GumroadReviews of gumroad.com

Response from GumroadJul 22, 2020

Glad you're enjoying us! As we explain at https://help.gumroad.com/article/79-gumroad-discover We have a variety of requirements in place on the Discover marketplace because if we don't, it quickly gets filled with spam products. The ease with which anyone can make a product on Gumroad does not, unfortunately, lend itself to a lot of valid products or helpful search results if we don't have filters in place. Also, we've always found that creators who sell directly to their audiences make far more money than those who depend on a marketplace model to generate their sales. The Discover feature is nice to have, but it'll rarely make more than 5% of your total sales.

Response from GumroadJul 22, 2020

Happy to clarify the situation! We are quite clear in our emails that when you as a customer issue a dispute with PayPal, Paypal takes the sales money out of our accounts, meaning the sale is effectively refunded. Thus, unless you cancel the dispute: 1) We cannot issue a refund on our end 2) We cannot provide you with a functioning download link We tried to convey this information to Steve in the voluminous correspondence we shared with him, but he insisted on receiving the download link, or the refund, neither of which we could accommodate given the above situation. As he says in his review - we provided him with his receipt and (non-functioning) download link, informing him that it wouldn't work unless he cancelled the dispute. He didn't cancel the dispute. We clarified this point in numerous follow up emails, only to be met with more and more aggressive responses. I'm not sure what company burned Steve in the past, leading him to believe that we were trying to steal his money, but I guarantee that we were not intending to get into a standoff like this when he first wrote in. Unfortunately, since we were unable to meet his exact demands to the dispute, this is where we find ourselves. To be sure, customers issue disputes against us in PayPal all the time. We ask them to cancel their disputes all the time. When they do, we refund them or get them download links. If we were actively trying to defraud customers on PayPal through an extremely transparent and time-intensive scam like this, PayPal would have kicked us off of their platform by now. Since we are still processing thousands of dollars through PayPal every day, and have been doing so since 2015, it is safe to assume that this is not the case.

Response from GumroadJul 21, 2020

Happy to clarify! It sounds like your account was suspended. We explain our policies about suspension here: https://help.gumroad.com/article/160-suspension

Response from GumroadJul 15, 2020

Hi Apologies for any confusion. This ham-fisted messaging was written by PayPal and lacks any nuance or explanation for what their policy actually entails. We actually address this here: https://customers.gumroad.com/article/251-recurring-paypal-payments Here's what their email should have said: "IF you buy a product on Gumroad using PayPal... AND you create an account on Gumroad after that purchase... AND you save your PayPal information in Gumroad... AND you later log into your Gumroad account and go to buy another product on Gumroad... THEN You would not have to log into PayPal to buy this product. It would basically be a one-click purchase." So really, it's the same thing as creating an account on Amazon and saving your payment information on there. There are no unauthorized recurring payments, the only "recurring" payment would be if you were to buy more things on Gumroad using your PayPal. If you are unhappy about the messaging, I implore you to write to PayPal's support staff to tell them about it.

Response from GumroadJun 30, 2020

Hi Lailah I totally understand the hesitancy to create an account with us if you think we're not going to pay you. I'm not sure why this couldn't have been solved with an email to [email protected], or what qualified us for TWO stars, but ok! Happy to explain here: Here's why our ratings on here are, well, a bit rough: 1) Online fraud is a much more widespread problem than most people think, and we encounter a ton of it, since our site's entire purpose is to process sales. 2) We are a small company, and have to answer to banking partners whose policies we cannot skirt. We are under strict obligations to suspend and refund the sales of any accounts that show signs of fraud or violate our TOS 3) Literally anyone can leave a review on here, and a lot of fraudsters, or people who were violating our TOS, believe they should be getting paid (we can't pay them, as per #2). They’ve have very short tempers and know that negative reviews of us here an on the BBB website can hurt us In all, we have over 50,000 users, and we have to suspend maybe ~10-15/week, depending on how many accounts fraudsters create. They often create 3+ just to see which ones survive, because they are testing out our systems. The only reason someone would not get paid by us is if: A) They are actively violating our TOS B) Their accounts show signs of fraud C) Their account has not been reviewed by our risk team yet. That is, they *will* be getting paid but we have not cleared them for a payout yet We explain risk reviews and the process of getting paid by us here: https://help.gumroad.com/article/13-getting-paid

Response from GumroadJul 21, 2020

Happy to clarify! Ben took this product: https://www.coursehero.com/file/41098460/Paypalguidepdf/ and uploaded it to our servers, copied/pasted the the entire course description, and then sold the files to people who were using stolen credit cards and compromised PayPal accounts to buy them. In effect, he was attempting to launder money through our site. When confronted with this in an email thread, he avoided the subject and tried to tell us how we were scammers, then left this review. Hi Ben! If you read through https://help.gumroad.com/article/160-suspension and https://help.gumroad.com/article/161-what-gumroad-considers-fraud we explain our policies on fraud and why we suspend/refund accounts. In your case, you were: 1) Selling products that you didn't create (i.e. committing fraud), and 2) Your sales showed extremely strong signs of being fraudulent Thus, we had to suspend your account and refund your sales to the cards/PayPal accounts used to buy those products.

Response from GumroadJun 19, 2020

While I'm not really sure what I'm meant to do with this sentence, here are some resources that might help! 1) https://help.gumroad.com/article/13-getting-paid 2) https://help.gumroad.com/article/160-suspension