a-real-storefront.gumroad.com — what a UK/EU buyer is actually charged

This is a worked sample of the report, not a report about you.

It was produced by running the audit against one real Gumroad storefront on 2026-08-12 — nine products, walked logged out from a UK address, each page loaded cold and each checkout read at the pay step. Every figure below is the figure that was measured. No price, gap, percentage, median, peer count or range has been adjusted.

What has been removed is the seller. Their name and their product titles are replaced with Product 1, Product 2 and so on, because they did not ask to be an advertisement. Your report names your products.

Walked 2026-08-12 06:04 UTC, logged out, from a UK address, as an ordinary buyer: each product page loaded cold, the buy control clicked, the pay step read and nothing submitted. No order was placed and no form was filled in.

9 product(s) on the storefront. 9 gave a page price the pay step confirms. 9 of those charge the buyer more than the page says.

The widest gap is Product 1 — the page shows £71.82, the buyer pays £87.40, 21.7% more.

productpage saysbuyer paysgapwhat the pay step itemised
Product 1£71.82£87.4021.7% more£14.52 added at the pay step. page shows £71.82, pay step totals £87.40
Product 2£71.82£87.4021.7% more£14.52 added at the pay step. page shows £71.82, pay step totals £87.40
Product 3£71.82£87.4021.7% more£14.52 added at the pay step. page shows £71.82, pay step totals £87.40
Product 4£71.82£87.4021.7% more£14.52 added at the pay step. page shows £71.82, pay step totals £87.40
Product 5£71.82£87.4021.7% more£14.52 added at the pay step. page shows £71.82, pay step totals £87.40
Product 6£21.47£25.8020.2% more£4.34 added at the pay step. page shows £21.47, pay step totals £25.80
Product 7£200.65£243.2021.2% more£40.57 added at the pay step. page shows £200.65, pay step totals £243.20
Product 8£51.83£63.0021.6% more£10.48 added at the pay step. page shows £51.83, pay step totals £63.00
Product 9£70.34£85.0020.8% more£14.22 added at the pay step. page shows £70.34, pay step totals £85.00
This is the report, not a summary of it.
The page above is one storefront's audit end to end — the same document a buyer receives, with the seller's name and product titles removed and not one figure altered. Yours names your products, walks every product on your storefront, and is run the day the order lands. Order the audit — $149, once → Or have it watched: the same walk every week, and an email the day a price stops matching the pay step → The watched version is a monthly subscription and its first month is this report, included rather than added on; after that the walk repeats weekly and you hear from me when a gap opens, closes or moves. It states its own price on its own page. The number moves on its own — it is a function of the day's exchange rate, the buyer's country, Gumroad's tax handling and your own edits — so a report is true on the day it is written and the watching is what keeps it true. The figure above was read off the Gumroad product page when this page was built (2026-08-26T18:39:46Z); that page is where you pay and it is the authority if it ever disagrees with this one. Prefer to look at the underlying data first? The category crawl behind the price comparison is free and openly licensed.

And here is the same walk against my own storefront, unredacted

Everything above is somebody else's shop with the seller removed. You have to take my word for it. So here is the measurement run against my store, which is public, which is linked from this page, and which you can check yourself right now — open any product below in a private window and click through to the pay step.

Most of every gap below is VAT, and VAT is lawful. Gumroad is the merchant of record and is required to add it. That is exactly the point: there is nothing wrong with my checkout, and I still cannot see these numbers from inside my own account. My dashboard reports in my currency, and my own visits are localised to where I am. Neither shows me what the row below shows.

The gap does not reduce to the tax line, and the last column is the part that does not. On the largest row the difference is £38.63 and the VAT line is VAT £37.04 — the remainder is £1.59, because the checkout's own subtotal (£184.76) is not the figure the page advertises (£183.17), before a penny of tax. This page said “every gap below is VAT” until 2026-08-26 and that was wrong in the direction that flattered me. It is a small residual here. It is not always small: across the 32 other people’s pages in the walk above that carry a non-zero price, all 32 show one, median 0.95%, ranging from -28.4% to 49.2%, and 5 of them negative.

ProductPage saysCheckout subtotal Tax linePay step chargesDifference Not explained by tax
What Actually Sells on Gumroad — 255 categories, 8,311 products measur£183.17£184.76VAT £37.04£221.80+£38.63 (21.1%)+£1.59
Gumroad checkout audit - every product in your store, what a UK/EU buy£109.61£110.63VAT £22.17£132.80+£23.19 (21.2%)+£1.02
Gumroad checkout monitor - a walk of your whole store every week, and £72.83£74.07VAT £14.73£88.80+£15.97 (21.9%)+£1.24

5 published products walked logged out from a UK address (this VPS); Gumroad localises the render to it on 2026-08-26; 3 are comparable and 2 are excluded (free tills, tills charging no more than they advertise (the monthly one with a free first month), and any page whose currency does not match its own checkout total — none of these can produce a gap figure that means anything). The largest gap is £38.63 on a product whose page advertises £183.17. Nothing was ordered and no form was submitted; every reading stops at the pay step. The walk is the same instrument that produces the report above, pointed at my own shop instead of a customer's.

That is one page, walked. Want the same reading on one of yours?
Send me one Gumroad product URL and I walk it logged out from a UK address to the real pay step, then write back what your page advertises, what the checkout’s own subtotal is before tax, what the tax line is, what you are actually charged, and which part of the difference is not tax — the last column above, on your product instead of mine. One page, walked — $49, once → This is the cheap way in, and it is deliberately narrower than the audit: one product page, not your storefront. You are buying the reading and not a finding — there is nothing wrong with my checkout, there is probably nothing wrong with yours, and a clean, fully-explained answer is a likely outcome and is what you would be paying to know. I answer within 24 hours. Refund on request within 30 days, including if you decide afterwards that a clean answer was not worth it. The figure was read off the Gumroad product page when this page was built (2026-08-26T18:39:47Z); that page is where you pay and it is the authority if it ever disagrees with this one.

How to read this

Gumroad is the merchant of record and adds VAT on top of the advertised price for UK and EU buyers rather than inside it. That is not a fault of yours and there is nothing to fix in your account — the number is set by where the buyer is, not by you. What you control is whether the page says so. A line in the description saying tax is added at checkout costs nothing and removes the surprise at the moment of paying.

You cannot see any of this from inside your own account: the dashboard reports in your own currency and your own visits are localised to where you are.

A row with no figure is a row where nothing in the pay step confirmed the price on the page — usually a page priced in one currency that the pay step converts. Rather than quote a comparison between two different currencies, it is left blank. Every number above was confirmed against the checkout subtotal.

What comparable products in your own category charge

4 product(s) could be compared. 0 are priced below the median of products in the same category with comparable demand.

productyou chargecomparable mediandifferencepeersyour ratingsrange
Product 2$97.00$59.59$-37.41636$12.01–$500.00
Product 5$97.00$59.59$-37.41632$12.01–$500.00
Product 1$97.00$45.06$-51.941111$8.01–$500.00
Product 3$97.00$19.02$-77.97622$8.01–$500.00

How this comparison is built, and what it is not

Peers are products in your own leaf category whose rating count is between half and double the rating count of the product being compared. The demand window is what makes it a comparison rather than a list of prices: a category median on its own is dominated by products nobody buys.

Ratings are a lower bound on units sold, not a sales count. An unknown share of buyers leave one. They order products by demand; they cannot size a market, and nothing here multiplies a price by a rating count.

This is not advice to raise your price to the median. It is the distribution you are priced inside. A product can be deliberately cheap. What the number tells you is whether the position is one you chose.

Your own price and rating count above were read from your live product page while this report was being written, not from the category crawl the peers come from — so they are what your page says today even if you changed the price this morning.

Why some of your products are here and others are not. The peer set comes from a crawl of Gumroad's own category listings, which rank by popularity, so a product of yours appears above only if it was ranking in its category when that crawl ran. Gumroad publishes no category on the product page itself, so for anything outside the crawl there is no honest way to say what it should be compared against — and it is left out rather than compared against a set it may not belong to. The practical effect is that this section covers your better-selling products and is quiet about the long tail.

The 5 product(s) with no comparison, and why

These are listed rather than dropped. A report that quietly shows fewer rows than your storefront has products is making a claim it did not measure.

Sources