This guide walks through how to setup notifications through the Gumroad API on new membership creation as well as membership cancellation. You may need to be notified because on a new or cancelled membership, you need to do some setup in a different system or take some action.

One thing to note is that by default, Gumroad will send you an email on any new sales on your site. In many cases, this might be all the notification that you need. However, this might not always work, for example if the person doing the setup work won't have access to your email or if you wanted to configure some type of custom integration.

There are three steps to setting this up:

Create an Access Token
Make an HTTP call to the Gumroad API
Create a Test Membership and Subscribe

Create an Access Token

Gumroad's documentation for this is very straightforward: https://help.gumroad.com/article/280-create-application-api. One nice thing Gumroad does is first walk you through access 'For Just Your Gumroad Account'. These are the specific instructions this guide will follow. (other providers start off by walking through the OAuth section, which can be really confusing). At the end of this step you should have a very long string of random characters underneath the box titled 'Access Token'. Hold on to those because you'll need them in Step 2.

Make an HTTP call to the Gumroad API

The example documentation uses a tool named cURL to do this. I use a tool called Postman. Of course either will work, but if you are just getting started you might find Postman easier to use. Within Postman, create a new request. It should look like this:

Next, you need to change three things:

Change the method from GET to PUT
Update the request URL field to
https://api.gumroad.com/v2/resource_subscriptions
Add the following three parameters as 'Keys': access_token, resource_name, and post_url.

When you are done it should look like this:

Last step is to cut and paste your access token from step 1. into the Value section that parameter and enter the URL where you would like to receive this notification in the Value for the post_url parameter. I used an endpoint on AWS, but if you just wanted to test things you could quickly create an endpoint using something like RequestBin.

Once those have been all entered, click the blue Send button and in the response field you should see something like this:

I blacked out the post_url I used, and, for security, I'd suggest NOT making that URL public.

Create a Test Membership Product and Subscribe

Last step is to create a Membership product and test. I created a new membership product in Gumroad with a $0.00 price and clearly labeled it as TEST Membership so that people know what it is. I also chose to NOT have the product show up on my profile page, this option is available on the Settings menu and looks like this:

Once that was all set up, created a Membership. To do this, I created an incognito browser window and cut and pasted the URL of the product. I'm not sure if that was totally necessary or not, but I figured it'd be good as a matter of practice. Once I subscribed, I went and checked the endpoint I created and, sure enough, the following JSON was posted to that endpoint:

For more details about the types of events you can subscribe to, the Gumroad documentation lists them out on this page: https://app.gumroad.com/api#resource-subscriptions options are available for sale, subscription_upgraded, subscription_restarted and cancellation to name a few.

Hope this guide was helpful & good luck with your setup!

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