Teachable was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Ankur Nagpal and Conrad Wadowski. In March 2020, the company was acquired by Hotmart. The platform was originally called Fedora and acted as a side hustle to help people sell online courses. In 2015, it was rebranded into Teachable. The platform serves 150,000 creators from 180 countries.
What is Teachable?
Teachable is a platform for building, selling, and hosting online courses, digital downloads, memberships, coaching, and community. This no-code solution lets you create custom learning experiences for your students, while Teachable handles payment processing. Teachers on the platform can build online courses with features such as quizzes, videos, and other content. You can also create AI-assisted courses.
How does Teachable work?
Teachable works when creators upload their teaching resources, like online courses, to the platform using the drag-and-drop builder. You can use their AI to help generate an outline, curriculum, and course description. Teachable handles the checkout process and offers marketing tools to help you make more sales. The platform acts as a host for your content. It also includes a mobile app that your students can use to navigate your content.
What you need to know about selling on Teachable
One thing you need to know about selling on Teachable is that it is a particularly expensive platform for beginners. Not only do they charge a $29 monthly subscription for their Starter Plan, but they also charge a 7.5% transaction fee. There are Teachable alternatives that charge lower transaction fees on their free plans. Overall, the cost of selling products on this platform is high for beginners who haven’t even made a sale yet. Paying a subscription fee when you aren’t making money from your products yet can put your business into debt before it can even take off.
Most online store builders allow you to sell an unlimited number of products on all plans, even the basic ones. However, on Teachable, you can only sell one product on the Starter plan. On top of this, you can only sell 100 products on the Advanced plan, which costs $309 each month. Course creators, ebook writers, and coaches will often have multiple products to serve different audiences or topics. Having a cap on the number of products you can sell hurts your earning potential.
Unlike other ecommerce platforms, Teachable doesn’t include all of its features on all plans. You need to upgrade your account to access features such as the affiliate program, unlimited integrations, free subtitles and translations, and more. The platform nickels and dimes its customers for features that should be included even in their Starter plan.
Teachable isn’t intuitive or easy to use. There is a learning curve to setting up your school or multiple schools.
Teachable also lacks a large variety of payment gateways. Most online store builders offer over 100 payment options for customers worldwide. On Teachable, you’ll only have access to Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and buy now pay later options. This may work well in the United States. However, if you sell to students around the world, you may not have a payment method that’s available to their region.
One downside of Teachable is that you can’t sell physical products on the platform. There are certain products that someone who sells online courses, ebooks, coaching, and more would sell physically. For example, some might want to sell physical copies of their books. Others might want to sell journals for tracking details. Other physical products might include flash cards, workbooks, branded merchandise, wellness products, specialty items for their niche, and more.
Is Teachable the best platform to sell products?
No, Teachable isn’t the best platform for selling products; Payhip is. Payhip has a free forever plan with a 5% transaction fee, but no monthly subscription. Plus, you can create and sell an unlimited number of products, have an unlimited number of students, and access all marketing features, such as an affiliate program, email marketing, and more, on all plans. This easy-to-use platform lets you build an online store to sell digital or physical products in just a few minutes. Want to start selling products online? Sign up now.