Payhip Review 2022: Best Free Platform to Sell Digital Downloads

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Co-founders Abs Farah and Kahin Farah launced Payhip in 2011 and since then has helped more than 130,000 people around the world to generate extra income selling products online.

It is a secure online e-commerce platform that enables entrepreneurs, bloggers, YouTubers and authors to sell digital products or memberships to their audience.

Payhip allows you to upload your digital products to your online store. You can either use the Payhip store to sell your products or embed the store directly on your site.

It offers a complete e-commerce solution to save your time and effort:

• It provides an easy checkout process to your customer to make payment
• Customer can make payment via PayPal or Stripe that allows you to make payment through internationally accepted cards like Visa, Mastercard, American Express and more
• As soon as a customer makes a payment, he/she can immediately download their files
• You get immediately paid for your sale. No minimum threshold to get payment.

However, this is not all.

I am going to reveal many more features and benefits of Payhip in the later section below.

Here are the main benefits on offer using Payhip platform to sell your products online.

Please remember that these benefits are applicable to all the paid plans and also the FREE FOREVER plan.

This means that there is absolutely no difference it terms of features and benefits between the paid plans and the free one.

List of benefits offered by Payhip:

Payhip offers the following plans:

1. Free Forever Plan: This is a completely free plan with no hidden fees. Payhip only charges you a flat 5% transaction fee on each sale.
2. Plus Plan: This is paid plan which will cost you $29/month and a flat 2% transaction fee on each sale.
3. Pro Plan: This plan will cost you $99/month. Under this plan, you’re not required to pay any transaction fee to Payhip.

Please note that you’re required to pay PayPal/Stripe charges which is applicable to free as well as paid plans.

To create your online store at Payhip, you need to sign up for the free plan.

Here is the step by step process to create your online store on Payhip.

Step 1: Create your free account by visiting this link – Payhip Free Forever Plan. You need to enter your email address and password to create your account.

Step 2: Enter your Name or Business Name that will be displayed on your online store. It will become your Payhip online store URL.

Now click on Get Started Selling.

It will launch the Payhip Dashboard where you can see the message – You’ve completed 25% of your store setup.

Here, you can add your digital products like eBook and set up the payment process to get paid for your eBook sale and more.

Step 3: In this step, you can add your digital product. To add a product, click on – Add your first product. Next, click on – Add a product and select Digital Product.

Step 4: Click on Upload product file, to add your product. For example, if you’re planning to sell an eBook, you need to select the same here.

Step 5: After uploading the file, set the price for the product and add a product image. You can create a product image in popular tool like Canva.

After adding the cover image, add a short description of your product.

This is how you can add your digital product in Payhip.

There are some additional advanced features that I will explained later in this article.

Step 6: After adding your product, you need to set up the payment details. To complete set up payment details, click on  – Setup checkout.

Payhip offers two payment solution – PayPal and Stripe. You need to enter your PayPal or Stripe account details to allow your customers to buy your product using any one of these payment processors. If you don’t have any of these accounts, you would have to create a new account.

Step 7: Now your online store is 75% completed. Move on to the next step to design your product store. From the Payhip Dashboard, select – Customize Store Design. A window will open, again select – Customize design.

Payhip Editor will launch where you can customize the look and feel of your store page. Below is a screenshot of a page that I have created for the sake of this tutorial.

When you’re satisfied with the look of your digital product store, hit the Publish button to make your store live.

That’s it. In 7 easy steps, you have now successfully created:

1. An online store,
2. Uploaded your digital product
3. Setup payment gateways – PayPal & Stripe, and 
4. Make the store live 

Now you can share your store URL with your audience and they will be able to buy your products from your Payhip store.

Payhip offers some advanced customization features to make your digital product secure and prevent it from illegal sharing.

To apply these advanced features, select Products under Payhip Dashboard and click on Edit.

Scroll down the page and you’ll see the Advanced Options.

Here you can enable the following features:

Upload a preview file for your customers. This is particularly useful when you want to give your users a free sample/preview of some of the pages of your eBook. May be 1 or 2 chapters to generate interest among your prospective customer to buy your eBook.

Limit the number of times this product can be sold. Use this option to sell only a fixed number of copies of your digital product. For example, if you want to sell only 100 copies of your product, type “100” in here.

Automatically subscribe customers to mailing list. This feature allows you to automatically add your customers to your email list. You can integrate Payhip with email tool like ConvertKit, Aweber, GetResponse and others.

Generate unique license keys for each sale of software. Use this option if you want your user to have unique license key for the software. This will help you prevent software piracy.

Payhip gives you more advanced features that you can set up in your account to keep your digital product secure, track your store visits under Google Analytics, Facebook pixels to track your ads, notifications and more.

To enable these advanced settings, go to your Account and select Settings. Now click on Advanced Settings.

You can enable the following settings:

• Protect your PDF files – Enable this setting to protect your content from piracy. Each page of your PDF will be stamped with the customer’s email address and their date of purchase.
• Email Notifications – Switch on or off email notifications every time a product is sold.
• Inventory Notifications – Get notified when your inventory number for a physical product falls below a certain number.
• Download Limit – Limit the number of times a customer can download the purchased product. It’s a another way to protect your content from piracy.
• Google Analytics – Enter your Google Analytics ID here for pageviews and e-commerce tracking.
• Facebook Pixel – Enter your Facebook pixel ID here to track your Facebook ads campaign performance.
• Store Units – Choose whether you’d like to use imperial or metric units for the weight of your physical products
• Redirect customers to a particular webpage when they successfully complete the checkout
• Display your own questions for customers to answer during checkout.
• Email Receipt – Add a custom message to the email receipts that your customers receive.

One of the best features that I am going to reveal in this Payhip review is this – Marketing. To get started, log in to your Payhip account and click on Marketing (you can see it at the top of your screen).

Marketing features of Payhip can give a huge boost to your product sales.

Here you can create coupons, offer social discounts, allow people to join as affiliates, set up your mailing list and more.

Let’s check them out below.

Coupons. You can use this option to offer coupon codes with discount to your buyers. Coupon code is automatically generated and you can set whether the coupon code is applicable for all products or any specific product only. You can also set – no of times that coupon be used and coupon expiry date.

Social Discounts. Payhip offers an easy way to promote your digital products on social media pages to gain more visibility and sales. You can create social discounts to offer discount to anyone who share your product on Facebook.

When somebody visits your product page they’ll see the option to “Share and get X% off”. If you have set 25% discount, the price will automatically reduced by 25% when anyone share your product on Facebook.

Affiliates. You can allow people to sign up as an affiliate and promote your store that can boost your sales and promotion efforts. You can select the products you’d like the affiliate to promote and set the percentage of sale that they’ll receive.

Mailing Lists. You can setup your mailing lists with popular email service providers so that customers can be automatically subscribed. Currently, Payhip has integrated the following email marketing tools – Aweber, Campaign Monitor, ConvertKit, Drip, Email Octopus, GetResponse and others.

Cross Selling. If you have multiple products, you can cross sell your products. This means that when a customer add an item to their cart, you can offer other products at discounts (for example, buy one, get another at half price).

This will result in increasing the average value of the cart for your customers.

Some popular alternatives of Payhip are:

• Sellfy
• Easy Digital Downloads
• Gumroad
• Shopify
• Opencart

In this Payhip review, I have tried to cover and share every details of this popular platform. It is great free solution to sell your digital products online. 

It offers one of the easiest platform to:

• Setup your online store,
• Add your digital product,
• Set up Payment Details – PayPal/Stripe
• Offer discounts, social discounts and referral discounts to customers
• Build your mailing list
• Allow people to join as affiliates
• Cross sell multiple products
• and much more

Sharing is Caring! If you have liked my effort in creating this review of Payhip, please take a moment to share it on social media websites. The sharing link is given below.

Join Payhip today by signing up for the Free Forever plan (no monthly fees)