Podia was founded in 2014 by Spencer Fry to help people sell online courses. Today, Podia has expanded its offerings, allowing sellers to offer digital products and memberships. They have over 150,000 business owners who have used their platform to sell digital products online.
What is Podia?
Podia is an ecommerce platform for selling digital products and services. You can sell online courses, digital downloads, webinars, coaching, and community on the platform. They offer distinct functionality for the product types they accept.
In addition, they offer email marketing, so you can run weekly newsletters to your customers with available email templates. You’ll be able to build email forms on landing pages to help you build an audience on your website that you can remarket to.
Podia also offers a blogging platform for you, allowing you to build an audience through content marketing. Building a blog allows you to rank organically in search engines, both traditional and AI.
If you’d like to see Podia compared to other platforms, check out Podia alternatives.
How does Podia work?
Podia works by allowing creators to build websites to sell digital products and services, such as courses, webinars, and more. You can build an online store quickly using their pre-made templates. You can upload products to your website, modify some design elements, and publish content on your website to help you build some domain authority online.
Sellers will need to create digital products, write product descriptions, and maintain their websites through regular content creation to attract new customers.
Podia sellers are required to market their own products themselves. Unfortunately, they doesn’t have a central marketplace like Etsy or Payhip for selling digital products. This makes marketing more difficult, as you don’t have any pre-existing audiences you can promote your products to through their platform.
What you need to know about selling on Podia
Unlike other platforms, it’s not easy to sell physical products on Podia. You’ll need to use a workaround to upload your products. It isn’t straightforward. Also, they recommend using this workaround only for a small number of physical products. If your goal is to build an online store with dozens or even hundreds of products, you’ll be better off choosing another platform instead.
Podia is also known to be kind of pricey. Their lowest-tier plan costs $33 per month and includes a 5% transaction fee. The high subscription fee plus transaction fee is double-dipping into sellers’ earnings. If you want to sell products online, a platform that charges only a 5% transaction fee with no subscription, another ecommerce platform may be your best bet.
Podia also lacks EU/UK VAT tax handling. If you’re selling products to Europeans, you’ll likely want to choose a platform that complies with global tax laws; otherwise, you put your business at risk. You’re on your own when it comes to following national tax regulations for the customers you accept payment from.
Another setback with Podia is that you can’t access their affiliate management system unless you sign up for the $75/month pricing tier. Competing platforms offer affiliate marketing tools even in their free plan. Making an affiliate management system require an upgrade makes it harder for sellers on this platform to make additional revenue, capping their potential success.
If you’ve set up a PayPal account to help you accept payments for your online business, you might run into some issues with this platform. Podia only allows you to be paid via PayPal on its highest tiered plan. Considering that PayPal is the go-to payment platform for most online sellers, this can be disadvantageous to your online store’s success.
Is Podia the best platform for selling digital products?
No, Podia isn’t the best platform for selling digital products. Payhip is. You can compare these two platforms by checking out the Payhip vs Podia article. Unlike Podia, Payhip has a free forever plan with only a 5% transaction fee. They also let you accept PayPal payments alongside 100 other payment gateways, including Apple Pay, Google Pay, Stripe, and more. In addition, you can access the affiliate management tool on their free plan. They also have a marketplace where you can list your products online for free. Finally, they handle all EU/UK VAT. To start selling products online, sign up today.