🍋 Lemon Drop #09: Affiliates coming soon, migration tools, Zapier, and platform improvements

Looking for a payment provider without the headache? Try Lemon Squeezy — a global merchant of record that handles all of your payments, taxes, fraud, affiliates, email and more all for one simple price.

As we ring in the new year of 2023, the focus remains the same — build the world's best platform for selling digital products.

We spent most of 2022 expanding our platform to support SaaS companies. From rich API additions, improved documentation, developer SDK, payment recovery, and end-to-end subscription management.

As we look at our roadmap heading into the new year, the team is working towards some big releases to kick 2023 off. Starting with affiliates, customer portal, our highly anticipated website builder, and a marketplace.

If you’re new around here, be sure to check out our Lemon Drop series (#01, #02, #03, #04, #05, #06, #07, #08). In today's Lemon Drop we'll be covering the latest release, plus share some news on what's coming soon to the platform.

Here's what is included in the #09 release:

• Migration tools for Gumroad, Paddle, and Stripe
• Zapier integration
• API additions
• QoL (quality of life) improvements

Also, a sneak peek at what's coming next:

• Affiliates
• Metered billing
• Customer portal
• Localized pricing refactor
• Improvements to our design editor

Without further ado — let's get to it.

Migration tools

Lemon Squeezy supports various types of digital products from ebooks, templates, licensed software, SaaS, courses, and more. As our platform has grown in popularity, the requests for migration support from our competitors have naturally increased. It seemed like the right time to set aside a few cycles to build proper migration tools.

Little did we know how valuable the Gumroad migration work would be at the end of 2022 when Gumroad raised their prices.

As of today, we provide free migrations for the following platforms:

• Gumroad
• Paddle
• Stripe

It's important to note, each of these respective platforms provide different access to migrate certain items. Additionally, we do have a beta version of a Paddle migration sync — making it much easier to migrate.

The idea of our Paddle migration sync is by using your Paddle vendor ID and a vendor auth code, we run a scheduled job every couple of hours to automatically sync new products, customers, transactions, subscriptions, coupons and license keys from your Paddle account to your Lemon Squeezy store. This allows you to have more flexibility on when you actually "flip the switch" over to Lemon Squeezy as you can set things up while having the peace of mind that everything from Paddle is being synced to Lemon Squeezy.

Easy peasy.

Zapier integration

Lemon Squeezy now offers a Zapier integration that allows you to connect your account with over 5,000 other apps and services. This allows you to easily automate your workflows and save time.

Zapier works with Triggers and Actions to build powerful automations. For example:

• When a new order is created in Lemon Squeezy (trigger) send a notification to a Slack channel (action)
• When a new order is created in Lemon Squeezy (trigger) add the customer to a list in Mailchimp (action)
• When a subscription is cancelled in Lemon Squeezy (trigger) send a follow-up email to the customer (action)

You can easily connect your Zapier account to your Lemon Squeezy account under the integrations page in your settings.

API Additions

We're constantly looking for ways to improve our developer experience. When it comes to our documentation, API, webhooks, and SDK's — our work here is never complete.

With the recent hiring of Dan Rowden (Head of Developer Relations) expect to see a lot of new developer guides, SDKs, tutorials and more.

• The API now has a customers endpoint
• The orders endpoints (and webhook/Zapier events) now contain a *first_order_item* object so that users don’t have to make another API call to manually fetch the product/variant data.
• Added a new *invoice_immediately* flag when updating subscriptions (API docs)

Last but certainly not least, we have been working on taking our API to the next level. Opening more billing methods like metered billing (usage-based), refactoring localized pricing, and secret / publishable API keys.

The current implementation of our API keys limits what we can ship to our developers, so let’s do something about that—starting with a newer, more secure way to manage API keys on Lemon Squeezy.

Our new API keys feature Secret and Publishable API keys, and they do exactly what the label says; Secret keys are used for your backend code and have full access to Lemon Squeezy APIs. Publishable keys are for client-side use only and are limited in scope to only specific API resources; this will be used to enable new functionality on our Lemon.js SDK, such as Localized pricing and more. You can roll these keys anytime in the dashboard’s API settings to prevent unauthorized access.

Of course, all existing API keys will still work. These can still be managed under “Personal API keys” in the API settings. We’ll likely revoke these keys in the future, but we’ll give any developers affected a timely heads-up.

In the future, we plan to expand on this and bring Restricted API keys to Lemon Squeezy; this will provide you even greater control over what resources any specific key can do. Let us know if you’d like to see this by getting in touch via support.

Quality of life improvements

• Simulate test mode subscription events from the subscription panel in the Dashboard (useful for testing webhooks)
• Successful database migration to increase platform performance
• Intertia.js optimizations to improve in-app speed and performance
• Allow cancellation of subscription in unpaid status
• Logo in emails now link to merchant account, not LemonSqueezy.com
• Abandoned cart emails no longer send to merchants
• Improved test mode checkouts (demo)
• Bug fix resolving some refunded orders not deactivating license keys
• Fixed some test mode subscription payment webhooks
• Bonus: Here's a great Typescript SDK for Lemon Squeezy made by Ben (@nurodev).

Looking ahead at what's next

Affiliates

Currently, the team is shipping new updates to the product week in and week out. In terms of new feature releases, we're aiming to release our new affiliate feature by the end of Jan 2023. Which is just weeks away. The anticipation for this feature is high and we've taking a lot of time really building something that can compete with any other type of affiliate software.

Some of the key features to expect from this affiliate feature release:

• Affiliate hub
• Cookie type/set/length
• Support for recurring commissions
• Payouts powered by Lemon Squeezy
• Set commissions per product & affiliate
• Access to global affiliates across all of Lemon Squeezy

The new affiliate feature has been a long time in the making, but definitely worth the wait.

Metered billing + Refactoring localized pricing

As mentioned in the API additions above you will be gaining new features to make Lemon Squeezy even more flexible. This work opens more billing methods like metered billing (usage-based), refactoring localized pricing, and secret / publishable API keys. As of today, Lemon Squeezy supports several types of billing methods such as flat rate, per seat, per license, etc. Soon, you will the ability to offer usage-based billing.

In addition to this, we're also refactoring our pricing API's to support a more traditional localized pricing rather than displaying the payments in local currencies and processing payments in USD, it will be full local currency support.

Customer Portal

Currently, your customers have the ability to access their purchase's, download assets, and cancel subscriptions. We're working on expanding on existing "My Orders" section to allow merchants to let their customers manage their entire accounts, purchases, subscriptions, payment methods, etc., via a hosted customer portal.

Builder Improvements

Over the past few years, we've received loads of requests for a customizable builder. It's definitely on our roadmap but we're currently exploring new ways to quickly generate product pages as easy as you can create payment links. We are currently in the design and research phase and once we get through some of the highly requested features, we will kick off work to improve our website building experience. Expect nothing short of amazing.

Wrapping up

There you have it. If you've made it this far, thank you. We appreciate the support and interest in what we're building. Please be sure to check out our roadmap, watch our changelog for latest releases, and follow us on Twitter to follow along.

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See you in the next Lemon Drop.

Stay fresh,
@lmsqueezy

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