Teachable boasts a user base of 100,000-course instructors who have generated sales of $500 mil. It’s subscription plans provide for the unlimited creation of courses and unlimited students.
This article will conduct a Teachable review and determine if it is the right solution to sell courses online. Before we proceed, I will first state that I have not Teachable for my own online learning solutions. Due to my own specific requirements, my work focuses on the LMS WordPress plugin LearnDash. However, Teachable does cater to a segment of course creators, and hence, this article was written to help you understand if it fits your needs. The comparison and insights are based on my research of their features provided on their free trial plan and user feedback found on review sites.
Key features to help you sell courses online
Before you start creating your course, you need to set up your school. You do this by creating your new school and naming it. Once that is done, you can start customising your site’s theme.
Site and theme customisation
The customisation features are relatively basic. Here are the items that you can customise:
- your site logo and thumbnail
- your site’s fonts from a selection of available fonts
- the navigation bar, footer, background, links, course page heading, subtitle and body text colour
Custom domain name
Use your own custom domain name – this allows you to link your own website to teachable
Page Builder
Teachable offers a page builder that allows you to create your bio pages and pages for your learning site. Note that the layouts are standard. You can add new content blocks, but you won’t be able to do creatively different design layouts.
Course Creation
- Setting sales pages for your courses.
- Configuring course compliance requirements. You can enforce lecture order, video watching or graded quiz completion.
- Setting out the course curriculum
Course curriculum involves developing content to your course (you can upload videos, images, create text). A course can be split into sections and multiple lectures. Within each lecture, you add videos, text or quizzes. Note that the quiz functionality is rather basic (only multiple choice quizzes) and you can only have 1 quiz per lecture. - Adding a pricing plan for your course. Options available are Free, one-time purchase, payment plan and subscription
- Drip your course content by setting a scheduled release of different sections of your course
Course Reports
Teachable offers the following student reports for your courses:
- Lecture completion rate reports
- Video stats for videos uploaded directly to Teachable
- Quiz scores
- Leaderboards
Coaching Services
Marketing
With Teachable, you can create discount coupons and upsell offers for your courses.
Accepting and processing course payments
Course creators have the following payment processing options:
- Teachable payments for those based in the US, Canada, UK or Germany
Credit and debit card payments are processed through Stripe. You receive your payouts daily, weekly or monthly to your Stripe Express account. - Monthly Payment Gateway
Credit and debit card payments are processed via Teachable’s stripe account, and you get paid out every 30 days via Paypal - Option to use Backoffice feature
Allows you to enable Paypal payment option for your students. Paypal payments will be processed using Teachable payments and paid out every 30 days. - For Professional Plans and higher (see Teachable pricing plans below), you will be able to use your own Stripe or Paypal custom payment gateway.
Teachable Pricing Plans
Teachable bills monthly and annually and offers the following plans. We list out the key differences between the plans below.
Basic
- 5% transaction fee on sales
- 2 admin users
Pro
- Features in addition to Basic
- No transaction fees
- 5 admin users
- Priority support (Live Chat)
- Additional graded quiz features
- Advanced reports for courses, videos, upsell performance
- Create your own branded website
- Course completion certificates
Business
- Features in addition to Basic and Pro
- 20 admin users
- Import students manually
- Bulk Enrollments
- Advanced Theme customisation
Other costs
While there are no transaction fees on sales, do note that there may be costs involved in processing student payments.
Research of reviews online
A search of Teachable reviews online indicate some grievances with customer email support. Email support may take some time (24 to 48 hours). Hence, if support is essential for you, a Pro plan is needed to get access to Live Chat support.
There are also grievances about Teachable removing a creator’s courses or suspending payments. However, it is hard to jump to conclusions without knowing the background of the cases as these may be due to violation of Teachable’s terms and conditions.
Is Teachable the right solution for me to sell courses online?
Teachable can be a suitable solution for you if you don’t need the additional advanced features other platforms provide and
- a simple standard layout website to sell your online courses is sufficient to meet your needs
- you are to seeking to create courses that are mainly delivered via video and do not need complex quizzing capabilities
- you only require standard reporting for student course participation
