Payhip is an easy to use ecommerce platform for selling digital products. It is ideal for small-to-medium sized creators as you get to have a professional storefront for free and only pay 5% transaction fee when you make a sale. Payhip has robust features to sell digital downloads, online courses, coaching services, and memberships, but has limited features for selling physical products.
PROS
- Affordable cost and free plan available
- Build a fully customizable website using Payhip’s drag and drop store builder
- Takes care of EU & UK VAT
- Accepts credit card/PayPal
- Supports subscriptions and payment plans
- Ability to generate license keys for selling software products
- Clean and optimized checkout pages
- Can use Payhip’s embeddable checkout button on any websites
- Can easily create discounts and coupons
- Basic but workable affiliate center built-in
- Super easy to understand user-interface
- Can offer free trials for memberships/subscription products
CONS
- No support for Apple Pay or any cryptocurrencies
- Lacking native integrations (though you can use Zapier)
- No live chat or Facebook community
- Limited functionalities for selling physical products. No native integrations with shipping label services.
Founded in 2011, Payhip is one of the crowd favorites amongst small creators who sell digital products such as ebooks, design assets, printables, etc. Payhip provides an easy way to set up an online store with minimal investment. You need an afternoon to put something together. You don’t even have to pay anything upfront. All of this is perfect for someone with an existing audience who wants to see how easily they can start selling.
So let’s see how this thing stands up to the competition, shall we?
Getting Started With Payhip
Payhip has a helpful guide to get you started with their tool:
It’s a 3-step process that you can knock out in an afternoon. The guide covers the most important aspects of an e-commerce site – creating a product and store and setting up a way to get paid. You just click on one of the tasks still left to do, and you’ll be taken to that feature of Payhip.
It’s a streamlined system, making it easy for you to start with Payhip. The platform is pretty easy to use anyway, but this guide kicks things into second gear. If anything’s confusing at any time, you can also get in touch with Payhip support.
All of this is much easier than creating your own site or setting up an e-commerce section on your site with platforms like Wix or Weebly. So if you’re a beginner, you can give Payhip a try. Payhip’s store builder comes with a lot of pre-built sections that you can just drag-and-drop and customize. let’s say, for example, that you sell courses online. It’s easy to upload everything on Payhip and start sending people a single product page.
Definitely much easier than creating a site in WordPress, installing a learning management system, and customizing everything for weeks. But that’s just the thing. With a complex set-up, you have enough things TO customize in the first place. You can create a beautiful site and an engaging course area:
And this is only possible with WordPress and the best LMS. Using Payhip means forgoing some of that control.
Payhip Features
Payhip’s features focus on ecommerce for digital products. While the platform also supports selling of physical goods and order fulfillment, it doesn’t have complex functionalities relating to integrations with shipping labels. All of Payhip’s pricing plans (including their forever-free plan) comes with all the features that the platform has to offer.
So let’s go through its features and see what you get.
Products in Payhip
Creating products to sell with Payhip is part of the startup guide. To get it done, you’ll first need to pick a product type:
This is the same process, whether or not you’re doing it as part of the startup guide. Based on the product type you selected, you’ll be able to fill in some details about your product, like its name, price, or associated file:
This is a great system because it doesn’t overwhelm you with options. Yes, you can add .pdf files if you sell ebooks, and you can upload videos if you sell online courses. But you won’t have to choose between these options – you just give Payhip your product type, and you get the fields you need, nothing more. You can also upload multiple files if you need to.
Payhip instantly creates a product page with your store design once you’re done:
So if you’ve already created a store design that you’re comfortable with, you can quickly add a new product and start generating traffic to it almost instantly.
I like that you can sell both physical and digital products from the same Payhip account. Creating physical products can be a bit complicated, as you’ll need to worry about shipping. Still, the options are there, and you can always limit yourself to digital products if you don’t want to bother with inventory and the like.
File Management in Payhip
After you add digital products in Payhip, you’ll also have to upload corresponding files. This is really easy to do, and it’s also easy to sort through said files later:
You can use files you’ve uploaded for other digital products, rename/describe all files, and even make them unavailable at rollout. This is useful if you’re just trying out a page design and don’t want to sell outright. It’s also useful if you want to support pre-orders.
Managing digital downloads is not the biggest hurdle an e-commerce platform faces. But if you sell digital products, you’ll be happy to know the Payhip platform is an affordable solution even if you wave tons of digital downloads to manage.
Store Creation
Nothing beats building your e-commerce store from scratch. And that doesn’t mean coding it yourself. Even something like Gutenberg is better than a drag-and-drop builder like Payhip.
The reason is pretty simple – you need people to trust you if you want them to buy. And the best way to do that is with highly optimized sales pages that look unique, have social proof scattered everywhere, and tons of other elements to keep your audience’s mind at ease. It’s hard to do that with a subdomain and stock-standard checkout pages like the ones you’d create with Payhip.
Payhip has some limits. But for a fair Payhip review, I’ll clarify that it’s not a bad store builder. At least not for the price point and expectations you can have. It has the template drag-and-drop page builder mechanics, where you can choose from a set of pre-made sections:
And add them anywhere on your pages:
You can edit all elements live, with the results of your edits being displayed on the right:
Payhip has a lot of product-oriented sections, so it’s easy to insert your offers in a variety of ways on plenty of pages:
And if you want to write, you also get a (very limited) blog post editor outside of store creation:
This builder is decent for whipping up a small site quickly. But it’s not a long-term option, and it’s definitely not a good option for established businesses that want to inspire trust in their audience. Payhip is good for someone with a decent following on things like Instagram or Tik Tok. You can use it to test how well you can convert a budding audience.
The main issues I have with Payhip’s store editor are the limited customization and the live preview. You can’t edit advanced details about your page, like margins or padding. You also get very little control over how pre-made sections are displayed. Not to mention, the live preview is great, but it constantly takes up about 75% of your screen:
Not too user-friendly, IMO. So if you need a quick product page, Payhip’s store creator could come in handy. But for the most part, it’s limited.
Analytics And Data In Payhip
Payhip isn’t a data powerhouse. But it’s on par with most of its competitors regarding how you can collect, store, and process data. In the main analytics dashboard, you’ll get some information about your orders, and a decent overview of how your store is doing:
For more, you can open the Customers screen, where you’ll get a breakdown of your orders, subscribers, followers, and more:
You won’t get any advanced data here. But at least you have a database of your customers. You can easily hold onto these email addresses and use them later when you’re better established. Even selling 20 physical and digital products can teach you tons about your audience. And you only need the stuff to sell, Payhip, and a PayPal account.
If you want advanced analytics from Payhip, you can get that too. You can add your Google Tag or Facebook Pixel to your Payhip site:
So Analytics may not be extremely advanced in Payhip. But you can always rely on the powerhouse that is Google Analytics. That’s why Payhip is pretty much on-par with its competitors regarding data. Still not on par with creating your own website, sure. But this is the Payhip review, not the WordPress one, so let’s press on.
Marketing Tools
Payhip gives you many tools to promote your products in an engaging way and sell more. Some of these include coupons, social discounts, mailing lists, cross-selling, and more:
It’s not a guarantee you’ll start selling more if you set up a coupon. But these tools are available and will help you improve your conversion rate once you already have some people interested in your digital products.
Another cool thing is that you can set up affiliate marketing in Payhip:
You’ll have to pay affiliates yourself, and it’s not as complex as other link-tracking tools. But it’s very useful that it’s here, especially if you plan on selling your products on social media. You can just create a product page, send this link to an influencer in your niche, and start selling. In theory, at least.
In practice, I have a few problems with Payhip’s marketing tools. All of these options – the coupons, discounts, cross-sells – could have a MUCH BIGGER impact if you had better store creation. If you want inspiration for what that looks like, don’t forget to check out our successful affiliate site examples.
Getting Paid with Payhip
One of Payhip’s biggest selling propositions is the fact that it’s super easy to get paid – instant payments. You can use Paypal or Stripe to get your funds:
You also get decent options for invoicing, shipping, and even setting-up tax rates:
If you sell to European countries, you’ll be especially happy to know about Payhip’s automatic VAT handling.
EU VAT Tax Handling
By default, Payhip adds the applicable VAT to customers in the EU and UK, and they are also compliant to remit these VAT on your behalf. This means your revenue won’t fluctuate between customers, so it’s really handy. Even if it’s not a revolution in e-commerce.
If you want to manage your own tax rates and prices, you can always untick it:
But I don’t see why you would, especially if you’re just starting.
Other Features And Settings
When creating products, you get a lot of advanced options that can make your life easier:
For example, you can create license keys for each transaction. This takes a lot of headaches away if you’re selling software. Another cool option is to limit the number of times a product can sell, which is really useful if you’re trying to create scarcity. For more useful options, you can open the Account Settings and go to Advanced Settings:
Here you’ll get a ton of great options like:
- Watermarking PDFs
- Inventory notifications
- Setting up Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel
- Creating a thank you page
- Optimizing data collection for customers
- Customizing the invoices and email receipts you send
And if you feel like taking things to the next level, you can also open Payhip’s Developer options:
Here you’ll find an API key unique to your store and the option to set up a ping endpoint. This is useful if you want to set-up automation in your store. But if you’re at that point already, you might as well invest in your own site.
Support and Pricing
Payhip’s support is decent, especially thanks to its startup guide. I also love that you can use every single feature of Payhip 100% free. It’s as easy as opening up the store creator and starting to work.
For digital products such as online courses, coaching, and memberships, Payhip offers several pricing options including:
- One-time fee
- Subscription
- Payment plan
- Free
This allows you to offer various pricing options to cater to a variety of customers’ needs. Some of those pricing options also include advanced settings such as setting up free trial periods, charging a different rate for the initial subscription, etc.
Payhip charges 5% transaction fee per sale, which is much lower than its competitors such as Gumroad who charges 9% transaction fee per sale. Once you earn more than $1500-2000 per month, you can upgrade to Payhip’s monthly plans. The best part is that all the plans come with the exact same set of features (that is all of the features).
Conclusion: Payhip Review
Is Payhip the right platform for you? Despite being one of, if not the cheapest ecommerce and shopping cart solutions on the market, Payhip has a lot to offer. If you’re looking for a feature-rich cart to handle selling physical products, Payhip is NOT the right option for you. But if you’re looking to start an online business selling digital products like ebooks, online courses, coaching services, you can’t really go wrong with a forever-free Payhip plan to get your feet wet as a new online seller.
Payhip Review In 2023
Payhip is a decent store builder that can help you whip up a product page, and get it to viewers in no time. But while it is convenient, the lack of deep customization make it limited.
Price: Free
Price Currency: $
Application Category: Page Builder
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