By now, you all know how much we love Shopify at Kait Studio. Shopify is the most popular e-commerce platform in the world at this point. One of the biggest misconceptions is that you aren’t able to sell courses on Shopify – we hear it often. But today, we’re handing out BRUTAL honesty.
Over the years, we’ve worked with a ton of course creators as well as creating our own courses. We’ve tried and tested pretty much every platform out there and we have a thing or two to add – from both the course creators’ side and the designer/developer’s side in terms of tech and ease of use.
Through a million and one deep dives online, it seems like a lot of people are confused and assume Shopify is for courses – but that’s not really the case. Shopify is actually intended for physical products – but people do use it for digital products.
Listen, we’re big fans of combining tech where we can. If we can put everything in one place, that’s exactly what we do – for both ourselves and our clients. I can’t tell you how much clients we’ve started working with who have had to “bandaid” a solution with 50 different apps…ouch. It’s rough and it’s why we always dive into how we can combine and cut costs immediately for our clients – before starting any project.
So today, we’re breaking down who should host their course on Shopify and why – and what other platforms we recommend.
Let’s dive into our thoughts:
If you only sell physical products, use Shopify and only Shopify.
If you only sell courses and/or other digital products, use another platform like Kajabi, Podia, Thinkific, Thrivecart, etc. However, we’ve tried them all and highly recommend Kajabi.
If you plan on doing both, this really comes down to the functionality of your course and how much work you plan on putting into it. If you already have your course on another platform, I don’t recommend moving everything over. It’s tedious, for sure. Some platforms, such as Thinkific and Teachable, allow you to sync the two and host your content on your website. It isn’t entirely user-friendly but it is doable. If your budget is limited, it may be worth the time to move everything to Shopify and integrate with a third party (Thinkific, etc). Keep in mind that Shopify itself does not offer course-creation – you do need to use a third party app for the content itself and the portal for your students.
In our personal opinion, Kajabi is the best course platform – but it doesn’t mean hosting it on Shopify isn’t great, too. Just personal preference!
Tell us below – are you looking to create a course? Give us the deets, we’d love to help you go in the right direction.
