Payhip Review: Quick Summary

If you are looking for a simple, easy-to-use platform to start selling your digital products online, then Payhip is definitely an option worth considering, especially as you can get started for free.

It offers a good selection of features, allows you to sell a number of different product types (including physical products) and includes a decent website builder or you can embed your products into an existing site if you want.

The two main downsides we found with Payhip were the limited payment options (they currently only offer PayPal and Stripe) and the lack of SEO tools, which means getting organic traffic to your Payhip site might be a challenge but other than that, we were very impressed with Payhip.

• Easy-to-use admin area
• Multiple different Digital Product types on one platform
• Free plan
• Decent website builder
• Can be embedded on other sites

• Limited payment gateways
• Lack of SEO t

Payhip Features

Ecommerce Tools

Payhip is constantly adding and updating features to the platform and while its main focus is on Digital Products, such as downloads, online course and memberships, they also offer the ability to sell physical products via the platforms.

And one of the great features of Payhip is that every plan includes every feature that they offer, including:

• Unlimited Items – list as many items you want on any plan
• Multiple Items Types – sell digital downloads, online courses, memberships and physical products
• Customer Reviews – let customers leave reviews on your products
• Embed – embed a full product listing or buy button on other websites
• Use Your Own Domain – you can use your own custom domain name with any plan

They also have features that are unique to each product type and we’ve listed these below:

Digital Downloads

• 5GB limit per file
• Supports different content types, such as eBooks, software & videos
• Instant downloads
• Download limits
• PDF stamping
• Auto-generated keys for Software licenses

Online Courses

• Different lesson types such as videos, text, quizzes, assignments, surveys and downloads
• Drip feed content to your students
• Custom pricing such as one-off, subscription, payment plans or even free
• Pre-orders, let customers pre-order your course before launch
• Student accounts
• Commenting system on your lessons
• Free preview, gives a taste of your course to potential students

Memberships

• Sell multiple plans, with exclusive content for members on certain plans
• Share updates and content with your members
• Set custom billing intervals such as weekly, monthly or whatever you want
• Member management, they can manage their own accounts such as changing plans, updating payment details or cancel their membership
• Free trials, let prospective members try it out before committing to a paid plan

Payhip Marketing & SEO Tools

To generate sales on your ecommerce website, you are going to need a selection of tools to not only get customers to your site but also encourage them to buy, so what does Payhip offer?

• Affiliate System – easily allow affiliate partners to not only sign up but also promote your products
• Coupons – offers discounts and special offers in the form of coupons
• Social Discounts – give discounts to customers who tweet and like your posts
• Mailing Lists – easily sync your customers with popular email marketing platforms such as MailChimp and CampaignMonitor
• Blog – create blog posts for content marketing

Unfortunately, Payhip is light on SEO tools for your site and product listings as there are no options to create custom URLs or add a meta title or description.

Payhip Payment Gateways

Payhip is quite limited when it comes to payment options but fortunately, they do offer the two most popular options:

• PayPal
• Stripe

This allows you to take a variety of credit and debit card payments and should be enough for most users.

Payhip Shipping Options

Payhip isn’t only for digital products, they also have the option for physical products and offer a couple of basic shipping options:

• Flat Rate Shipping – a single shipping price for all orders
• Free Shipping
• Order Weight – shipping rate based on the weight of the order
• Order Total – shipping rate based on the total value of the order

Payhip Reporting & Analytics

Payhip comes with a good selection of analytics, including:

• Daily Views
• Daily Sales
• Top 10 Visitor Sources
• Conversion Rate
• Visits Map

One nice little feature is that you can see some product-specific analytics on your product overview page, including how many views it has had, the number or orders and total sales.

Payhip Website Builder

Payhip can be used in one of two ways, you can either embed a product page or buy button into an existing website or you can build a storefront using Payhip’s website builder and that is what we are going to be looking at in this section.

Payhip Theme Selection

Payhip includes a small number of free themes that you can use for your storefront and these are nicely designed and work well for small store’s selling digital products.

Payhip Theme Customization

When it comes to customization, the Payhip editor is a nice and easy-to-use tool with quite a few customization options, such as:

• Add, remove and reorganize sections of the page
• Layout options for the header and footer
• Edit the layout of all pages including product and blog pages
• Edit theme style including colors, fonts and favicon
• Add custom CSS to store and checkout pages

Payhip Pages

While the Payhip website builder is quite basic, it does allow users to add custom pages to their site, which can be used for things like about me or terms and conditions and these are built using the sections that are available in the customizer, which means that you can build some really nice looking pages.

Payhip also includes a built-in blog, which is quite basic but still allows you to add content to your store but one thing you can do is edit your post in the customizer after you have published it, this allows you to add sections to your post and make it more visually engaging.

Overall, Payhips website builder is pretty good and very easy to use and will do the job for a small store, the only thing we don’t like is the lack of SEO options, including not being able to set custom URLs or meta data and this applies to all pages that you can create.

Payhip Support

Support on Payhip is limited to email support, which can be accessed by clicking the icon in the dashboard (looks like a live chat icon) and completing the form and a member of the team aims to get back to you within a few hours.

Outside of contacting the support team, Payhip does have a good amount of support documentation covering many different topics and issues that you may run into.

Web Hosting

There isn’t a great deal of information about Payhips hosting environment and below is the only info we could find:

• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Unlimited Storage
• Free SSL Certificate

We couldn’t find any info on PCI Compliance or a CDN but they say they have:

“Industry Leading Security, transactions and payment details are encrypted and protected with stringent security measures.”

We also couldn’t do our usual performance testing due to the limited number of customer example sites.

How Easy is Payhip to Use?

Getting Started with Payhip

Getting started with Payhip is very simple as you simply need:

• An Email Address
• Create a Password
• Create a Business Name
• Create a Store Name (for your URL)

And that is it, you will be signed up to Payhip and will be taken through to the dashboard homepage, which includes a short setup guide to help you get your store configured and there are only three steps to this:

1. Add a Product
2. Setup your Checkout
3. Customize Your Store Design

A very simple setup guide that takes you through the basics but a prompt to set up your terms and conditions and privacy policy would be a good addition.

Outside of the setup guide, the dashboard is very easy to use and well laid out. The headings in the top navigation bar are clearly labeled, the only one that stumped me a little was Customers as this is the one that contains all of your order information, which isn’t immediately clear.

Inventory Management

Adding New Products

Adding a new product with Payhip comes in two steps, step 1 is to select the type of product you want to sell from the list of:

• Digital Product
• Physical Product
• Course
• Coaching Service
• Subscription Billing (membership)

The options and layout of the page will depend on the type of product that you choose to create, for example, the digital product and course pages are completely different.

But this is a good thing as different product types require different inputs in order to create them but to give you an idea, the image below shows the page for adding a new digital product.

This page, along with the one for the physical product are simple single-page layouts and both are very easy to use and include all of the sections needed to create a complete product listing.

The setup pages for the Courses and Coaching Services are a little more complex as there are more steps to these than the Digital or Physical products, especially the course as it requires setting up the course curriculum, pricing, settings and pages etc.

But overall, none of the products are difficult to set up and even someone completely new to creating any one of these products shouldn’t experience much of an issue.

Organizing Your Inventory

Organizing your inventory is very simple with Payhip as you can create collections of products but unfortunately, there isn’t an option to create and sub-collections.

One interesting thing with the collections is that they have some SEO settings (set custom URL & meta description), this would be very useful for the product pages.

Managing Your Inventory

If you are selling physical products and enable inventory tracking, Payhip does have an Inventory Manager, which allows you to quickly and easily update the stock quantities for your product listings.

Order Management

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to test the order management out as this requires linking up either PayPal or Stripe and we currently don’t have a test account for either of these gateways.