How to sell online courses on Shopify (from zero to first sale)

By Gill · builder of Chapters LMS · Updated August 2026

To sell online courses on Shopify, install a course app from the App Store, build your course inside it (video, text, or live lessons), and publish — the app creates a normal Shopify product you price like anything else. Buyers pay at your regular checkout and are enrolled automatically the moment payment clears. Students then learn in a portal on your own domain, signed in with their normal customer account.

That's the whole shape of it. The rest of this guide walks through each step in detail, using the flow inside Chapters — our course app — as the concrete example.

Most of it applies whichever app you pick, and where the apps differ, we'll say so honestly.

Step 1: Choose how you'll host your course

You have two real options: a standalone course platform, or a course app inside your Shopify store.

Standalone platforms like Teachable run everything on their own site — their checkout, their customer accounts, their analytics. As of August 2026, Teachable's public pricing starts at $39 a month (or $29 billed annually) plus a 7.5% transaction fee on the Starter plan. If you already run a Shopify store, that means two systems that never quite talk to each other.

A Shopify course app keeps everything in one place. Your course is a product, your student is a customer, your sale is an order. One checkout, one customer list, one set of reports — on the Shopify plan you already pay for.

This guide follows the app route. If you're weighing it against a standalone platform first, the Chapters vs Teachable comparison covers that decision in depth.

Step 2: Install a course app on your store

Search the Shopify App Store for course apps and you'll find a handful of serious ones. The main things to compare are pricing model, video hosting, and what happens at checkout.

Here's how the main options stack up, from their public pricing pages as of August 2026:

Competitor pricing from each product's public pages, August 2026 — always confirm current pricing on their sites. Full comparisons: Tevello, Courses Plus, Teachable.

The honest difference: subscription apps cost the same whether you sell or not. Chapters charges nothing until you sell — then 5% of each sale, capped at $29 a month, so a big month never costs more than the cap. Full details on the pricing page.

To install Chapters: open apps.shopify.com/chapters, click Install, and approve the $0 plan once. That single approval is what lets the commission bill later through your normal Shopify invoice — there's no card to add and nothing to pay today.

Step 3: Build your course — chapters, lessons, and video

A course in Chapters is a set of chapters, each holding lessons. A lesson can be a video, a text page, or a live Zoom class scheduled right inside the lesson.

Video is the part that trips people up on other setups, so it's worth being clear: you upload video straight into Chapters. Hosting is included — lessons stream from Bunny's global CDN, and you don't need Vimeo, Wistia, or any separate video account.

Every store gets 30 GB of storage free. Go past it and the overage bills automatically at $0.16/GB/month — you're emailed before that ever happens.

Your videos are protected out of the box: signed expiring URLs, copy and print blocking, and a moving watermark tied to each student. Add captions in the player, and reuse files across courses from the shared media library.

Already have a curriculum in a spreadsheet? Import it. Chapters takes CSV or Excel curriculum imports (templates included), plus question-bank imports for quizzes — a real time-saver if you're moving over from another platform.

Step 4: Price your course and publish it

Set a price in the course settings and hit publish. Chapters auto-creates the Shopify product for you — priced, marked digital, no shipping — so there's no product-page plumbing to do by hand.

Already have a product you want to attach the course to? Link any existing product instead. That's handy if you sell a physical kit and want the course bundled with it.

Because the course is a real product, everything you already know works: discount codes, collections, multi-currency, your theme's product page. You can also sell bundles of courses, and even standalone exams — a timed test sold on its own, no course attached.

One opinion on pricing the course itself: don't undercharge. A focused course that solves one real problem is usually easier to sell than a sprawling one priced like an impulse buy. You can always add a cheaper taster later with free preview lessons.

Step 5: How checkout and enrollment work

A student buys your course at your normal Shopify checkout — the same one your other products use, with every payment method you've enabled.

The moment payment clears, Chapters enrolls the buyer automatically. They get a welcome email, and the order auto-fulfills so nothing sits in your admin waiting for you.

Guest checkout works too. Someone who buys without an account gets emailed access instructions, and their purchase links itself to their account the first time they sign in — you don't lose the sale to a login wall.

There's no manual step anywhere in this chain. You can genuinely make a sale while you sleep, which is the entire point of the exercise.

Step 6: Where your students learn

Students learn in a branded portal on your own domain, at yourstore.com/apps/courses. Your logo, your colors — not ours.

They sign in with their normal Shopify customer account. No second password, no separate "course site" to remember.

On a phone, students can install the portal to their home screen, with your logo as the icon. No app store, nothing to download from anywhere.

This matters more than it sounds. A student who watches on your domain is your customer, on your email list, browsing your store — not parked on some platform's subdomain. See the full feature list for everything the portal includes.

Step 7: Track sales and grow

Once you're live, the Insights dashboard shows enrollments, revenue, watch time, and where students drop off lesson by lesson. Drop-off data is quietly the most useful thing here — it tells you exactly which lesson to fix.

Chapters also flags students who are going quiet, with email nudges to the ones needing attention and automatic reminder emails for inactive students. Bringing one paid student back to finish costs you nothing and often earns a review, a referral, or a second purchase.

Because sales are Shopify orders, your regular store reports work too — courses show up in revenue, top products, and customer lifetime value like everything else you sell.

Level up: drip, previews, seat caps, and certificates

Once the basics are selling, a few built-in options do real revenue work:

• Drip content — release lessons by date, days after enrollment, or sequentially as students complete the previous one. Keeps cohorts together and stops binge-and-refund behavior.
• Free preview lessons — let anyone watch lesson one before buying. The single best conversion tool a course page has.
• Seat caps and access windows — cap a cohort at, say, 30 seats with a real sold-out state, or sell access for a fixed window. Scarcity that's actually true.
• Quizzes, exams, and certificates — 7 auto-graded quiz types, timed exams with retakes and randomized pools, and completion certificates with public verification pages. Certificates can even be a paid add-on.

All of this is included from day one — there's no higher tier hiding it.

One honest aside: don't set all of this up before your first sale. Publish a simple course, get real students through it, and add drip and certificates once you know people actually want the thing.