Last year Gumroad quadrupled their fees overnight and covertly enabled affiliate sales without consent. Now they’ve dumped PayPal and abandoned customer support, enabling a thief to get away with hundreds of dollars worth of my assets. Suffice to say, I need to get out before they tank themselves and everybody else with them.
Blender Market might seem like the obvious next choice, but they’re not a Merchant of Record (meaning I’d be required to collect and remit taxes for innumerous countries) [Edit: perhaps they are] - not to mention that their fees overtook even Gumroad’s recently… or their apparent proclivity for promoting generative AI.
The jury is still out on FAB, although some early reports are not encouraging.
According to my research, that leaves Paddle, which seems geared more towards software subscriptions; Payhip, which has the best fee structure, but are not a MoR (yet… (or so I’m told)); and Lemon Squeezy, which is the current frontrunner, unless I decide to risk waiting it out for Payhip.
Anyone have any other suggestions or insights on the above, apart from hiring someone to build me a store and maintain it (which I doubt would be affordable)?
i heard that blendermarket isnt doing well either about how much income the creators get from their product sales…
yeah fab seems good, but joining all stores in one place seems either an overkill or really good for small creators…
Also you can do Patreon, if i recall you dont have one …patreon can be both paid and free contents afaik, but as an individual asset type of store not really. and there is Ko-fi.
I wouldn’t recommend Patreon. They take a percentage of patron fees before they are added to your Patreon account, and when you transfer to your bank account they take another fee. It costs them nothing to send money to you. I think the goal is to obfuscate the fee structure.
I had to jump through hoops to cancel the page I started. Like most subscription services they purposely make it difficult to end. It’s so easy to start though…
Additionally Apple made a change recently where anyone who signs up for your Patreon through the IOS app, Apple gets a cut first so you get even less money.
Online marketplaces are getting worse. Hosting your own products seems like the way to go but that comes with its own caveats like marketing and getting traffic. A lot of backend Web interfaces are Content Management Systems so setup and maintenance is pretty straightforward.
Seriously? Wow, that’s a huge deal… I would be hesitant to use them bc of that and their overall stance on genai as you said, but having to handle VAT yourself is basically a killer.
Some sellers now report better sales than at the beginning, but it’s still very bad (both in terms of sales and the overall experience and bugs).
paypal support killing is also one reason I will jump ship
I might move my stuff to https://cubebrush.co
where I set up an store account a few years ago, but never found the time to proper setup my products. Unlike fab, setup is quite easy, once approved.
Yes they do. But one channel I do watch a lot of, actually also uses them and has done so for many years for there own site/store.
At this stage I have no reason to doubt that said person would run any of their sponsor ads, let alone use it themselves, unless they were really happy with the service and even the company behind it.
Ok, now that I thought about it a bit more… I don’t think it’s responsibility of sellers to re-emit VAT as Blender Market is acting as Merchant of Records (i.e., the transaction isn’t between buyer and creator, but between buyer and Blender Market). They even admit it themselves to being in that role here.
So… if anybody will have issues, it’s BM (and I kind of doubt that EU governments will go after them as they don’t have representation in EU?). It’s confusing…
Thanks for the input, I’ll look into those suggestions.
Yes I was just about to post exactly this - apparently they are a MoR, but they don’t handle VAT. So perhaps the onus is on them?
I’m not too concerned about that, as I don’t use Gumroad’s “Discover” feature anyway (which is another thing they forced on me after I had already disabled it ). It contributes little to traffic and gives them another 10% cut or so. I tried find out how much it is now, but it looks like their online help has disappeared as well! Madness…
Wouldn’t that still leave me with the burden of tax compliance etc though? Apparently the amount of work involved is why there are so few MoRs, and their fees are so much higher.
@MichaelBenDavid I checked out Flipped Normals a little while back, think their fees might have been higher than the other options. I’ll have another look.
It kind of is… and I think it’s on EU customers too. I just checked what my accountant did for my past purchases there: he made me paid extra VAT to our government on those purchases.
Are you sure about that? I think it only is if you ‘boost’ a product visibility in the discovery and you can set the % they get. The boosting setting is per product in the last tab (share) at the bottom of the page, ie:
It used to be a flat 10%, so they must have changed that more recently. I wonder what else they’ve changed without me knowing about it…
Come to think of it, is that even the same thing as Discover, or an additional service/fee on top of it? I can’t find out because, well, they took away the help.
I took a VERY quick look at squarespace’s site regarding taxes and it seems those tools are mainly geared for selling within the USA (where both seller and buyer are in the USA). Outside the US I’m not certain.
Would be nice if all this was made easier to encourage businesses to start and grow wherever they are.
That would make sense, as you’d only have to deal with tax compliance between US states. I could probably set up a store and only sell to Australians - that would make things a lot easier!
Very possible, or you’ll just have to ‘pay’ to have it done for you via much higher fees, etc. Either way, not something that can be avoided, well, not legally anyway.
Wouldn’t count on it. Back in the day our GST didn’t apply to anything bought and ‘shipped’ from overseas unless it’s value was $1000 or higher.
Now it technically applies to everything, no matter the value. I could say a lot more, but since it’s Tax and that makes it political, I won’t.
…patreon can be both paid and free contents afaik, but as an individual asset type of store not really. and there is Ko-fi.
). It contributes little to traffic and gives them another 10% cut or so. I tried find out how much it is now, but it looks like their online help has disappeared as well! 
Madness…
