A downloadable product — a template pack, a preset bundle, a PDF — is about the simplest thing you can sell online, which makes it the clearest place to watch what a checkout actually does. Here is one NZ$29 product followed the whole way through: the price, the GST, the delivery, and the small add-on beside it.
You can sell a digital download from New Zealand with your own Stripe, PayPal or Airwallex account and a checkout that delivers the file link the moment payment lands. Under NZ$60,000 of turnover you do not charge GST and the price is simply the price; registered, the same NZ$29 is NZ$25.22 plus NZ$3.78 GST.
The file itself can live anywhere a link can reach — a zip in cloud storage, a shared folder, a page on your own site. gocushy is the checkout, not the file host: it takes the payment into an account with your name on it, works out the tax line, issues the receipt, and hands the buyer the link. It does not store your files, it is not a course platform, and it does not file your GST return — it gets the numbers on the paperwork right so that filing is the easy part.
Say the pack is priced at NZ$29. If you are not GST-registered, the price is the whole story: the buyer pays NZ$29.00, the receipt says NZ$29.00, and there is no tax line, because an unregistered seller does not charge GST and must not issue documents calling themselves tax invoices.
If you are registered, the buyer still pays NZ$29.00, and the tax invoice shows the split IRD expects — NZ$25.22 for the pack plus NZ$3.78 GST, the same NZ$29.00 read the way your accountant needs to read it.
| Seller | Pack | GST | Buyer pays |
|---|---|---|---|
| Not GST-registered | NZ$29.00 | — | NZ$29.00 |
| GST-registered | NZ$25.22 | NZ$3.78 | NZ$29.00 |
Either way the buyer’s experience is identical. The split is bookkeeping, and the useful thing is having it done at the moment of sale rather than reverse-engineered from a bank statement at the end of the month.
Each offer stores a delivery link. The moment the payment lands, the buyer sees that link on the confirmation page, and the same link is on the receipt in their inbox — so there is no manual sending, no morning ritual of emailing zips to overnight buyers, and no window where someone has paid and is sitting there waiting.
There is one rule attached, and it is deliberate: an offer with no delivery link, access note or webhook is refused at the point of going live, because a buyer who paid and received nothing is treated as the worst outcome the system can produce, not as a support ticket. Worth knowing the limit too: the link is delivered, not policed. gocushy does not watermark files or stop a buyer passing a public URL along, so if that matters for your product, put the file behind something that checks who is asking.
A bump is a small related add-on offered as a single tick box on the payment page — for a NZ$29 template pack, something like a NZ$12 bonus icon set. The buyer ticks it or does not; there is no second checkout. Tick it and the card is charged NZ$41.00, and the paperwork stays exact: a registered seller’s invoice shows the pack at NZ$25.22 plus NZ$3.78 GST, and the bump as its own line at NZ$10.43 plus NZ$1.57 GST — NZ$12.00 on the nose. An unregistered seller’s bump is simply NZ$12.00 flat.
On a NZ$29 product the bump matters more than it looks, because the numbers are small: if one buyer in three ticks it, the average order moves from NZ$29 to NZ$33 without any new traffic. That is arithmetic, not a promise — whether your buyers tick it depends on whether the add-on actually belongs next to the pack.
No. Registration becomes compulsory once your turnover passes NZ$60,000 in any rolling 12 months — at NZ$29 a sale, that is 2,069 orders in a year. Most download sellers start well under it, and that is normal, not a compliance gap. Nothing above breaks while you are under: the checkout sells the pack at NZ$29 with no tax line, and only starts producing the NZ$25.22 plus NZ$3.78 split on the day you register.
The threshold is measured over any rolling 12 months rather than a calendar year, so a strong launch counts against the twelve months that follow it. Watching the running total is easier than discovering it in arrears, and whether your price stays at NZ$29 after registering is a pricing decision, not a plumbing one.
Connect your own Stripe, PayPal or Airwallex account, paste the file link into an offer, tick a bump onto the payment page if you have one, and buy the pack yourself — then read the confirmation page, the receipt and the invoice that come out the other end. The trial exists so you can run that whole loop on your own product before a real buyer does.
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