Gumroad is an eCommerce platform with many tools designed to assist creators in selling digital downloads and online courses, with an easy setup process making getting started hassle-free. Plus, built-in marketing tools help increase conversion rates.
This platform does not charge transaction fees and enables creators to build customizable storefronts. Unfortunately, however, it may not be an optimal choice for selling physical products.
Teachable
Teachable provides creators with an effective platform to share their passions, expertise and knowledge with a wider audience. Its intuitive course builder makes curating engaging multimedia content easy – including video lessons and interactive assignments – while built-in marketing tools help creators attract students while growing their businesses.
Teachable’s platform is flexible and customizable, enabling instructors to craft an educational experience tailored to their brand identity. Choose from an assortment of course themes and layouts while adding custom domains, affiliate programs, third-party integrations and webhooks as desired – and finally pay with PayPal or Stripe with ease!
Teachable stands out with its Buy Now, Pay Later feature that enables students to purchase courses using installment plans through Affirm and Afterpay. This functionality helps increase sales while improving the customer experience and increasing retention rates. Recently, Teachable also unveiled memberships – an innovative product offering which enables creators to build a recurring revenue model by gating access by tier. Tiers can be customized by creators themselves while students have the flexibility of upgrading and downgrading from any tier within their account.
Teachable stands out with its robust analytics and reporting, providing valuable data insights about student enrollments and transactions – such as course progress, sales transactions and overall revenue generated per course – at both student and teacher levels. These analytics are also available on an individual course level for easy monitoring.
Teachable offers notable features to assist new learners, including its ability to slowly introduce course content over time and its ease of adding quizzes for comprehension assessment. Unfortunately, Kajabi outshines Teachable with its more robust quiz offerings such as embedded coding exercises, multiple choice questions and paragraph questions; also its Power Editor uses Shopify Liquid templating language so course creators can customize almost all aspects of their website without extensive coding knowledge required.
Podia
Podia is an all-in-one platform designed for creators that provides everything they need to build and host products, manage email marketing campaigns, accept payments, manage customers and manage customers in one convenient place. Podia has garnered top reviews across Capterra, G2, Trustpilot and others for being user friendly with exceptional support – many creators find that using Podia saves them multiple tools and makes their business simpler to operate overall.
Podia offers many features for creators to manage their business, including a customizable storefront with global tax support and zero transaction fees (except on its free plan). Furthermore, creators can use Podia to add custom sales pages and upsells as well as embed their products in any website without having to code. Furthermore, there are marketing and analytics tools provided that help build their businesses further.
Drag-and-drop technology makes creating and updating pages simple, while its built-in sales funnels can help drive more traffic and make more sales, while email marketing features engage your audience and automate workflows. Furthermore, it supports various currencies and payment gateways.
Kajabi is another popular option similar to Podia in that it offers customizable storefront and course creation tools, but has additional features such as event management tools and video hosting. While more costly than Podia, its additional features may justify their higher costs for some users.
Podia’s community features make it easier for creators to form and manage communities around their courses, providing forums for helpful discussions as well as sharing extra courses or downloadable content such as images or videos. Creators can set commissions for affiliates, track performance and release payouts automatically; making promoting courses and creating revenue streams simpler than ever!
LearnWorlds
LearnWorlds is an online platform designed to enable the creation, sale, and marketing of digital products and services. It offers several features to maximize engagement while operating your business smoothly such as payment processing, ecommerce optimization, fraud monitoring, customer support services integration with popular marketing tools such as MailChimp or ConvertKit and its starting price of $33/month.
LearnWorlds offers many additional tools, such as its full white label option that removes its branding from your site and gives access to analytics allowing you to track products’ performance allowing you to optimize strategies based on campaign outcomes.
LearnWorlds is an ideal digital marketplace, providing creators with everything they need to establish communities, manage subscriptions, and develop interactive courses. Its intuitive UI supports multiple languages and currencies; there are various themes available so users can customize their website; plus, there’s even a free trial and plan available if users wish to test out this service first-hand.
As much as the platform’s features may appear straightforward, they require some technical understanding for optimal use. For instance, creating a paid course requires entering a price point, adding images and descriptions, selecting whether or not video components should be added, and choosing whether you want it offered as one-off purchase or subscription option.
Each type of creator relies on different tools to run their business successfully, from project management tools for campaign planning, social media scheduling software and digital to-do lists – Beatrice of The Bliss Bean is known to use Trello to organize her content calendar and manage daily tasks.
LearnWorlds provides more than its basic features to creators looking to boost sales. It can add discount codes or cart abandonment recovery solutions in order to increase conversion rates, as well as integrate with popular marketing automation platforms like Zapier and FoMO.
Shopify
Shopify provides entrepreneurs with an accessible, user-friendly platform on which to start or expand their businesses. By seamlessly integrating tools and channels, eliminating clutter and streamlining operations. It adapts to your company’s technical maturity, growth trajectory, size complexity or location; providing only solutions necessary to help your growth while eliminating unnecessary features that don’t add anything new.
Shopify’s built-in tools are tailored to address a broad spectrum of business needs, such as payment gateways, tax calculators, shipping carriers, inventory management software and accounting software. In addition, it supports various apps to extend core functionality – these include email marketing tools, dropshipping services and CMS systems. Shopify helps optimize your site for search engines with its mobile responsive design and canonical tags that ensure the main version of each product page on Shopify is the primary version.
Shopify may have its downsides, but its easy use and endless growth potential make it a great option for new entrepreneurs and power sellers alike. While its limitations include simplistic blogging features and limited store customization capabilities, these shortcomings are overshadowed by Shopify’s wide variety of selling opportunities and core business management tools. Shopify provides numerous customer support options including phone, email, web chat and community forums and also provides a free trial without a credit card requirement so that new entrepreneurs and power sellers alike can evaluate it risk free.