Podia is an online platform that lets you sell courses, webinars, memberships, and digital goods. In this Podia review, we will look at its features, pricing, advantages, and limitations to find out if this is the right platform for you.
Review of Podia
- What is Podia
- Onboarding
- Podia storefront
- Products to sell
- Promoting your store
- Integrations
- Podia pricing
- Payment processing
- Pros and cons of Podia
- Summary
Podia Review – What is Podia
Before diving into the details of the important features of Podia, let us begin this Podia review with an introduction to the Podia platform.
Podia is a leading and popular platform to sell digital content. It lets creators sell online courses, memberships, subscriptions, webinars, and digital goods. The platform’s target users consist of creators, online trainers, and owners of subscription-based businesses.
To make things impressive, you get access to the features of Podia at a reasonable and flat-rate monthly subscription price.
In short, if you are looking for a powerful all-in-one learning management system at a reasonable monthly subscription – Podia is definitely for you.
Podia Review – Onboarding in Podia
Getting started with Podia is simple, easy, free and fast.
- Head over to Podia.
- You will notice a button saying Start free Trial. Click on it to start your 14 days trial.
- Podia needs only your name, email, and password to complete your onboarding.
You must note that Podia does not have any free plans. You get 14 days to test the platform for free. If you wish to continue the platform beyond your trial period, you must upgrade to one of the paid plans of Podia.
Podia does not need your credit card details when you sign up.
After signing up as a user, you need to activate your account. As an active Podia user, you can access your dashboard to do the following:
- Store Customization – You can customize your digital storefront using the Editor feature. If you want to customize your storefront, this is the option you will use.
- Sell Products – You can create and upload digital goods to Podia. This is the first thing you need to do before you can sell your digital items or subscriptions.
- eMail Marketing – Podia has an efficient in-built email marketing system. As an active Podia user, you can utilize this feature for effective email marketing.
- Manage Customers – As the owner of an online business, you must have access to your customers. With Podia, you can access the details of your customers with simple navigations.
- Admin Tasks – Podia also lets you perform several admin tasks for your storefront. For example, you can change and manage your payment methods, storefront language, store URL, and currency.
The admin dashboard is optimized for mobile, and you can access it from desktop or mobile device alike. Moreover, you will notice that Podia is one of those platforms utilizing cute graphics on its dashboard.
Podia’s user interface is simple, user-friendly, elegant, mobile-friendly, and easy to navigate.
Podia Review – Customizing Podia Storefront
As an active Podia user, you have access to the admin dashboard. You can navigate to the Storefront Editor from your dashboard and start customizing your storefront.
Podia’s Editor lets you customize the product pages by adding text, images, videos, themes, and colors. You can even modify your storefront by adding widgets with text, images, links, and testimonials. Podia also lets you apply a custom theme to your store.
Of course, Podia allows you to use your own domain for free. But if you prefer, you can even host your storefront as a subdomain of podia.com.
But note that Podia’s storefront customizer is not that versatile. If you are looking for a uniquely customized storefront, you should probably look at platforms like Shopify.
Podia Review – What Can You Sell with Podia
Podia is more famous as a platform to sell digital courses. But, what is often overlooked is its ability to serve as an eCommerce platform to sell digital products.
In a nutshell, you can sell downloadable digital goods, courses, videos, and subscription-based memberships using Podia.
In this section we will briefly discuss the different types of stuffs you can sell using Podia.
Selling Courses With Podia
Like all other features of Podia, creating courses is also a simple process.
- Login to your Podia dashboard.
- Navigate to the products section from your dashboard.
- Create your online course. At this step, you need to give only a name to your online courses.
You can edit your newly created course to update its details. For example, you can change the price of the product. You can also add files, texts, links, and quizzes to your course.
Podia also lets you drip your course content over time.
If you are using videos for your courses, you do not need another service like Vimeo. Podia takes care of hosting your videos.
Podia gives you unlimited bandwidth.
However, there are certain limitations of Podia that you must be aware of. For example, Podia does not have an in-built mechanism for issuing certificates or badges. If you need this feature, you must integrate your Podia store with a third-party application using Zapier.
Selling Memberships With Podia
You can use Podia to build your own subscription-based business and earn recurring revenue.
The platform allows you to create multiple plans or tiers for your membership business. You can even set up a free tier for your customers to generate leads.
You also have the option to create discount coupons and offers for your membership business.
In short, Podia allows you to create member-exclusive content. You can restrict your premium content, posts, or info-products to paid or free members.
Note that you need to have an active Stripe account to accept recurring payments. PayPal does not support this. Moreover, you must be a Shaker plan user to access Podia’s powerful membership features. Check the pricing section of this review for more detail.
Selling Digital Goods With Podia
Like most online store builders, Podia is well suited to sell your digital products. For example, you can sell eBooks, printable files, music files, etc.
Podia has a product creation wizard that helps you to create a digital product using a guided flow. Similar to courses, you can add downloadable files to your product.
After you create your digital product, you can update the price. You can also offer promotional coupons for your products.
If you have multiple digital products in your store, you can make use of Podia’s intelligent upselling tool to recommend related items and boost your sales.
Podia Review – How To Promote Your Podia Store
Podia has several efficient eCommerce tools built right into the system. You do not need any external applications or extensions to add many advanced yet useful functions to your store.
Here, we will discuss a few of those.
Email Marketing with Podia
Email marketing is built right into Podia. You can use the built-in functionality to send regular newsletters to your customers. You can even create drip campaigns using Podia’s in-built email marketing tool.
A significant limitation of the in-built tool is the absence of an ability to personalize emails. In other words, you can not send personalized newsletters at present.
Although Podia is not a complete replacement for powerful email marketing platforms, it is an effective and self-sufficient platform. In case you need more capabilities, you can integrate with any of the supported email marketing platforms.
Affiliate Programs For Your Podia Store
Affiliate programs can give a tremendous boost to your sales. In essence, with an affiliate program, you pay a commission to all referrers generating sales in your store. The affiliate programs are typically hosted by third-party applications. You have to pay a recurring subscription price to use these applications.
Podia has an in-built system to create an affiliate program for your store. You get most features of an external application but for no additional price.
Upselling In Podia
Upselling refers to recommending related products to your customers. Upselling can result in better sales.
If you have multiple courses or digital items in your store, you can upsell the related products to your customers. Podia has in-built features to support upselling.
But, note that Podia does not support upselling free goods.
Product Bundles With Podia
Bundling products is an effective strategy to sell multiple related products, often at a discounted price. The reduced price often triggers the buying impulse in your customers.
Podia has in-built features, which you can use to promote your products by creating product bundles. You can even create offers for these product bundles.
Selling Pre-Orders With Podia
If your product is still not ready for shipping, you can still go ahead and accept orders. In eCommerce terms, this is known as pre-orders. As a seller, pre-orders help in understanding the market of an upcoming product. You can judge the interest and demand of a product using pre-orders.
Podia lets you book pre-launch orders.
If you plan to judge the demand for an unfinished product, Podia can be your perfect companion.
In short, Podia has several in-built features that can enhance the capability of your storefront.
Podia Review – Integrations Supported by Podia
Podia has several interesting and powerful functionality built right into the system. For example, you do not need to use a third-party service to host your videos. You also get an effective email and affiliate marketing tools present right in the system.
But you can integrate Podia with other third-party apps or tools to enhance the capabilities of your storefront.
For example, you can integrate your store with multiple email services provider, analytics platforms, and advertising systems.
We encourage you to visit the Podia website to check the most recent list of official integrations.
Moreover, you can use Zapier integrations to connect your Podia storefront to several external tools like Google Sheets, Trello, LeadPages, and so on.
The bottom line is Podia can integrate with most eCommerce platforms that support Zapier.
Review of Podia Pricing
As we said earlier, Podia does not have any free plans. But it gives you fourteen days to try the platform for free.
You can test every feature of the fully functional platform for free without any need for a credit card. But if you want to continue using Podia beyond the trial period, you must upgrade to one of the two paid plans.
Interestingly, the two premium plans are known as Mover and Shaker.
Podia’s Mover Plan
The Mover plan is the cheaper of the two paid plans of Podia. It comes at a monthly subscription price of $39 per month. If you pay for the whole year upfront, you get a discount of $78.
When you choose the Mover plan of Podia, you get access to the following features:
- You can sell downloadable digital products and online courses.
- You can host free or paid webinars for your customers. You can offer both scheduled and live webinars from your Podia storefront.
- You can use Podia’s email marketing tools to build your own list.
- You can connect to your customers using the in-built live chat tool.
- You can use Podia to sell unlimited products to any number of customers. There is no restriction on the number of products, customers, emails sent, sales, and files hosted.
- Moreover, there is no transaction fee in Podia.
- You will have access to Podia’s 7-days-a-week support using live chat, email, or video calls.
- If you want to migrate your existing store to Podia, you can avail of Podia’s Free Migration support. Note that this is available only with the annual plan.
In short, Podia’s Mover plan is perfect for creators launching their first digital products.
Podia’s Shaker Plan
The Shaker plan is a superset of the Mover plan. In other words, if you choose this plan, you get many more extra features than its cheaper counterpart.
Of course, the Shaker plan is more expensive and is available for $79 per month. Users opting for the annual plan get a discount of $158.
If you are a Shaker plan user, you get access to every Mover plan feature. Besides that, you also get access to the following functionalities.
- You can earn recurring revenue by offering a monthly or yearly membership subscription to your customers. You can even create a free membership to generate leads.
- You can sell live coaching classes using Zoom integrations.
- You can run your own blog to publish articles and drive traffic to your store.
- You can have your own affiliate program and drive referral sales to your store.
- You can embed offsite buy buttons on any website, blog, or landing page. Your customers can purchase your products right on your own website with the help of these offsite embeds.
- You can install any third-party code snippets like Facebook Pixel, Sumo, Olark, and more.
The Shaker Plan is meant for creators ready to grow their business.
For more details on Podia’s pricing and comparison of features, we encourage you to visit the Podia website.
Podia Review – How Podia Processes Payouts
Podia does not directly collect any money. Instead, all payments are processed by the payment processor you choose.
You can connect your Podia account with your Stripe or (and) PayPal account to receive the payments. These processors process the payment and deposit the money directly into your bank account. The typical time needed to complete this process is within two business days.
Note that you must use Stripe to accept recurring payments and selling memberships. PayPal has technical limitations to accept any recurring payment and cannot be used.
The takeaway here is, Podia does not hold your money. Your payment processor, PayPal or Stripe, will determine the necessary settlement time and fees involved.
Podia Review – Pros and Cons of Podia
In short, I found Podia as a powerful and efficient platform to sell digital products online. It has significant features that make it easy to run an online business.
Overall, Podia has impressed me with its features and pricing.
But has its own share of limitations as well.
As we are nearing the end of this review of Podia, let me summarize the advantages and disadvantages of the Podia platform for a quick reference.
Advantages of Podia
- Podia has a user friendly and easy to navigate UI.
- You can create unlimited products and courses in Podia.
- There is no restriction of bandwidth or storage.
- Podia is an all-in-one platform that hosts your videos and files. You do not need any third-party platform like Vimeo to host these files.
- You can create your own affiliate program.
- Podia does not charge you any transaction fee.
- It has in-built email marketing, course creation, subscription management tools integrated into the core platform.
- It also supports Zapier integrations.
Limitations of Podia
- Podia does not have any free plans.
- The membership and one-page checkout features are exclusive to the pricier Shaker plan.
- Podia does not come with an integrated landing page builders.
- There is no certification feature. Moreover, Podia does not have any native integration with certification services like Accredible.
- Podia lacks advanced email customization or the ability to personalize your own Podia presence.
Wrapping Up Our Podia Review
Podia is a powerful platform to start selling your online info-products, courses, and memberships. If you are looking for an effective alternative to Kajabi or Teachable – Podia is the best option.
Podia is efficient and versatile, yet it is not a complex platform to manage. You can create and sell info-products, subscriptions easily with its easy-to-use features.
Though Podia does not have any free plans, the price is not overly high considering its features. Moreover, the zero transaction fee makes Podia an attractive platform for creators.
In short, Podia is value for money.
As the free trial does not need any upfront commitment, it is wise to try out the platform and check if it meets all your requirements.
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