Podia Review
Podia positions itself as a platform for you to sell online courses, digital downloads or webinars. Unlike other online course platforms that focus on you creating a school and student community, Podia brands its solution as one where you can easily build a site, create and sell your digital creations as single products, bundles or memberships.
Its proposition is about getting your site online and providing you with the simple tools to quickly sell your digital products.
Reviewing the features
You start off in Podia with the Dashboard.
The Dashboard has the following options:
Create and Manage Products
- Online Courses
- Digital Downloads
- Webinars
- Bundles
Online Course Builder
Podia offers a simple online course builder. It is not as feature-rich as other solutions like LearnWorlds and Thinkific. With the builder, you create sections and in those sections, you add files, links, text or quizzes. There are not many instructions involved with adding files. All you are asked is to drag and drop the files in the upload box. For links and text, it is basically a simple editor that allows you to enter them in.
Quiz functionality is also very basic. All that is provided are simple multiple-choice quizzes. To be honest, I would have preferred the course builder to provide more features and allow one to set a proper curriculum. However, if you are just selling a simple course and want to skip all the sophisticated features, this could be the solution that meets your needs.
Webinars
Podia provides the option for creating webinar products. This basically allows you to create a webinar product page with your scheduled time sessions. To run your webinar, you can integrate with your Zoom account or YouTube account. The integration with YouTube provides an alternative option for monetising YouTube videos.
Digital Downloads
This is pretty straightforward. One adds files and sets a price for those files.
Bundles
Product Pricing
What kind of pricing options do you have for your products? With Podia, you can set a standard price or opt to provide your customers with the option to split their purchase into multiple payments. You can also promote upsells by offering another product at a discounted price after a customer completes their purchase.
Membership plans
Coupons
Messaging
Site Builder
Podia offers a simple site builder to develop your storefront website. The site builder offers plain vanilla features like adding your own text, images, columns. Customisation of the site layout is rather limited. If you are looking to build a beautiful jazzy interactive website, this will not do it for you. The site builder suits those who just want to get an online storefront up and quick to sell.
Podia offers a simple sitebuilder.
Reporting
Audience
Its audience reports list the number of customers, members and subscribers you have acquired.Sales
The sales reports list the total sales, monthly recurring revenue (MRR), revenue and pending sales.Marketing Tools
Email Campaigns
Podia has a built-in email marketing platform. It allows for email broadcasts and campaigns to help you reach out to your audience.
Affiliate Tools
It offers simple affiliate tools where you are able to set the default commission. You can choose between a flat commission payment or a percentage of sales. You can also add product-specific commissions. This feature is only available with their Shaker plan.
Payment Processing
When it comes to payment processing, you can set the currency of your choice from 20+ currency options. You can also connect to you Stripe, Paypal account to receive and manage course payments and receive funds
Podia Pricing Plans
Podia bills monthly and annually and offers the following plans. We list out the key differences between the plans below.
Note: Prices are in USD
Mover
- Own website and custom domain
- Unlimited Online courses
- Unlimited Digital Download products
- Unlimited Webinars (no Zoom)
- Email Marketing
- Additional teammates ($20/mo each)
Shaker
- Key Features in addition to Mover
- Membership feature
- Zoom Integration
- Site Builder with Blog
- Access to subscriptions and memberships
- Affiliate Marketing tools
Other costs
There are no transaction fees. As you are using your own Paypal or Stripe accounts for payment processing, there are no additional processing fees.
Research of reviews online
I couldn’t find many reviews online and hence, I will leave this section blank for now.
Is Podia the right solution for me to sell online courses?
Who is it not for?
Podia will not meet the needs of creators:
- seeking a feature-rich course builder with more quizzing and interactive options
- needing a solution that allows one to build a design-rich website
- seeking detailed student reporting features
Similar to other online course platforms (most of them lack this functionality), this is not for creators who:
- require reporting for SCORM, XAPI online learning content
- require gamification elements that you can customise (badges, points, leaderboards for interacting with your site)
Who is Podia for?
Podia is likely to meet the needs of creators who:
- do not require advanced interactivity for their online courses, digital downloads and webinars
- seeking to setup their storefront and sell their digital products quickly and do not need a flashy fancy website
- are seeking alternative ways to monetise their YouTube video LIVE sessions
- want to set up and sell quickly and have access to easy email marketing, coupon discounting and affiliate tools
