Crate vs Payhip
Payhip is a storefront for digital products, courses and memberships, and it handles the parts of selling a file across borders that are genuinely tedious. Crate covers those too, and keeps going into the parts of a business that involve a warehouse and a counter.
What Payhip is: A hosted storefront for creators selling digital downloads, online courses, memberships and coaching, with cross-border tax handling included.
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How does Crate compare to Payhip?
Payhip sells digital products, courses and memberships from a hosted storefront, and it takes on the cross-border tax handling that makes selling a file internationally more annoying than selling a parcel. Crate sells digital products too, alongside physical stock, and is built as a commerce platform: variants, locations, a point of sale, delivery, staff permissions and a storefront on a domain you own. The question is what proportion of your catalog will ever be physical. A creator whose catalog is entirely files, courses and subscriptions is well served by a tool that only has to do that. A business that already ships things, or plans to, gets a shorter path by starting on a platform that holds both from the first day.
Side by side
Qualitative and stable. No prices and no fee percentages for either side, because both change without notice and a comparison table carrying a stale number is worse than no table.
| What | Crate | Payhip |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A commerce platform for files and physical goods, sold across a storefront, chat and social. | A storefront for digital products, courses and memberships. |
| Courses and memberships | Digital products and recurring billing are supported; a dedicated course player is not part of the platform. | A core part of the product, and one of the reasons people pick it. |
| Physical stock | Tracked per variant and per location. | Not the focus of the product. |
| Point of sale | Included, sharing one stock count with the online store. | Not offered. |
| Selling in chat | Built in. A chat order is a real order with real stock movement. | Not a native channel. |
| Your own domain | A designed storefront on a domain you own. | A hosted storefront, with a custom domain available. |
Which one you actually want
Both columns are real. If the right-hand one describes you, take it: a product that does not fit you is a refund with extra steps.
Choose Crate if
- Some of what you sell has to be picked, packed and shipped.
- You sell in person as well as online and want one stock count for both.
- Most of your orders start as a message rather than as a checkout.
- You want staff on the account with different permissions.
Choose Payhip if
- Your catalog is entirely files, courses and memberships.
- You want a course player and a member area as part of the product rather than something to arrange.
- You are a single creator and you want the smallest surface that gets you paid.
Where Crate is behind
Every comparison on this site carries this section. A page that only lists what we do better is an advert, and you already know how much to trust one of those.
Where Crate is behind: course delivery. Crate can sell access and take a recurring payment, but it does not ship a lesson player, drip scheduling or a student progress view, and pretending otherwise would be the exact failure this page exists to avoid. If teaching is the product, a tool built for teaching will serve you better than a commerce platform with a file attached.
About switching to Crate from Payhip
Short answers, and none of them hedge. If yours is not here, ask us on the contact page.
Can I sell a subscription on Crate?
Yes. Recurring billing is supported, and a subscriber is a customer record with order history like any other.
Does Crate handle tax on digital sales abroad?
Tax rules are configured per market and applied at checkout. The pricing and tax pages state exactly what is calculated and what is left to you, and nothing here should be read as tax advice.
How this comparison is kept honest
Last checked
Everything said about Payhip here is a qualitative property of the product taken from what Payhip publishes about itself: what kind of product it is, which channels it sells through natively, and which capabilities it ships rather than leaves to an add-on. We publish no prices, fees, percentages or counts for any competitor, including ourselves, on these pages, because those change without notice and a table carrying a stale number does more damage than no table.
Claims about Crate on this page do not go beyond what our own feature, pricing and security pages already state. Where they would, they are not made.
Product capabilities change. This page states what was accurate on the date above and nothing beyond it. If a row is out of date, we would rather hear it than rank on it.
Other comparisons
Same structure, same honesty rules, different competitor.
- Crate vs Sellfy Creator storefront with print on demand
- Crate vs Big Cartel Small storefront for artists and makers
- Crate vs Bumpa Mobile business app
- Crate vs Selar Digital product storefront
- Crate vs payment link storefronts Payment links
- Crate vs Shopify Hosted commerce platform
- Crate vs Squarespace Website builder with commerce
- Crate vs Square Online Payments-led commerce
Try it before you decide.
Every plan starts with the same trial and the same full feature set. Import your catalog, take one real order, and judge it on that.
14-day free trial · No card required