I have had my Gumroad account for years now. I use it for all of my purchases. Once, I made a purchase by entering a different email, which resulted in two separate accounts.
I contacted the Gumroad support team and requested them to merge both accounts into one, and they happily did it.
With that good experience with Gumroad support in the past, I got curious about something.
I had a purchase in my Gumroad account that I rarely used, so I decided to sell it. But the thing with Gumroad is that you can’t transfer an individual purchase to some other account. You have to give away your entire account since your purchase's license is linked to your Gumroad account. That wasn't an option for me.
However, since I had requested an account merger in the past, I wondered if it was possible to isolate a single purchase into a separate account of its own.
So out of curiosity, I dropped an email to Gumroad support and they confirmed that yes, that is indeed possible and they can move a single purchase to a separate account.
That was good news!
Process of Single Purchase Transfer
The process is pretty straightforward:
- I had to create a new account
- Contact Gumroad support, and provide them with the following details:
- Name of Purchase
- Payment Method
- Date of Purchase
- Destination Account
- Upon verification, the purchase would be transferred.
To start the process, I created a new Gumroad account and sent an email to Gumroad with all the information they requested.
I think it took them two days to transfer the purchase to the new account. They sent a confirmation email to confirm the transfer.
Unexpected Additional Purchase
When I checked my new account, there were two purchases instead of one.
Odd, right?
I thought maybe they transferred two purchases from Account A to Account B by mistake. I checked the other purchase and found out that it was not mine.
It was someone else's purchase and I was really surprised. I checked the purchase details to confirm and it was indeed bought by someone in the United States.
This piqued my curiosity about how that could happen. When I looked at the purchase details closely then I found out that the last four digits of the credit card that was used to make the purchase matched the last four digits of my credit card.
Other than that, the purchase date also matched mine, but not the purchase year.
From this, I gather that the support agent who handled the transfer matched the last four digits of the card and purchase date into their database and moved all the products that they could retrieve to my destination account.
Potential Risks and Concerns
The situation was puzzling, and honestly, a little concerning. What if there were more purchases that matched the details of my purchase?
I received the product today by mistake; what if someday I lose a purchase this way? Gumroad won’t notify the losing party because it wasn’t deliberate.
Also, I can’t open my Gumroad account daily to make sure that my purchases aren’t mistakenly transferred to someone else’s account.
The purchase that was transferred to me by mistake was a physical product and the actual product was delivered to the owner. But what if it was a digital product of high value?
I hope Gumroad improves its infrastructure or support or whatever was responsible for this kind of unprofessionalism.
