Anyone have experience with Paddle, Payhip or similar?

jakob · 2020-04-01 09:48:54

I help someone out with their weebly site (I know 🙄) who is unable to give courses at the moment and would like to make his resources available as digital downloads for a nominal small fee. You can do that with weebly with a business account for 25€/month but he’s not likely to have the sales to make that worthwhile.

I made a proposal a while back for rebuilding the site with Textpattern but he prepaid Weebly for a year so we’re waiting for the annual billing period to expire before revisiting that option. Maybe this would be an option… I know Paypal is an option, but Paddle and co deal with the tax / EU-selling and invoicing all together. Payhip says they take a 5% fee for low-usage accounts (plus PayPal’s own fee). Paddle doesn’t say anything about prices. I’d love to know if someone has any experience with such services.

jakob · 2020-04-03 12:21:55

Maybe someone has another idea for selling one-off digital downloads where the payment handling, invoicing and VAT is outsourced to a service?

It wouldn’t have to be free, but the price and quantity involved is low, so high monthly costs would not make it worthwhile.

Pat64 · 2020-04-04 05:07:32

Hi Jakob ;)

There are plenty of scripts available: https://codecanyon.net/category/php-scripts?term=selling%20digital%20products

This one seems interesting with Stripe: https://halfdata.com/green-downloads/stripe/ (but without invoices neither VAT integration)

Or these two online services:

https://payhip.com/
https://getdpd.com

…Or some kind of features for this Bloke’s project: https://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=50529

Last edited by Pat64 (2020-04-04 05:08:00)

Destry · 2020-04-04 11:00:27

I think donation systems are becoming more meaningful that fixed-rate ‘stores’ for people that offer something but don’t expect to make a lot from it. In fact, they can even turn out better for the altruistic aspects, and the middle-man fees are often less.

There’s a growing number of these, which probably speaks to their success. I’d avoid Patreon, or whatever it’s called, which a lot of people on fedi complain about. I’ve heard good things about Liberapay’s model. But there are others I cant think of off hand. I’d like to see a list, though.

Some require recurring/monthly donations, even as low as 1 dollar, so maybe look for one that allows the one-off donation.

On the other hand, I think most if not all of them require donators having accounts too, and that could inhibit some potential donors.

But if a person needs money by providing some ongoing product (writing, art, education materials, etc), the donation system works.

colak · 2020-04-04 15:05:49

We never had to use money systems up to now but I found ko-fi interesting.

gaekwad · 2020-04-04 15:35:13

Flipping the logic on its head – any mileage in using an actual course provider as the platform? What’s the subject matter?

A ready-made audience is an attractive proposition, and I know many course providers are very popular at the moment.

bici · 2020-04-04 17:47:00

colak wrote #322481:

We never had to use money systems up to now but I found ko-fi interesting.

lovely! i have passed this on to a few students who are doing online school support.

jakob · 2020-04-04 21:54:15

Thanks for the feedback and good ideas.

I’m still most interested in the ad-hoc “reseller” variants as they remove the onus from the owner having to deal with invoicing, EU vat, data protection etc. In addition to pay hip and paddle, there’s also Gumroad. When the services transfer from within the EU also reduces fees at PayPal’s or Stripe’s end. None are great for low-cost items as the transaction fee eats up much more than the %age.

gaekwad wrote #322482:

Flipping the logic on its head – any mileage in using an actual course provider as the platform? What’s the subject matter?

A ready-made audience is an attractive proposition, and I know many course providers are very popular at the moment.

Also a great suggestion. In this case, they’re individual weekend/week courses for teachers on very specific aspects of Germain literature and “back in the real world” are closely tied to the locations in which those writers were protagonists in their day. Not sure that has such a wide reach.

Destry wrote #322479:

I think donation systems are becoming more meaningful …

colak wrote #322481:

We never had to use money systems up to now but I found ko-fi interesting.

I did suggest donation as well, because that can be put into weebly without any special business account requirements. Ko-fi is new to me and sounds like a possibility.

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#1 2020-04-01 09:48:54