What is the best medium to sell online products?

[Brivido]

I am on the verge of launching my first online product, which will be an ebook. I already have a large audience, to which I have offered free content for years, so I hope that finding customers won't be much of a problem. Obviously, I am not going to sell crap, what I am creating is of extreme value.

Now, I am not a technical kind of guy and I don't know if selling content directly on WordPress (I have my own website) is something doable, without specific knowledge like hosting videos, servers, handling payments etc. 

I have found this company which seems to be taking care of everything too technical for 30 dollars per month, seems like a sweet deal to me. For the moment, selling an ebook on WordPress doesn't seem that difficult to set up, but in the future I want to create video courses and using an external company to take care of the technical side of things will make everything easier, I guess.

My question is: do you guys suggest to learn how to manage everything on my WordPress site or you think is a good idea to use a company which will make everything easier? Please answer only if you have direct experience selling products online.

You input would be greatly appreciated @Leo Gura

[Yarco]

There's really two main options:

Online course platform -- like Podia that you've already looked at. Also look at Thinkific, Teachable, Kajabi, Learndash. Some of these have beginner plans that are free that might meet your needs, so worth checking out and comparing to see what's best.

When you look at the pricing, just make sure they aren't charging you a % for each sale on top of a monthly fee. Like I think Teachable is $29/month PLUS 5% from every sale on their lowest plan. You have to go up to their $99 plan to not have the % thing.

Think long-term if this is going to be a one-off thing as well, or if you plan to create a full video course or something one day. It's going to be annoying to move from one platform to the other, or to have your paid products spread across multiple services. So it might be better to pay for a more full-featured service from the start for the sake of easy growth.

LMS (Learning management system) - This is one of many wordpress plugins that allows you to host courses or sell stuff directly on your own website.

Or look at e-commerce plugins like Woocommerce. Or you can just integrate Stripe directly into your own website to take credit card payments. If your e-book isn't full of images it should only be a couple hundred kb. Even a basic Bluehost or Hostgator plan should be fine with people downloading a couple hundred copies per month.

One isn't necessarily better than the other, there's pros and cons. Personally I think I'd rather have it on my site and own it 100%. So it can never go down or be unavailable because of another company. But that also comes with more work to set up and maintain on your part. Go with a platform like Podia if you just want to set it and forget it though.

 

Edited May 17, 2021 by Yarco