What is Avocado?
Avocado is an online audio publishing platform that allows you to sell your audio products directly to your customers, without the hassles, high fees, and low conversion rates of a marketplace model. Avocado provides you with a payment form that you can share all over the internet or on your website, as well as insights into who your customers are, how they're finding you, and how to keep them coming back for more.
If you have an audio product that you want to sell directly on your website, or to your following on social media, Avocado is your home base for:
- Creating and selling audio products
- Distributing audio products
- Gaining insight into how you are making sales
How can I use Avocado to make money?
Making money as a digital creator on Avocado is as follows:
- Create an account and set up your payout information.
- Create an audio product and upload all relevant audio files.
- Publish your audio product and share the link with the world via social media, your website, a newsletter, telephone poles, bathroom walls, etc.
- Your followers/fans/family/friends/enemies go to that link, enter their payment information, and receive their download link.
- We verify your account and your sales, then turn on your payouts.
- We pay you the net amount of your sales (your sales minus our fee).
What can I sell?
You can sell just about any audio product on Avocado. The most common items sold on Avocado are audio courses, audiobooks, and audio stories. Soon you will be able to sell memberships and pre-orders as well.
Before you get up and running, please make sure that the audio products you intend to sell on Avocado are, in fact, allowed to be sold on Avocado. You may want to brush up on the following:
Setting up your account
Before you can start selling on Avocado, you need to create an Avocado account at the Avocado login screen.
You'll then receive a confirmation email from Avocado. Make sure to confirm your account. If you haven't received this email, please check your spam box, or set up an email filter to accept all emails from the AvocadoAudio.com domain.
Choosing between Free and Premium accounts
Anyone and everyone can get started selling on Avocado for free. We also offer premium accounts. Upgrading your account offers you premium features as well as a lower sales fee.
If a customer unsubscribes from your updates, you can verify this in your Customers tab. You can also re-subscribe them (according to their wishes) by clicking or unclicking the box marked Receives posts in the Customer drawer.
Adding your products
Adding your first product only takes a few minutes. You can add audiobooks, audio course, audio stories, or basically any audio product.
First, enter a title, description, price, track names. Then you can upload files from your hard drive.
The largest single file you can upload to Avocado is 16 GB. That said, a single product can contain as many files as you like, and there is no limit to how many files you can upload to a Avocado product.
Pre-orders (coming soon)
Putting the final coats of paint (digital or otherwise) on your nearly-finished audio masterpiece? Not to worry! You can still gauge interest and make sales.
Pre-orders require a release date and price. You can add discount codes and adjust the price later.
Before the release date, upload the files, and Avocado will automatically charge all customers and deliver them their respective files on the release date. You can also adjust the date as often as you like, as well as manually release your pre-order.
Discount codes (coming soon)
Your products can have up to eight cover images. These can be images (png, jpeg, gif), videos, or audio files, as well as embeds from Soundcloud, Vimeo, or Youtube.
Sharing your work
Publishing your product will create a link to your product page where your customers will be able to purchase it. You can share this link with your email list, or use our social buttons to post directly to Twitter and Facebook.
You can also send people directly to your creator profile, where they can view and purchase all of your products from you at once.
Sharing on your website with the Overlay and Embed (coming soon)
Bring the Avocado checkout experience right to your own website with a short snippet of JavaScript code. The overlay brings up a payment window in which your customers can pay you and immediately download any files you have uploaded to the product.
Affiliates (coming soon)
If you have a network of like-minded pals who you want to help sell your products and receive a commission, you can add them as Affiliates.
Note: They will need to have a Avocado account set up before they can start making sales for you.
Finance, Security, & Getting Paid
Taxes
Depending on what you’re selling and where, you may be subject to taxes. Avocado does not add tax on top of your product price for you. We leave it up to you to either build tax into your product price. Note: Avocado takes a fee on everything that flows through our system.
We are looking to support taxes in the US and abroad soon.
Getting paid
Your payments page will show you the full breakdown of your sales, refunds/chargebacks, and fees. Stripe normally pays out charges within a few business days.
Security
Avocado cares about the privacy and security of your content. That’s why the only personal information your customers see is:
- Your Full Name (this will appear on their bank statement)
- Your Support Email
- Any links you have set up to your Facebook or Twitter accounts
Data and reporting
Analytics Dashboards
The Sales dashboard displays the views, sales, and conversion rates on your products and profile page, as well as the referral sources of your customers.
All your sales data (including customer emails, shipping addresses, etc) can be downloaded as a CSV from your Customer Tab.
Customer support
What Avocado does
Avocado provides support to your customers for any questions related to:
- Payments
- Playback
- Other questions specific to our service
If your customer’s card won’t work on a purchase or they’re having difficulties playing something, you can refer them to us. We leave purchase updates (e.g., changes to shipping info), refunds/cancellations (which can be handled through the creator portal), and other questions specific to your product up to your discretion.
These requests should be rare, but it’s important to designate someone on your team to handle them and respond to customers in a timely manner.
Refunds
On Avocado, you are in charge of refunding your customers. Decide on a refund policy, and communicate it in the bottom of your product descriptions.
To issue refunds, search for the buyer’s email from your Customers dashboard and click on it to open the customer drawer. You can either refund them in full by clicking the Refund fully button, or enter an amount in the box and click Issue partial refund.
Chargebacks
A chargeback happens when someone pays for your product, then disputes that charge with their payment provider (PayPal or a credit card agency). Typically, chargebacks are used for fraud (when a card or account is compromised), but they can be issued at other times, too.
Chargebacks are an unfortunate (but necessary) side effect of processing payments online. They happen only rarely, and Avocado is limited by regulatory laws and banking policies in how we can respond, but we always fight to get your money back for you.
Avocado will cover all chargeback fees for you, but chargebacks are deducted automatically from your account just as a refund would be. You do not pay any fees for refunds or chargebacks.
