How I built a Gumroad Sales Dashboard using iOS Shortcuts
From concept to shipped solution in just 14 days. The journey of building a custom dashboard for Gumroad using no-code tools.
Why I built a Gumroad Dashboard 🤷♂️
Gumroad is an online marketplace that’s built for creators. If you sell any kind of digital products (like templates, music, plug-ins, videos, graphics, courses) Gumroad is likely the tool you’d use to sell it online.
This year I started listing my own products on Gumroad. I only have a few listed for now, but I plan on increasing my output on this channel significantly this year.
With the Gumroad app, you get notifications when someone downloads or buys your products. The analytics on the other hand are lacking on mobile.
I wanted a better way to track my sales, orders and revenue quickly without having to whip out my laptop and log-in to the website.
When I have more real-time visibility into the data/analytics, I can make better decisions on what’s working, what’s not, and how I can improve my store. I assume I’m not alone there.
So naturally, I looked for a solution. When I didn’t find one, I decided to try and build it myself. I don’t know how to code, so I used no-code tools like Zapier, iOS Shortcuts and Charty.
I’m really happy with the end result. This solution will help me a ton in my own creative business, so hopefully by sharing it, it can help others, too.
About Gumroad 💰
With Gumroad, you don’t need to sink the time/effort into building your own online store. Anyone can upload their assets to Gumroad, set a price and sell their products quickly and easily.
You also benefit from built-in tools like discoverability, coupon codes, tax calculations, e-mail marketing and other tools to make selling your products even easier.
Even though I already have an online store using Webflow, I still use Gumroad as the payment processor. Webflow charges a bit too much for e-commerce functionality right now, and I found the checkout process to have too much friction, especially for free products. Gumroad makes checkout a breeze.
The most important metrics for creators 🚀
This dashboard was built to track key metrics that are important for any creator, myself included. The stats that I’m currently tracking are:
- # of orders and revenue over a 30-day period
- Cumulative revenue to better visualize monthly income
- Product breakdown to see which products were the most popular
- Year-to-Date Orders/Revenue to quickly see my yearly income
These stats should give you a better idea of how your products are performing over time. It also allows you to spot trends from marketing pushes.
Key Benefits of using this Dashboard 📈
- 📊 See your latest Gumroad stats on your home screen
- 🎉 Lifetime access — no monthly fees
- 🌗 Bright and Dark themes
- 🎨 Customizable colors
- 🤖 Uses free tools you already love
- 🔒 Your data is yours — we don’t see anything
- 👨💻 No coding necessary
- 🔬 Totally customizable (if you want to get your hands dirty)
The dashboard is fairly easy to set up. 📊
Now before I bore you with the technical details, just know that you don’t need to be technically savvy to use this tool.
I built this dashboard in such a way where all you have to do is download the templates, tweak a bit of text and connect your accounts. That’s it. All the heavy lifting is done for you so you can focus on what you do best — creating things.
If you want to skip the boring technical details, you can download the Dashboard and installation instructions here.
How it works — using no-code tools. ⚙️
This dashboard works by utilizing a few different apps to push/pull/display the data on your iOS home screen.
- First, we use Zapier to push new sales data from your Gumroad account into a custom Google Sheet Dashboard.
- Then it uses iOS Shortcuts to grab the relevant data from different sheets using a GET .CSV format from the Google Sheets.
- The iOS Shortcuts then takes that data and plots it into different chart formats using Charty for iOS.
- Lastly, you can pin those charts to your home screen using iOS Widgets.
There’s a lot of hidden magic happening quietly behind the scenes to make this all play nicely together, including a custom Zapier zap that pulls in the relevant data, and a custom Google Sheets Dashboard that analyzes that data and organizes it into various sheets using formulas and pivot tables.
Then there’s the iOS Shortcuts themselves which map the data into beautiful charts, complete with Gumroad branded colours.
The result is being able to track your sales and revenue in beautiful charts on your home screen. This works on any iOS device that has iOS14 or later, including iPhones and iPads.
Try it for yourself 👇
If you’re a creator that wants a way to track your Gumroad sales/orders more closely, this dashboard should help you out.
If you have any questions about how it works, or have ideas on how I can make it better, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter. ✌️
