SendOwl Review: Sell Your Digital Assets & Protect It Against Piracy

SendOwl review: SendOwl is a great shopping cart solution for anyone looking for a robust yet simple solution. It’s not complex with multiple layers of functionality. It’s easy and straight forward.

In 2010, George Palmer founded SendOwl in London. He found a gap in eCommerce solutions and he wanted to provide an easy way to sell digital products from their website. Now, it has evolved into a complete shopping cart.

With SendOwl, you can sell physical goods, services, memberships, subscriptions, drip content, and digital products with a feature loaded shopping cart.  We’re going to get really in-depth with our SendOwl review.

It’s definitely an economical solution and one of the fastest store launches compared to others on the market.  It’s taking customers away from some of the major players in the eCommerce world who are focus on physical goods like Shopify, BigCommerce, or Subbly.

Shall we getting started with our SendOwl review??  Let’s go!

HOW DOES SENDOWL WORK?

SendOwl is robust shopping cart that you can deploy anywhere for your digital items, services, memberships, subscriptions, and drip content. Here are three ways to launch SendOwl’s shopping cart:

• Website – You can host a website with SendOwl, self-hosted WordPress site on SiteGround, or other free website solutions. SendOwl cart doesn’t include product listings. It’ll be a check-out pop-up window.
• Social Media – If you have a large social media following, you can add SendOwl’s Buy button to your social media accounts. The Buy button will provide a check out process with a complete payment form.
• Shopify – You can use Shopify’s eCommerce solution. Since Shopify is focus on physical products, you can integrate SendOwl’s shopping cart to process your digital products, subscriptions, memberships, and drip content.

FEATURES

SendOwl comes loaded with features to help you maximize your sales. It’s well designed, easy, and simple to use. You can sell digital products, software, subscriptions, memberships, music, books, and physical products.   We’re going to try to mention all the notable features in our SendOwl revew.

PAYMENT GATEWAYS

SendOwl offers multiple payment solutions for you to sell your products, which includes BitPay, Stripe, and PayPal. In addition, Stripe provides support for Apple Pay and BitCoin. Unfortunately, SendOwl doesn’t support Authorize.net any more.

In addition, Stripe doesn’t support any cryptocurrencies outside of Bitcoin. However, there aren’t many eCommerce solutions, shopping carts, payment gateways, and brick-and-mortar stores that accept cryptocurrencies.

Lastly, Stripe and PayPal is pretty much all you need and it’s pretty standard for online stores. It’ll be nice to have Authorize.net, Amazon Pay, and Ali Pay, but they all do essentially the same thing.

After setting up your payment gateway, you’re ready to start selling and making money!

Payment Gateways

CHECKOUT TEMPLATES

SendOwl offers four different checkout templates you can utilize for your shopping cart. There are two pop-ups and two standard pages. The same check out template will be applied to all products, which provides a uniform user experience.

It doesn’t make sense to have different checkout templates for different products. Could you imagine a different checkout process and experience for every product on Amazon? It would be confusing as heck and create a terrible customer experience.

You can further configure the template like showing a Dropbox button, changing the button color, and more. In addition, you can customize it further by adding some codes to match your branding and website’s design.

Definitely give them a test drive and get your free trial here.

Checkout Templates

PRODUCT TYPES

Now, let’s discuss the different product types you can sell with SendOwl. Obviously, SendOwl may not be right for everyone. However, for anyone selling digital products, it’s definitely one of the best options on the market. If not, the best.

What kind of product types can you sell with SendOwl?

• Services
• Subscriptions
• Software
• Music
• Magazines
• Comics
• Videos
• eBooks
• Video games
• License keys
• Physical products

Adding Product Types

Memberships

If you’re running a membership site with S2Member, Wishlist Member, or MemberMouse, SendOwl has your back and integrates with each one. There a lot of other membership software out there. It would be nearly impossible to create integrations and maintain each one. There’s only 24 hours in a day.

However, there is some good news. SendOwl is on Zapier, so you can integrate your heart away. Furthermore, you can integrate with Shopify because Shopify doesn’t provide a recurring payment option on its platform. In other words, you can’t sell subscriptions on its platform without having to pay for an additional app.

Drip Content

In addition, you can sell drip content on SendOwl. The drip functionality gives you the ability to release member privileges over time, so it keeps customers around. However, you could grant them full access upon sign up.

It’s definitely one of our favorite features and it’s something that’s not offered by the other major players like BigCommerce, Shopify, or Subbly. Plus, it has a WishList integration where you can grant access to different things like curated content, members-only forums, and among other things.

SendOwl allows you to schedule different types of drip content. You can mix and match different types of drip content like a video, eBooks, magazine, and so forth. It’s definitely a useful tool for entrepreneurs with membership sites.

Drip Content Settings

Services

There’s more. SendOwl can be utilized to sell services in addition to digital products. For example, you can sell online coaching, website maintenance, bookkeeping, or website development work. The possibilities are endless.

The services option works the same way as the other product types, but you without any license keys or files to download. It’s a great way to bundle your software with upgrades or maintenance upsells.

Additionally, it’s fully integrated with all the other marketing tools provided by SendOwl.

Digital Products

SendOwl’s digital products feature is where they really shine. It’s easy to set up and you can designate the Download folder, Download Attempts, and Download Validity. But SendOwl kicks ass with its ability to auto-generate license keys.

The auto-generate license keys prevent your software from being shared on a forum free to download. In other words, you won’t be losing any sales from pirated versions of your software. It’s definitely worth the $9 per month.

SendOwl Auto-Generation Licenses

Physical Products

Lastly, SendOwl isn’t limited to digital products. You can sell physical products on their platform too. You can set a sales limit on physical products. Furthermore, there will be an extra page at checkout to gather shipping address.

Although a great option, we don’t feel SendOwl is the best option as Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix, or Subbly provide better features for physical products. If you only have a few physical products, SendOwl would be good enough.

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MARKETING OPTIONS

Next in our SendOwl review, we’re going to touch on some of the marketing tools that’s provided with SendOwl.  It includes discounts, cart abandonment, upsells, quick sells, mailing list, and a built-in affiliate program.  You get them all out of the box with their most popular plan.

Discounts

No shopping cart will be complete without discounts. SendOwl keeps up with the other major players by providing robust options found on other platforms. SendOwl also keeps things very simple, clean, and straightforward.

You can specify the discount type – fixed or percentage. In addition, you can apply a cart minimum, product limits, time limits, and use limits. Plus, you can have SendOwl auto-generate a code or create a custom coupon.

The only limitation I found with SendOwl is not being able to automatically assign each of your affiliate with a custom discount code without manually creating it.

Discount Settings

Upsells

We really like SendOwl’s upsell feature because they allow you to upsell before or after payment. In addition, you can assign upsells for specific products and create an offer price. There’s an option to add your own upsell language in SendOwl.

Quick Sells

With Quick Sells, it only takes a few clicks to add a check out on your website or social media account via some HTML code, link, or sharing it on social media. The HTML has four options – Buy Now, Add to Cart, View Cart, View Product.

The best part about the Quick Sell is the checkout time. You want the check-out time to be seamless, fast, and simple. The less pages the customer has to navigate through the higher the conversion rate.

Affiliate Program

We really like that SendOwl offers an affiliate program for its users. An affiliate program is one of the most cost-effective marketing programs a company can implement because you’re only paying advertising cost for actual sales.

How does an affiliate program work? Marketers promote your products and get paid commission for any sales they refer to you. If they don’t make a sale, they don’t get paid and you don’t waste your marketing budget.

Affiliate program is based on actual sales performance unlike social media marketing, which is based on superficial metrics such as likes and comments. The likes and comments can be inflated by buying likes, comments, and Instagram pod engagement.

With SendOwl’s affiliate program, you can designate the cookie period, pay delay, direct selling, cookie expiration, and who gets the referral (e.g., the first or last person to refer the customer).

Affiliates Program

Mailing Lists

Email marketing is still one of the most popular methods of marketing. Everyone uses it from Travelocity, Amazon, Google, and so forth. Why do they use it? Because it works. SendOwl does it very well.

The mailing lists feature helps you deliver news directly to your customers’ inbox and tempting them to buy. You can integrate SendOwl with all the major email marketing services. Here is what’s available with SendOwl:

• ActiveCampaign
• AWeber
• Campaign Monitor
• Constant Contact
• ConvertKit
• Drip
• GetResponse
• InfusionSoft
• Mad Mimi
• MailChimp
• Sendy
• MailerLite

Cart Abandonment

Cart abandonment results in a lot of loss sales and it’s usually because the checkout process is too frustrating or long. Hence, it’s the reason we like SendOwl’s checkout process because it’s short and simple.

You can setup cart abandonment to try to recover any cart abandonment. With Cart Abandonment, SendOwl will take the customers’ email and send a reminder email if they don’t end up buying.

You can learn more about all their marketing tools here.

HOW TO SETUP PRODUCTS WITH SENDOWL

Before setting up your shopping cart, you will have to setup your products within SendOwl. Here’s a quick guide:

1. Under the Product Section, you would hit Add Products to begin setting up your products
2. Select the product type
3. Fill out the product information and hit Create a Product
4. Add your product image to make it look more appealing and professional
5. You can add more details to your product and images within the Sales Detail page
6. Add a commission percentage if you have an affiliate program
7. Do a final check on your product and hit Publish

HOW TO SETUP SUBSCRIPTIONS

Subscriptions is a revenue model a lot of companies are doing today. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple, Netflix, and smaller online retailers are doing it. Why? Because it creates stable and recurring income on a monthly basis.

With SendOwl, you can easily setup the frequency (e.g., 10, 15, 30 days, etc.), duration, and a trial period. We suggest usually on-going for your duration, so you can keep billing customers until they want to cancel.

Unlike other shopping carts, SendOwl advanced options sets them apart. You can choose 29 different currencies, sales limit, download page folder, set a download attempt limit, download validity, and redirect URL.

While SendOwl’s website isn’t a stunner, looks can be deceiving because their subscription option has tons of features. You can try it out for yourself here

Subscription Settings

DASHBOARD & REPORTING

Reporting is one of the most important aspects of any business. You need an easy way to analyze your sales. With SendOwl, you can determine what are the bestselling products versus your under-performing products, so you can shift your marketing efforts.

Furthermore, SendOwl breaks down your sales by currency, gross, and dates. The dates are important because you can see whether your marketing campaigns result in increased sales. Plus, SendOwl tracks your conversion rate. The conversion rate is the percentage of sales compared to your website visitors.

SendOwl Reports

SECURITY & STORAGE

In all our reviews, we always discuss security and our SendOwl review is no different.  SendOwl service is protected with SSL encryption. SSL provides encryption for websites, so your customer’s credit card information isn’t leaked when they’re going through the checkout process.

SendOwl stores all your digital products on their servers, so it makes your life a lot easier. You don’t have to worry about downtime, monitoring your servers, storage space, or other headaches with technology.

In addition, there’s a customer option to save the files to Dropbox or Download it directly upon purchase. Everything is seamless and delivered in real time.

What else? SendOwl protects your digital assets by providing a PDF stamping option, so your products aren’t pirated or reselling it. It PDF’s the customer’s information on it, so it deters them from distributing your work.

Lastly, the download file is via a link. The links provide a limited download permissions and customers can’t forward the download link once it’s expired. Videos can be configured to stream instead of download.

File Download

HELP CENTER

With technology, there will always be issues whether it’s a learning curve, technical problems, or unscheduled server downtime. SendOwl provides you with all the support that you need whether it’s their online support center, documentation, or help center.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a live chat provided or a community like a Facebook group. You would have to submit a support ticket via their contact form. As easy as SendOwl is, it’ll be nice to have a live chat team working designated hours to help customers.

SENDOWL REVIEW PROS VS CONS

We can’t finish our SendOwl review without doing a quick pros vs cons comparison. Here it is:

Pros

• Readily available affiliate program
• No transaction or processing fees
• Supports approximately 29 different currencies
• Multi-lingual user interface
• Ability to designate upsells (i.e., before or after checkout)
• Less than $9 per month for entry plan
• Easy to use
• Premade checkout templates
• Library of self-help documentation and answers to FAQs
• Integrates with Stripe and PayPal
• Multiple product types
• Auto-generated license keys for digital products
• Supports upsells
• Automate your business with their Zapier support
• Accepts Bitcoin via Stripe or BitPay
• Apple Pay via Stripe

Cons

• No free plan
• No multi-level affiliate marketing option
• No robust control of affiliates
• Limited cryptocurrencies accepted
• Only four checkout templates
• No live chat support or Facebook community group

SENDOWL PRICE

SendOwl is definitely one of the least expensive shopping carts in a crowded eCommerce industry. The average monthly prices start at $30 per month while SendOwl’s lowest plan is for a measly $9 per month. That’s $252 in annual savings for your business.

In addition, as your business grows, you can easily upgrade to a different plan to suit your needs. What’s more, SendOwl provides you with a 30 day free trial and they don’t require a credit card to start the trial.

Moreover, SendOwl doesn’t charge any transaction fees on top of the Stripe and PayPal fees. That’s really crucial because transaction fees will eat into your profits.

Here are SendOwl’s current pricing plans:

Here is an entry plan comparison between some of the popular shopping carts:

You can find all of SendOwl’s pricing plans and get a free trial here.

SENDOWL REVIEW COMPARISONS

SendOwl vs Sellfy

SENDOWL REVIEW CONCLUSION

Let’s wrap up our SendOwl review. From a physical product perspective, we don’t think SendOwl has the same offering as other major players on the market like Wix, Weebly, Shopify, BigCommerce, or even Subbly. You can check our eCommerce comparison post here.

However, from a digital products stance, SendOwl is one of the best in its niche market. They provide features that will help generate more sales, protect digital assets, and create recurring income for any entrepreneur looking to monetize their intellectual properties.

It’s easy to use user interface is another perk. It’s not water down by gimmicky features or complex options. They keep is simple and sweet. In addition, you can’t beat their $9 per month price. It really helps to keep your monthly expenses down. Not convince?

Why not give them a test run and get your free 30-day trial?

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