Migrating from Gumroad to Easy Digital Downloads

A short description of the process of moving to a new e-commerce system and changing the pricing model.

When we began selling Chipmunk late 2016, we went with Gumroad since it was really easy to implement and had a great user buying experience.

Gumroad is the perfect tool if you’re selling a single product by a single seller. That was exactly the case for us, since we only had one simple WordPress product. Although, over time we’ve added more products into the family so it became hard to manage them through the Gumroad system.

Another major downside to this is there’s no way to make multiple purchases at once from the same seller. There’s no “cart” functionality. If someone wanted to buy 2 or 3 products, they’d need to make 2 or 3 separate purchases which was annoying and time consuming.

The other downside is the cost. Gumroad takes a 5% cut of your purchase plus a 25¢ transaction fee. The typical industry pricing is 2.9% + 30¢. Of course Gumroad does way more than just processing payments so its 5% is justified. But once your volume gets high enough, it’s worth it to save that extra 2%.

But most importantly, we wanted to make it easier for customers to purchase multiple items from us directly on our site. Our main goal is always the best and simplest buying experience.

We decided to switch to Easy Digital Downloads backed by Stripe to achieve this. I won’t go into technical details of the migration in this post but I’ll try to explain further what needed to be done for this to work.

New pricing model

We’ve been the fans of one-time purchases from the start so we sticked to it for a long time. It helped to keep things simple because we didn’t have to worry about licenses or subscriptions at all. That model proved unsustainable over the long time tho. With the increasing number of customers, it was hard to commit more and more time to do support and fix all of the issues reported.

That’s why we decided to move to the subscription model where you can buy the product with one year of free updates and support. After the year, you’ll have to renew the subscription in order to get new versions or premium support.

New pricing model

With the help of EDD the implementation of this was pretty easy. It comes with a bunch of plugins which helped us to manage the subscriptions properly. Every new purchase will generate the unique license key which you’ll have to activate in your product in order to receive updates and support.

Our old customers, who purchased Chipmunk through Gumroad will still have the lifetime updates and support they were promised. All they have to do is to migrate their Gumroad account to our new system.

Refreshing the landing page

Adding new system to the existing site obviously means some major changes in the front and back-end of the website. Since we needed to update the look of the landing page to make room for the new system, we’ve decided to push things a little further and do some small redesign.

New homepage intro

We’ve also redesigned the footer section to make it easier for you to find what you’re looking for. You can access the products, get help or sign up for the newsletter, all in one place.

New footer section

New versions of Chipmunk Theme and Members Add-on

In order to support the automatic updates we had to also implement proper code into the products. As you probably may imagine, that’s not an easy task so we had to make sure it was well-tested before the final release. In the following days we’ll be sending out the files which has to be updated manually for the last time. Next release will only be available through WP auto-updater so you should get a notification in WP Admin when the time comes.

Aside from the auto-updater change, there’s also a bunch of other helpful functionalities and bug fixes so make sure to read about all of them in our changelog.

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