SendOwl Review: Is this Digital Products Platform Worth It?

With a new app or website coming out every few weeks, choosing a digital products platform can be overwhelming. One of the more popular choices within the market is SendOwl.

Are you considering using SendOwl? Well, we’ve laid out everything the platform has to offer, so you that you can make the right decision.

Let’s get to it, shall we?

What is SendOwl?

In 2010, George Palmer founded SendOwl and now the UK-based startup is growing with its small, but committed, development team.

Think of SendOwl as an ecommerce website created to make selling digital goods and services easier. So it essentially provides developers, entrepreneurs, and companies of all sorts the resources they require to sell to customers directly, all without having to worry about complicated setup procedures or large overhead expenses.

SendOwl doesn’t have a limit to what it can support, which means you can sell anything starting from ebooks, courses, music, software, and even subscriptions. 

Who is SendOwl For?

We’ve already mentioned some who can benefit from using SendOwl, but there are more options for who can use it.

If you’re a blogger or a small company owner looking for an easy way to market and ship their digital goods, SendOwl can be a good option. It’s also said to be excellent for newbies or small-scale vendors with a small inventory of digital products. Plus, due to their user-friendly interface, international sellers can find the platform to be of use, along with tech-savvy artists who must host themselves.

Now that you’re more familiar with the website itself, let’s go over how SendOwl might help you in selling your digital products.

Using SendOwl for Your Digital Products

Nowadays, there’s no shortage of websites that let you sell anything digital or even physical, do a quick search and you’ll find hundreds. But what is it about SendOwl that stands out?

Ease of Signing Up

The platform has 3 paid plans that come up as soon as you click sign in and put in your email address.

Unfortunately, you’ll have to choose either of these plans and only have a 7-day free trial for each one. Plus, you’ll also have to provide your credit card details, which isn’t ideal for those looking to test out the platform before committing to it.

However, once you do sign up, their team will send you 5 emails with tips and tricks that can help you start your journey.

Setting Up Your SendOwl Store

Once you’ve created your account, you must fill in your company details, link your payment channels, and set up your profile after creating an account on SendOwl. The website does well because of its intuitive user interface. That’s why, even for non-technical people, adding products and setting up your store is simple.

Now, there are two ways to start setting up your products on SendOwl. If you have your website or page you want to sell from, you simply need to create your call to action and then copy and paste the code they offer. You don’t need any advanced tech skills to make that happen.

What do you do if you don’t have a website? With a buy now button, you can direct customers to a sales description page from email or social media. What’s the purpose of a sales description page? Well, it informs your customers more about the product or benefits your service might bring. This can be a good way to encourage users to buy. You also can use these pages to direct anyone from your website to make a purchase.

SendOwl’s Top Features

If you’ve gone through the SendOwl website, you’ll see that the platform boasts a long list of features. Of course, you’ll find some in common with other digital product platforms, so we’ve highlighted the features that stand out:

Support for Versatile Products

With SendOwl, you can sell almost every kind of digital product you can think of, such as ebooks, online courses, event tickets, photography pieces, digital artwork, and more. It even allows for products containing licenses or codes to be sold as well. You can give SendOwl your license code or let it produce one for you automatically.

You can set up subscription possibilities, so your customers can subscribe to new products on a weekly, monthly, or bi-weekly basis by paying a fee that you determine. You can also give special access to long-time subscribers to a members-only website, provide them with discount codes, and more.

Plus, SendOwl allows for music and video streaming of any file size on the customer’s browser if they can’t download it.

Customization Options

Sendowl makes it simple to integrate a cart feature into your existing website. In fact, you can choose from its custom templates to give your consumers a smooth checkout experience. It’s even possible to create custom check fields or set up URL redirects from any product sales pages you create within SendOwl.

You can also personalize your shop page with a unique URL that displays up to ten digital products. Once you provide the details such as your store name, description, profile picture, and social media handles, SendOwl handles the rest. Not only that, you can customize the page's elements to fit your unique product offering and sales approach.

There’s also a variety of customizable email templates, which can allow you to the style, formatting, and branding elements to match your brand identity. This means you’ll spend less time on the nitty-gritty and you can work on perfecting your campaigns.

Reporting & Analytics Dashboard

Your business can track key performance metrics like open, click-through, and conversion rates using SendOwl's comprehensive reporting and analytics tools. With these sales reports and dashboards, your business can obtain useful insights about sales, revenue, and product performance. This enables you to make smarter business decisions along with identifying trends and opportunities.

Additionally, you also have access to abandoned cart insights, which help determine why customers might not be completing purchases. This can help you devise a plan to increase conversion. If you’ve integrated email marketing apps, you can also access the data to make well-informed decisions and continuously optimize your email marketing campaigns.

You can also generate and download CSV files for affiliates, products, orders, subscriptions, licenses, discount codes, and more. This allows you to handle sales and operations more efficiently.

Multiple Integrations

Although SendOwl doesn’t have some capabilities, it makes up for it by having multiple integrations in many categories. It’s integrated with widely used CRM platforms, such as Salesforce and HubSpot, enabling companies to keep track of client data and their actions. 

If you’re thinking about ecommerce, well it can also integrate with popular ecommerce systems like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce. You can even connect to Facebook, Notion, Linktree, and other platforms. 

Since the website has a comprehensive knowledge base, you’ll find the integration and setup to be a breeze, no matter what third-party app you want to connect to.

SendOwl’s Payment Gateways

With SendOwl, you have the chance to integrate with popular payment service providers such as PayPal and Stripe to make it simpler for customers to check out your digital products, as well ass other payment services such as BitPay, Apple Pay, Alipay.

After your payment channels are set up, businesses can provide services like "pay what you want" for products, such as license keys, memberships, ebooks, and subscriptions. 

Affiliate Marketing with SendOwl

When you’re signing up for affiliate marketing, it not only helps increase your sales, but it also means you’re spending less money on marketing than needed.

So, how to set up your affiliate marketing program on SendOwl?

You can click on the settings page, and find the Affiliate Program Tab there. Once you’ve put in all the details such as program name, payment details, and even cookie duration etc, you’ll find a unique affiliate link that you can share.

There are two ways that you can do that: 

• First, you can check out possible affiliates and assess their level of interest from readers. Then you can extend an invitation to join your program by sending your link through email or message.
• If you’re looking to send out a mass invite, you can embed the link in your email newsletter or social media accounts. You will receive an email notification whenever someone joins your program.

Remember, you can choose your custom commission rate, so make sure it’s worth the affiliates’ time. If you’re open to negotiation, there’s also an option to reset rates and select certain products for the program as well.

Once they’ve started generating sales, you might be thinking about how to manage all of the administrative tasks. At the beginning of every month, SendOwl sends you a spreadsheet with all of your affiliate earnings that are due for that month. The only thing left to do is submit the spreadsheet and pay everyone at once if you have enabled mass payments on PayPal.

If that’s not something you’re comfortable with, you have the option of manually paying each affiliate using PayPal or any other payment method you choose.

SendOwl’s Other Marketing Tools 

SendOwl has its own marketing tab that lets you promote your products using discount codes and coupons, upsells and cross-sells, etc.

You can actually create your own coupons for your products. There are options to set limits on the quantity, duration, and number of uses for the coupons. These special deals tend to draw more clients and increase revenue.

As you might expect, an upsell occurs when a customer buys one of your products and is offered the chance to get a more expensive item or collection of items. So they allow you to present upgrades or related products to customers while they are checking out. This is crucial since, when someone is in the market to buy, it's simpler for them to keep buying.

As clients proceed through your checkout process, they can also be presented with bundles along with similar products. That’s how these one-click upsells can help increase your revenue per customer. 

All you have to do is make sure the "after payment" option is selected. In fact, you can also show some unrelated products from other categories in case they are interested in them. You can get help from its analytics dashboard to make sure you’re on the right track.

Bonus Tip: There are also options to integrate with platforms such as Mailchimp and ConvertKit to generate leads and automate your email marketing campaigns.

Contacting SendOwl

What’s great about SendOwl is that it offers a huge range of support resources such as how-to guides and even information about basic features. There’s no topic you haven’t thought of, and they even have FAQs regarding the most frequent problems.

If you still need assistance, you can email customer service. However, their relatively delayed communication has been the subject of numerous customer complaints. This is not great for business owners, as if you need urgent help, you will be waiting a while to hear back from SendOwl.

One other thing that stings a little is that there’s no community forum where you can find a workaround for the strange and complicated thing you're attempting to accomplish. So if you’re unsure and think you might need immediate customer service, you should consider other options.

How Much Does SendOwl Cost?

Now comes the real question: how much would you have to pay for SendOwl?

With its range of paid plans, SendOwl is somewhat affordable for both new but it can seem expensive for established companies. It offers a $1/month option for the first two months regardless of the plan you chose. You can sell up to unlimited products along with subscriptions, integrations, and no order limits. 

Let’s take a look at what these plans entail:

• Starter: For new vendors just starting out, the Starter Plan is a good option as it starts at $18/month. It's a way to test the waters without having to make a big upfront payment, because it provides an affordable entry point with access to all of SendOwl's services. There’s also a 5% order fee or a minimum of $0.89 added. However, it only offers 10GB of storage.
• Growth: The Growth option is a step up, offering 100GB of storage for $37/month might be a steep price and a $0.47 order fee. This plan is for growing businesses with consistent sales, so it allows for higher sales volume without a noticeable increase in expenses by providing additional storage and a cheaper order charge. 
• Pro: For businesses and high-volume sellers who require more storage and the lowest pricing per transaction, the Pro Plan is the best option. With a $0.28 order fee and a monthly cost of $89, this plan offers the best value and can handle larger businesses, with 200GB of storage.

An additional expense along with the costs of these plans are the payment gateway fees. Retailers located in the US are subject to an initial 2.9% charge, which includes a $0.30 base charge. For retailers headquartered outside of the US, an additional 2% charge will apply. Plus, there’s also a charge for free orders, similar to that of paid orders.

Is SendOwl Worth It?

It’s finally time to decide: should you choose SendOwl or not? Well, let’s give you a brief overview that can help you make the decision:

SendOwl is a formidable competitor in the market for digital product sales. It makes selling digital downloads easy with its features and user-friendly UI. If you’re looking for a reasonably priced way to launch your small online business, you can think about using SendOwl. 

But, if you need a stronger marketing solution with enhanced features and superior support, you should consider looking outside of SendOwl.

That’s why we’ve looked into another choice for a digital product platform: Whop!

Selling Digital Products? Sell With Whop Instead

The worldwide ecommerce market is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.8% from 2023 to 2032, reaching over $19.43 trillion by that time.

So, there’s a need to stand out in this competitive market, and that’s where Whop comes in.

Whop is a social commerce platform for all kinds of digital products, from trading software, and ebooks to online courses, paid communities, and more.

Because of its user-friendly layout, Whop is simple to use for both beginner and experienced creators. With Whop, you create your own whop. Your whop is your online hub that you can design to meet your business needs. Whether you want to sell online courses, community access, trading signals, sports picks, ebooks - or all of the above - you can do it all with Whop.

Compared to SendOwl’s pro plan, Whop has no limits on its storage. With Whop you also get a powerful dashboard so that you can easily see all of your business metrics. Additionally, Whop supports multiple payment types, including subscriptions, buy-now-pay-later, and even cryptocurrencies. Overall, we can safely say that Whop offers the resources, tools, and support you need to succeed, regardless of your level of experience. 

The platform also has a clear pricing structure with an industry-leading 3% sales fee, so you shouldn’t even worry about any unforeseen expenses. In fact, you don’t have to pay any membership fees.

If you’re looking to branch out to more customers, you can join their marketplace for an additional charge. This means you can access an audience of millions a month, which can definitely boost your sales drastically.

When it comes to selling digital products, there's no better option than Whop.