My experience selling digital products with Lemon Squeezy

Recently, I put my first product up for sale on my website. I created a minimal portfolio design for my blog a while ago, which I did not use. So, why not prepare that as a Figma template that I can put up for sale? This is how Calais was born.

After finishing up the product and making it ready for publishing, it was time to think about how I wanted to sell it. My most critical requirement was that I wanted the store to be on my own website. I wanted to have a dedicated product page for the template. I am looking to implement a store in the long term.

My immediate thought was to use either Stripe or Lemon Squeezy. Stripe was the more obvious for me as I've used Stripe quite often in my career. From simple donation pages to entire SaaS applications with discounts and grandfathered pricing, I've already seen most of what Stripe can offer.

On the other hand, Lemon Squeezy is a company that's been on my radar for a while now. I've been following them and am impressed by their work—especially the design work at Lemon Squeezy and Orman Clark, the designer there. Using Lemon Squeezy would expose me to another payment provider, which might be helpful to me later.

So I decided to give them a try. If the product were as good as the company and its people, I would stick with them. If not, I would have gained some experience and could still fall back to Stripe.

The first thing I did before even creating an account at Lemon Squeezy was to set up the pages on my website. The idea was to have a custom page for the product and then use the Hosted Checkout option from Lemon Squeezy. With that option, you get a “share link” to a checkout page for the product created and hosted by the payment provider. So, all I would then have to do was use that link on my website when the visitors clicked the “Buy” button.

Once that was all done, I created my Lemon Squeezy account. After registering the account, they provided a decent onboarding flow, which guided me through creating the store, configuring it, and creating the product for Calais.

All that was possible before I even had to get the account activated, as I could try out everything in test mode. Once I was ready, I submitted a form answering questions about the store, the products I intend to sell, and some other questions about the store.

They said they would get back to me in 3-5 business days, but I submitted the form on Saturday, and they activated the store by Tuesday morning.

Overall, this has been an enjoyable experience so far. Setting up a store quickly and publishing my product was incredibly simple, and I recommend Lemon Squeezy to anyone in a similar position.

That being said, at the time of writing this, I haven't had any sales yet, so I haven't gone through the payment process and product delivery, but I expect that it will work as smoothly as the rest. I also haven't yet used their API, but looking at their docs, it seems pretty promising. I will report back once I've had a chance to use them a bit further.