There are tons of different ways to sell products online. It can be hard to choose from digital marketplaces to website builders and eCommerce platforms, especially if you're selling digital products.
Luckily, some platforms specialize in helping you sell digital products online. Gumroad is one such example, but there's a zesty new option on the market worth checking out.
We've done the legwork for you and taken a close look at Lemon Squeezy – the new kid on the block for all digital vendors. Although this new platform's still expanding and releasing its core features, we still think it’s one to watch. So without further ado, here’s our Lemon Squeezy Review for 2021.
What is Lemon Squeezy?
Lemon Squeezy is brought to you by Make Lemonade, a small team of creators who brought their vision for digital product eCommerce to life. While this new eCommerce platform's still in its infancy, the team behind it isn't as green as you might think. In fact, they've been around for years.
The team is a quartet of developers and designers with a big vision for the future. Aside from Lemon Squeezy, they're “making lemonade” with:
- A new website builder
- A way to curate content on the web
- A studying productivity tool
- A landing page builder
..Aand much more, all of which are coming soon.
But, back to Lemon Squeezy. As an eCommerce solution for digital products, Lemon Squeezy specializes in facilitating the sale of digital downloads, subscriptions, memberships, software license keys, and online courses.
Lemon Squeezy Features
When we say Lemon Squeezy is new, we mean new. That’s why in our discussion of its features, we have to acknowledge that some functionalities are still in development and not yet available to the public. In fact, the platform’s website currently doesn’t have a feature section, and many details are still sealed away.
That said, what we do know is that there are many features to look forward to…
Create Your Online Store
Lemon Squeezy enables you to build your eCommerce site in just a few minutes, all without coding or design skills. The platform provides everything you need to create a fully customizable, SSL secure, and mobile-optimized website for you to start selling on.
While Version 1 of the design tool is currently live, the team will soon release a Lemon Squeezy website builder that takes this to a whole new level. Users can expect to see an intuitive drag-and-drop interface and a range of professionally designed templates.
Sell Digital Products – Without Limit
Unlike many online sales channels, Lemon Squeezy aims to enable you to sell any type of digital product.
This includes:
- Digital products and downloads: Easily sell any digital product imaginable worldwide – eBooks, templates, images, audio files, PDFs, PSDs, and much more. You can even give away digital products for free as lead magnets or adopt a pay-what-you-want pricing model.
- Subscriptions: Sell widgets, courses, or software and charge customers weekly, monthly, or annually. You can also charge one-time or recurring fees within the same product.
- Memberships: Customize a landing page, member access, and payment plans for your paid-for membership services.
- Online courses: Create and deliver online courses with complete control over enrollment, content delivery, and more.
- Software license keys: Lemon Squeezy automatically issues license keys with each sale so you can lean back and let the tool do the work for you while you retain the power to generate, activate, limit, and disable keys.
- Services: Selling services isn't an option often seen with competitor platforms like GumRoad. Lemon Squeezy vets companies to ensure their legitimacy and to avoid fraud and banned industry services.
With so much on offer, Lemon Squeezy might just become the perfect solution for holistic digital merchants offering a wide range of digital services and products.
Money Money Money
The Lemon Squeezy platform acts as a merchant of record for your store, meaning it keeps financial records for you and automatically calculates sales tax and EU VAT.
The platform also enables you to generate beautiful invoices with just a few clicks.
While we’re talking about money, it’s worth mentioning that Lemon Squeezy makes it easy to accept payments all around the world. In addition, the team's heavily invested in offering creators as many payment options as possible. As a result, Lemon Squeezy supports payouts in over 270 countries, with 79 bank payouts handled via Wise and the others via PayPal. In comparison, Gumroad only supports bank payouts in four countries!
Marketing
Like many other platforms, Lemon Squeezy recognizes that marketing your products is imperative to your success. So in the future, the platform has every intention of offering its users a complete marketing suite.
For one, this will include the ability to generate and use discount codes, offer lead magnets, and create bundles and upsells.
Lemon Squeezy also plans to offer an affiliate marketing platform so that you can work with your most loyal customers to generate more sales through referrals.
On top of that, you'll also get access to email marketing tools. You’ll be able to send your very own newsletters to connect with your audience and access analytics to launch intelligent data-driven campaigns. You'll also benefit from marketing automation. For example, you'll be able to send targeted drip campaigns triggered by purchase history, spending habits, the length of your relationship with the customer, and more.
Lastly, with the Juicy Plan, Lemon Squeezy intends to offer live chat so you can engage and support customers directly from your web pages.
Lemon Squeezy Review: Integrations
Right now, you can only integrate with email providers MailChimp and ConvertKit. However, once the Juicy plan launches (more on that in a sec), Lemon Squeezy will also integrate with Shopify and WordPress. This will enable you to sell digital products on your existing Shopify stores or WordPress websites.
Lemon Squeezy Pricing
Right now, two pricing plans are available:
Ecommerce: Free plan with no montly charges, just pay %5 + 50c for each transaction
Email marketing: Lemonsqueezy will only charge you monthly or annually for email marketing features are based on the total number of subscribers you have and are free for up to 500 subscribers.
Customer Support and Documentation
When it comes to customer support and documentation, there's not yet much to say. At the time of writing, Lemon Squeezy offers a creator’s guide on their website with helpful tips and tricks. But aside from messaging them on Twitter, there aren't any other support options.
Later down the line, Juicy Plan users will receive priority and personalized support to help them get up and running.
In terms of documentation, you can currently browse their API resources. But, unfortunately, its help center is a little hidden away, and it only holds 12 articles in the categories ‘Products’, ‘License Keys,’ and ‘Payments and Payouts.’
Lemon Squeezy's Pros and Cons
Last but not least, we’ll wrap up this review with a quick list of Lemon Squeezy’s advantages and disadvantages. Remember, the platform is still brand new, and in development, so many of these drawbacks may soon be ironed out. Nonetheless, here's our take on Lemon Squeezy's current pros and cons:
Pros 👍
- There's a free plan available. Here you’ll only pay for transaction costs. This is perfect for new merchants wanting to get started without the financial commitment. It also works out slightly cheaper than Gumroad’s free plan.
- Lemon Squeezy makes it easy to get paid no matter where you're based in the world. With payouts supported across over 270 countries, it promises to be a viable global platform for both you and your customers.
- You can sell a wide range of digital products, including software, online courses, and even services.
- You can offer customers a wide variety of payment plans, including pay-what-you-want, one-off, or recurring weekly, monthly, or annual payments.
- You can sell unlimited products.
- You benefit from unlimited file storage.
Cons 👎
- As we've already said, many features are still unreleased or in development. This includes the final website builder and email marketing functionality.
- Lots of functionality is locked behind the Juicy plan, which isn't yet accessible to the public. This means at the time of writing; you can’t access marketing automation, memberships, online courses, affiliate marketing, or live customer chat.
- Transaction fees remain present even with the paid-for plans. Although Lemon Squeezy's free plan offers slightly cheaper transaction fees than Gumroad, the Sweet program is looking less affordable in comparison.
- Lemon Squeezy's self-help documentation is still very scarce, so it's challenging to learn about any of the features in-depth. Also, the website generally doesn’t yet feature a lot of information, so for prospective users to truly get a sense of the platform, they need to sign up for free to find out.
Lemon Squeezy Review: Is Lemon Squeezy the Digital eCommerce Champion of the Future?
In short: It’s too early to tell.
For anyone selling digital products and services, Lemon Squeezy is an eCommerce platform worth watching closely.
Its main selling point is the sheer range of digital products you can sell. More specifically, the ability to sell software license keys and services makes it uniquely valuable to a new niche of entrepreneurs. As such, Lemon Squeezy could be the perfect solution for freelancers operating in a variety of industries – especially those looking to sell digital products while offering services and commissions, all in one space.
With a full marketing suite on the way consisting of marketing automation, email marketing tools, and an affiliate marketing platform, you'll find plenty to promote your store with. But, unfortunately, many of these features are unavailable right now, and it's difficult to say whether they'll bring anything new to the table in comparison to their competitors.
That said, when compared to similar services like GumRoad, Lemon Squeezy, with its multi-currency support and payouts across a vast range of countries, Lemon Squeezy certainly seems to be paving the way for more global sellers. As such, for non-US sellers, Lemon Squeezy might make it an attractive alternative.
Right now, we can probably only recommend Lemon Squeezy to new merchants. However, if you're happy to take your time growing your new store and you're not reliant on more advanced marketing features or support, Lemon Squeezy is worth considering. New sellers can try out the platform and start selling without any financial risk with the free plan. In contrast, established merchants might be hesitant to switch from other platforms and will likely find Lemon Squeezy's current suite of features lacking.
But, one thing we can say for sure:
LemonSqueezy’s development team brings a breath of fresh air into the eCommerce world and has a vision for great things to come. This makes the digital eCommerce platform one worth watching.
What are you looking for in a game-changing eCommerce platform for digital products? Let us know in the comments below what you’d like to see newcomers like Lemon Squeezy accomplish.
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