Create and Sell Online Courses via Shopify January 4, 2017 20:00
Online learning has been growing in popularity over the last few years. The barriers to set up online courses have been reducing where it is no longer large organizations or institutions who are able to create these courses.
Online learning allows providers to share their knowledge at a low cost, and allows learners access to this low-cost learning from anywhere and at any time. In this post, we’ll take a look at a couple of ways you can use Shopify to sell online courses.
Online courses via Shopify: Why create courses
If you’re passionate and knowledgable about a certain subject, creating online courses can help establish you as an expert in the field. This can help you enhance your brand to create credibility if you sell your own products, or endorse products to get affiliate revenue.
Since there is no physical space required for teaching, online learning can provide you with a low-cost stream of passive income through scalability. You can market your courses on your Shopify store and make them accessible to as big an audience as you’d like with no geographical restrictions. You also don’t have to be present every time a learner starts your course and can help guide them through support forums.
Lastly, online courses provide your learners a structured way to gain knowledge about a subject. As they progress in a step-by-step manner and take proficiency tests, this creates a better learning experience than trying to find things online.
Online courses via Shopify: Bootstrap with content access restrictions
One way to set up online learning on your Shopify store is by creating pages and blog posts with the course content, and selling content access to your customers. This is a low-cost and bootstrap way of creating courses without using a third-party system. Without making too big of an investment, this can help you gauge interest in your courses and get feedback.
For tests and quizzes, you can use survey platforms like SurveyMonkey to build questions, receive submissions, and display correct answers at the end of the survey.
If you’re creating videos, you can use video platforms where the videos cannot be shared and only you can get the embed codes.
However, if you would like to scale your online learning business or products, you will be better served by using a third-party learning management platform and selling those courses on your Shopify store.
Online courses via Shopify: Learning management integration
You can integrate third-party learning management systems using their Shopify apps. Services like Avizr and TalentLMS allow you to build a robust online learning environment. These services connect with your Shopify store via apps – Avizr app and TalentLMS app – to enable eCommerce.
Typically, these apps will have an option within the platform (see below video for Avizr example) to connect with your Shopify store so that a course is mapped as a product on your store.
Online courses via Shopify: Summary
Online learning is a growing trend due to its accessibility and lower cost compared to traditional learning institutions. You can create your own online learning courses to share your knowledge, generate passive income, and establish yourself as an expert in the field.
You can use Shopify to create and sell online learning content in a number of ways. You can bootstrap the learning by selling content access, and creating pages and blog posts with different learning materials. The other option is to create courses on a third-party learning management system (LMS) and integrating it with your Shopify store to sell the courses. The latter option provides you with a dedicated LMS that creates a better user experience for your learners.
Have you considered selling online courses? What platforms do you find useful? Please share in the comments below.
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