Can you move a Teachable course to Shopify?
Yes — but understand what "moving" means first. Shopify handles products, checkout, and customers brilliantly, and it has no course player at all.
So a migration has two halves. Your selling moves to Shopify itself: each course becomes a normal Shopify product that sells at your store's own checkout. Your teaching moves to a course app: with Chapters, students learn in a branded portal at /apps/courses on your own domain, signed in with their regular customer account.
That's the whole architecture. No separate school subdomain, no second login for your buyers, no second checkout taking payments somewhere else.
If you're still weighing whether to switch at all, the Chapters vs Teachable head-to-head covers the platform comparison. This guide assumes you've decided and want the actual moving plan.
Why move from Teachable to Shopify?
The usual trigger is running two platforms when one would do. Per Teachable's own public pages (August 2026), a Teachable school runs its own site, its own checkout, and its own customer accounts — all separate from your Shopify store.
In practice that means two customer lists that never quite match, two dashboards to check, and buyers who need one login for your products and another for your courses.
Then there's the bill. Per Teachable's public pricing page in August 2026, the Starter plan is $39/month (or $29/month billed annually) plus a 7.5% transaction fee on sales; dropping the fee to 0% means Builder at $89/month or Growth at $189/month. That subscription bills whether you sell or not.
Chapters flips that model. It's free to install with no monthly fee — you pay 5% only when a course actually sells, and the commission is capped at $29 a month. A $100 course sale costs $5. A zero-sales month costs $0. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.
Consolidating also means every course buyer lands in your Shopify customer list — the same list you already use for email, discounts, and everything else you sell. One checkout, one set of orders, one place your business lives.
Teachable to Shopify: what maps to what
Before you export anything, it helps to know where each piece of your Teachable school ends up. Here's the translation table.
| On Teachable | On Shopify with Chapters |
|---|---|
| Your school (separate site) | Your existing Shopify store, plus a branded student portal at /apps/courses on your own domain — installable to a phone's home screen. |
| A course | A Chapters course: chapters containing lessons, each lesson video, text, or a live Zoom session. |
| Sales page & pricing | A native Shopify product — auto-created when you publish the course (priced, digital, no shipping), or linked to any existing product. |
| Teachable checkout | Your store's normal Shopify checkout — guest checkout included, multi-currency supported, enrollment lands instantly on payment. |
| Students | Shopify customers — one list covering course buyers and everything else you sell. |
| Video hosting | Built in, on a global CDN — 30 GB storage free, then $0.16/GB/month; 300 GB of student streaming free monthly, then $0.08/GB. No Vimeo or Wistia account needed. |
| Quizzes | Quizzes with 7 auto-graded question types, graded assignments with written feedback, plus timed exams with retakes and randomized pools. |
| Certificates & drip | Certificates with public verification pages (optionally paid), and drip by date, days-after-enrollment, or sequential unlock. |
Teachable structure per its public pages, August 2026. See the full Chapters feature list for everything included.
The step-by-step migration plan
Here's the order that works. The whole plan runs alongside your live Teachable school, so nothing goes dark mid-move.
1Export everything from Teachable
Download your video files, copy your text lessons and descriptions, and export your student list as a CSV. Write down your quiz questions, drip schedule, and prices while you're in there.
Do this first, and do it completely. Everything else in the plan depends on having your content in hand, and downloading videos is usually the slowest single task in the whole migration.
2Install Chapters and approve the $0 plan
Install from the Shopify App Store and approve the plan once — it's $0, with no monthly fee and no card beyond what Shopify already has. Charges only ever appear on your normal Shopify invoice, and only after you sell.
That matters for a migration: you can rebuild your entire school at your own pace without paying for two platforms during the overlap.
3Rebuild your course structure — in bulk
You don't have to click out every lesson by hand. Chapters imports your curriculum from a CSV or Excel file (templates provided), recreating your chapter and lesson structure in one pass. Quiz and exam questions import the same way through the question-bank importer.
Videos upload straight into Chapters — hosting is included — and land in a shared media library. Upload each file once, then attach it to any lesson in any course. If the same welcome video opens three courses, it's stored once.
Add captions, mark a lesson or two as free previews, and set your drip rules as you go.
4Set prices and publish
Set each course's price and hit publish. Chapters auto-creates the Shopify product for you — priced, digital, no shipping — or you can link a product you've already made. Bundles, seat caps, and access windows are there if your Teachable school used the equivalents.
5Test it as a student
Buy your own course before anyone else does. Check that payment enrolls you instantly, the welcome email arrives, the order auto-fulfills, and the portal works on your phone — including installing it to the home screen. The setup guide has a fuller pre-launch checklist.
6Move your students over
Bring your exported student list into Shopify as customers. Then give existing students a one-time 100%-off discount code for the courses they already own: they check out free on your store, and enrollment lands the moment the order completes — guest checkout works if they don't feel like creating an account first.
Announce the move with clear, short instructions: here's the new link, here's your code, here's the date the old school closes. Expect to send that email more than once.
7Sunset your Teachable plan
Keep Teachable alive for a couple of weeks as a safety net while stragglers move, then cancel the subscription. Keep your exports — videos, CSVs, student list — as a permanent backup regardless.
Update every link that pointed at your old school: email signatures, social bios, YouTube descriptions, old newsletters if you can. Those links outlive the school itself.
What doesn't transfer from Teachable — honestly
This is the part most migration guides mumble through, so let's not.
Student progress doesn't move. Lesson completions, quiz attempts, and course history live inside Teachable and can't be injected into another platform. Every student starts at 0% in the new portal.
Tell them before the switch, and give anyone mid-course a window to finish what they started. A small make-good helps too — a bonus lesson, or a discount on your next course.
Old certificates stay old. Certificates already issued through Teachable remain whatever students downloaded. Completions in Chapters generate new certificates with public verification pages — arguably an upgrade, but past ones won't be re-issued automatically.
Comments and community threads don't come along. Anything conversational tied to your Teachable school stays there. Screenshot or archive whatever you'd hate to lose.
Switching course platforms always costs you the history layer, whichever direction you're going — anyone who promises a lossless one-click migration is selling something. What you keep is everything that matters commercially: your content, your students' contact details, and from now on, a single store where both live.