwl has advanced features to accommodate you as well. 

Customizability

SendOwl can be used to create a storefront from scratch, from a provided template or if you have a pre-existing web page, you can even use that to create a sophisticated online store with SendOwl. 

While it’s mainly a platform that’s used to sell ebooks and other digital products, online courses can also easily be sold with SendOwl. 

SendOwl even has options to create your own affiliate program. Once your business starts to gain traction, you can definitely set up an affiliate program to attract more customers and to build a loyal base.

Payout Process

As mentioned earlier, the payments on SendOwl are typically processed by a popular payment gateway such as Paypal or Stripe. 

You get your money as soon as an online course is bought by a customer. This means you don’t have to wait till a certain day of the week until you receive your payout (as is the case with Gumroad). 

Customer Support

While SendOwl has many great resources to resolve issues such as instructional articles all of which are neatly organized in different categories, if you want hands-on support, you may be a bit disappointed. 

This is because SendOwl mainly provides customer support through emails and their response time can be called average, at best. 

They’re slow at responding to queries and if you run into an issue it could cause you to lose potential customers.

What Do the Customers Think?

People who have used SendOwl love how everything is so easy to set up with great integrations with social media and third-party marketing tools. 

People also love how affordable it is since they don’t have to pay more money once their online business starts to gain more customers. 

Some of the reviews we came across had this to say: 

Best Affordable Solution to Sell Digital Products

The best affordable solution to sell digital products (in this case, online courses) is SendOwl since it charges a flat, monthly fee for you to create a web page for your online courses. It sets up easy digital downloads as well as payment providers for your customers so they have no trouble accessing your courses.

Gumroad Review – Flexible and Easy to Use

Gumroad is a great e-commerce platform for selling digital products online even if you have no technical expertise related to web development. 

You can start to sell right away when you opt for a Gumroad account as it allows you to choose from pre-built designs or start from scratch. 

If you opt for a pre-built design, it has sophisticated customization options that you can utilize to tailor its look to match your personal brand. 

While it’s a platform that’s highly popular among artists, it can just as easily be used for selling digital products of any kind, including online courses.

Gumroad is a great option if you intend to sell online courses through a subscription/membership system. 

This is because it has sophisticated options to set up subscriptions and their payments. 

Pros	Cons
• Accepts both Paypal as well as credit and debit card payments • Extensive customization options • Free plan available (though its features may be inadequate for online course creators) • Easy to use • Easy options for creating discount codes and coupons	• Small knowledge base • Relatively expensive

Benefits of Gumroad

As a simple landing page builder with a checkout cart, Gumroad has many great benefits under its belt and as an online course creator, that is mainly what you’ll use Gumroad for. 

To start off, it has a clean and simple interface that is very easy to use. Even the more advanced options aren’t that difficult to get the hang of since the interface does a great job of keeping everything simple and easy to understand. 

The interface is never cluttered and any option you need to access is always one or two clicks away. 

Gumroad allows you to create your own website to host your online courses and sell them directly to customers. This is because you can get your own custom domain when you sign up for a Gumroad plan. 

Gumroad even has a free plan that you can take advantage of but as you’d expect, the features offered in this free plan are fairly limited. 

Factors to Consider Before you Decide to Buy Gumroad

Pricing

While the pricing of the standard creator plan itself is fairly cheap ($10 per month), the thing to worry about with Gumroad is its transaction fee. 

Unlike Sendowl, Gumroad charges transaction fees to accommodate payment processing costs every time a customer buys an online course from you. 

The transaction fee is 3.5% of your transaction plus 30 cents per charge.

This means that the more customers you have and the more sales you make, the more you’ll pay in transaction fees to Gumroad. 

User-Friendliness

In terms of ease of use, Gumroad is one of the sleekest and most intuitive tools we’ve used in a while. 

The interface is neatly designed with zero clutter and does not require you to have coding knowledge or technical expertise in web development to build an engaging website. 

You can easily create your own website for your online courses within the first session you have with Gumroad. 

Customizability

Gumroad has great customization options for both novices as well as veterans. 

With its creator plan (that costs $10 per month), it allows you to add your own CSS so that you can make your website according to whatever the aesthetic of your personal brand is. 

It also allows you to immediately sell digital goods with pre-built designs that are fully customizable. 

Similar to Sendowl, Gumroad also has the option to create an affiliate program to further market your online courses and extend their reach. 

An affiliate program is definitely something you can consider once you have the budget and customer base to support it. 

Payout Process

Unlike SendOwl which provides you with your money as soon as a customer buys from you, Gumroad provides you with your money on Friday every week. 

Thus, this is definitely something you’ll have to keep in mind before you opt for Gumroad: You’ll receive a bulk payment every Friday instead of receiving money as you sell each online course. 

A good thing about Gumroad in terms of payments is that it supports credit card payments along with Paypal and other forms of payments through payment gateways. 

Customer Support

Similar to SendOwl, Gumroad’s customer support lacks responsiveness. 

They don’t have a live chat option and you can only receive hands-on support via email which can get fairly slow. 

Their knowledge base is also fairly limited so if you run into an issue that you can’t fix on your own, you’d be completely reliant on their customer support which is not a great position to be in. 

Until they are able to fix your issue, you may go through many days where you would lose potential (or even existing) customers. 

What Do the Customers Think?

Gumroad’s ability to process debit and credit card payments is definitely a feature that has made it popular among its competitors. 

People also love how their free plan offers a nice way to test the service out and determine whether it’s something they want to pay money for or not. 

Here are some of the reviews we found online: 

Best e-Commerce Platform to Host Your Own Website

The best e-commerce platform to host your own website for online courses is Gumroad thanks to its ease of use and custom domain that’s provided to you as part of their standard creator plan. It accepts both debit and Paypal payments and makes it very easy for you to create engaging landing and checkout pages.

SendOwl vs Gumroad – Buyers’ Guide

When you choose a platform to host your online courses, things can get pretty confusing since there are a ton of factors that you have to take into account. 

It can be disastrous if you spend money on a pricing plan and spend a ton of time creating your landing page only to find out that the platform you chose does not have a critical feature that you need to sell online courses. 

That’s why we’ve made a list of the fundamental factors that you have to keep in mind when you choose a platform to host your first online course:

Pricing

Naturally, this is something that you have to keep in mind with pretty much every service or tool you get. 

When it comes to e-commerce platforms, we recommend that you stay under $20 per month when you choose a plan.

Another important thing you have to keep an eye out for is transaction fees. 

Many online course platforms charge a transaction fee every time a purchase is made for any of your digital downloads or digital goods. This means that the more popular your business gets, the more money you’ll have to pay to the platform. 

Thus, try to opt for a platform that does not charge a transaction fee with every payment. 

User-Friendliness

User-friendliness is something you need with every service or tool you use in your online course creation and selling journey. 

This is because you want the majority of your time and effort to be focused on the online course itself. 

You don’t want to spend too much of your time learning a specific tool or service. 

Thus, whatever platform you choose has to have an intuitive interface that is easy to use and easy to get the hang of quickly. 

Customizability

When you create an online business to sell courses, you will most likely have come up with a personal brand. 

Thus, it’s important that whatever platform you choose has extensive customization options so that you can tailor your landing page to match your personal brand. 

Payout Process

Some platforms pay you instantly whereas others pay you either weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly based on how many sales you made in that respective period. 

This is something you’ll have to consider and choose what suits you best. 

Then, based on that, you can choose the appropriate platform with the payout process you prefer. 

Customer Support

Customer support is crucial in a service such as an e-commerce platform where you host your online courses. 

This is because if you run into any issue, it may affect your sales as well as your relationships with your customers. You want issues such as these to be resolved as quickly as possible and for that, you need to have prompt responses from the customer support team. 

It’s definitely a bad idea to host your online course on a platform with lackluster customer support. This is because you may lose potential or even existing customers. 

Final Verdict

In the end, we have to go with SendOwl as our winner among the two. 

It’s extremely easy to use, it has a free trial, it’s highly affordable, and does not charge transaction fees. 

Furthermore, its customization options allow you to create landing and checkout pages that match exactly with whatever your personal brand’s aesthetic is. It allows you to sell digital goods within no time. 

Which platform do you think is better? Do you agree with us? Let us know in the comments below.