Are you contemplating using PayLoadz to sell digital products online? This evaluation will assist you in determining if this e-commerce platform is the right fit for you.
Here we will cover everything from the features to the pricing of this platform, as well as discuss the other PayLoadz alternatives.
What is PayLoadz?
Payloadz is an e-commerce solution that allows selling digital goods online. You can sell anything you want including software, courses, ebooks, music, movies, clipart, templates, fonts, articles, low content books, crafts, planners, or anything else that can be downloaded.
This platform takes care of the product hosting, “buy now” buttons, secure payments, as well as of the instant delivery of digital products to your customers.
Customers pay for your products directly to your PayPal account and the money is available to you immediately. Meanwhile, PayLoadz instantly sends a product download link to your customer, so the products are also available immediately.
For those who don’t have a website, PayLoadz is not going to be a favorable platform. It’s because it works only as an integration to your existing site.
Unlike the other e-commerce platforms like Sellfy or Shopify, this platform isn’t a store builder and you will need to have your website set up before you take full advantage of it.
How Does It Work?
It works in a very simple way, all you have to do is to create a product listing and embed the buy now button wherever you want.
STEP 1: Once you sign up with PayLoadz, click on “Select New Product To Sell” or if you have already existing products from somewhere else you can import them from your Excel spreadsheet.
Alternatively, you can navigate to PayLoadz Express to get your products listed in just a few minutes.
STEP 2: Select the title for your product and put all the necessary info in the description. Then, upload your files, set your price and you are almost ready to go.
STEP 3: Once you click on the “Get Your Selling Link” button PayLoadz will provide simple copy-paste links and button codes that can be embedded to your website, blog, Facebook, or Twitter page.
Besides that, they have their own marketplace where you can also list and sell your digital products.
What Are The Main Features Of PayLoadz?
PayLoadz Store – It is a marketplace that can bring extra exposure to your products. As being a member of the PayLoadz platform, you can additionally list your digital downloads on their store. However, the marketplace does not seem very active.
Unlimited files and storage – When selling with PayLoadz, there’s no need to worry about any upload limits. This platform has no limits in terms of how many items you can list, and they also offer unlimited space for storing your product files.
Piracy protection – This feature is only applicable for game and software products. PayLoadz is capable to deliver unique product serial and software registration keys for everyone who buys your products.
Variety of payment options – Despite accepting all major credit cards, the platform also enables selling through many other getaways, such as PayPal, PayFlow Pro, 2Checkout, GoogleCheckout, Amazon Payments, TrialPay Payments, and Authorized Net.
Product trials – You can create subscriptions for your products by offering a trial period, a special introductory rate, or a regular rate. You have the freedom to customize the length of the trial and set your prices with intervals of the recurring billing after the trial period ends.
Allows custom discounts – PayLoadz provides sellers a variety of options on how they can discount their products. Sellers can create their own discounts based on either cart total, number of items in cart, or individual products. Sellers can also set an expiry date for their discounts, or restrict them for particular users.
Affiliate system – With PayLoadz you can set up the affiliate program for your products. That means you can recruit people to promote your products and share a commission (% of sale) when they successfully refer you a new customer. You have complete freedom to choose how much you want to give to your affiliates, as well as track sales, statistics, and other reports.
Security – PayLoadz uses SSL security protocol for their checkout pages as well as when handling the payments. Using SSL ensures that the information you exchange is never transmitted unencrypted over the Internet and therefore cannot be seen by unauthorized individuals.
Other Features:
- Email support
- Instant product delivery
- Supports eBay auctions
- Allows bulk product upload
- Help center & learning resources
- Basic storefront with custom domain name
- Allows product samples and previews
- Provides product sales reports
- Allows limiting downloads
What Is Good About PayLoadz? (Pros)
Simple To Use: PayLoadz provides a very simple e-commerce solution without overwhelming the user. It can take less than 5 minutes to get your product selling, however, such simplicity comes at the cost of not having enough features.
Help Section: In case you need assistance on selling your products or how to use all the platform’s features, these guys have a very big learning section for that. It consists of more than 200 articles and it answers any questions you may get
What Is Not So Good About PayLoadz? (Cons)
Outdated interface: As I know this platform for over 10 years now, it seems that its interface has barely changed since 2009. Everything looks and feels outdated inside and I can’t call this site very functional either. To sum this up, PayLoadz doesn’t seem a user-friendly or modern platform at all.
Lack of features: When we look at the PayLoadz pricing and compare this platform to the other platforms, it seems that PayLoadz definitely lacks some features. First of all, it doesn’t provide any custom product pages and you have to create them by yourself on your website. Also, this platform offers almost no marketing tools and lacks advanced analytic features. Apart from that, PayLoadz is missing other important e-commerce features like social discounts, membership systems, PDF stamping, custom checkout pages, and many more.
1$ trial: PayLoadz charges $1 for their 14-day trial, which in my opinion is a bit cheeky. None of the top e-commerce solutions charge for their trials, but PayLoadz decided to take a different approach.
Pricing:
So as we mentioned before PayLoadz charges 1$ for a 14-day trial, but what’s next? The bad news is, you won’t be able to start using this platform for free, as it charges both – monthly and transaction fees.
After you complete your 14-day trial, PayLoadz will charge $19/month and 2.9% + $0.29 of transaction fees. But, if your orders don’t reach $2 PayLoadz will still charge their monthly fee plus 4.9% + $0.05 per transaction.
Verdict:
Despite the outdated interface and lack of features, Payloadz could still be a decent lightweight eCommerce solution working as an add-on to your product store. But the high membership plan pricing plus transaction fees make Payloadz not a very affordable option. This applies especially to sellers who are also paying for the hosting of online stores, or email marketing platforms because Payloadz covers none of these.
These are the main negatives of Payloadz, and that is probably enough to make us for the alternatives.
The most similar in features alternative would be a platform called Payhip. In fact, it offers even more features than Payloadz and costs nothing to start selling with it. However, Payhip still remains a lightweight selling platform that charges pretty high transaction fees and lacks some essential features.
So now we are going to cover the platform, which is one of the best among all digital product selling solutions. It covers all essential eCommerce features under one roof, has no transaction fees, and offers affordable monthly plans instead. Eventually, this platform will let you experience all eCommerce capabilities and save money in the long run.
The Best Paylodz Alternative:
Podia is an affordable all-in-one eCommerce solution that can be a great alternative to Payloadz. The platform enables efficient selling of all digital downloads as well as memberships, courses, and webinars.
Unlike Payloadz, Podia takes zero transaction fees but has affordable monthly memberships instead. Such a payment structure allows many sellers to benefit from high-volume selling with higher profit margins.
Compared to Payloadz which only works as a basic integration to your site, Podia allows you to build a custom website that could be hosted either on Podia’s subdomain, or your own domain.Â
Also, all of the Podia plans come with an integrated email system and high volume monthly email recipients. These built-in functions give you the opportunity to save you tons of money as you don’t need to pay for your website’s hosting, or email marketing software.
While with Payloadz you can only design basic product pages and buttons, Podia comes with attractively designed templates that let you easily build all pages of your website, including home, landing, sales, product, newsletter, and other pages.
Podia also includes embeddable buttons, shopping carts, and other features, so you may use the platform to sell products on other websites.
Apart from that, Podia also allows to sell and incorporate the following:
- Upsells
- Coupons
- Embeds
- Pre-launches & Pre-sells
- Bundles
- Messaging
- Instant Payouts
- Video Hosting
- and more…
Now since we know more about Podia’s features, let’s discuss another very important aspect – pricing.
Pricing:
As being said, Podia does not charge any transaction fees but has monthly paid plans – Mover, Shaker & Earthquaker. While all of the plans enable custom websites and unlimited selling, there are still a few distinctions between the plans:
- Mover – $39/month – includes a custom website, unlimited digital product selling and webinar hosting, unlimited email subscribers, and 5k monthly email recipients.
- Shaker – $89/month – includes everything in the Mover plan, plus offers coaching selling, course certificates, affiliate marketing system, embedded checkout, and 15k monthly recipients.
- Earthquaker – $199/month – covers everything of the Shaker plan, plus offers 5 team members onboard, and 50k monthly email recipients.
Besides the stated differences there are more factors that vary from plan to plan. To find out what exactly each plan has to offer, we suggest that you take a look at Podia’s pricing page.
And before subscribing to any of the plans, you can try Podia at no cost by signing up for a free 14-day trial.