Can You Sell Online Courses on Shopify? Apps vs Platforms

Shopify can sell an online course, but it was built to sell products, so the course experience — the lessons, the player, drip and progress — comes from an app or from a separate course platform. That choice, not the checkout, is the real decision, and it turns on what else you sell and where your students already are.

This guide is for a coach, trainer or expert deciding where to sell a course, and for a merchant adding one to an existing store.

What Can Shopify Do for a Course Without a Course App?

Start with the part Shopify already does well: the product, the price and the checkout. A course is listed and paid for like any other product. What a course needs beyond the sale is where the gaps are, and the table sets each need against what Shopify does on its own and what a course app adds.

The Digital Products app sends a file or a link

The Digital Products app is free, and Shopify's Help Center says it sells digital products in two ways: an uploaded file the buyer downloads, or a link to content hosted on a supported provider. For a file:

So a buyer gets a file and keeps it. The same Help Center page, read on September 28, 2026, sets the maximum file size at 5 GB, says there is no bandwidth limit for downloads, and lets you limit downloads per variant, which is unlimited by default. The finer points, including share links and resending a download to one buyer, are covered in the Digital Products app's bandwidth and download limits.

A downloaded file is enough when the product really is a file: a workbook, a template pack, a recorded workshop the buyer keeps. It stops being enough the moment the course has lessons to unlock in order, an account to come back to, or a certificate at the end. If what you sell is mostly files, pricing, file protection and tax for digital goods are covered in our guide to selling digital products on Shopify.

Product-page video has its own, smaller limits

Video on the product page is a different system from the Digital Products app, with its own ceilings: per Shopify's product media requirements, an uploaded video can run up to 10 minutes and 1 GB, at up to 4K, as .mp4, .mov or .webm, while YouTube and Vimeo embeds skip those limits and other video URLs aren't supported. A product page is open to anyone who visits the store, so this is the place for a trailer, not for paid lessons. The full list of video and 3D types a product accepts is in which 3D models and videos a Shopify product accepts.

Which Course Apps Turn a Shopify Store Into a Course Site?

The four below are the course apps we read on the Shopify App Store on September 28, 2026: a dated snapshot, not a ranking and not every course app listed. Each describes selling courses directly from your store rather than sending buyers to a separate course site.

Plans and features as listed on each Shopify App Store listing, read September 28, 2026, in USD per month; prices change on the listing first. Not a ranking.

Read the cap before the price. The four apps limit different things:

• Courses Plus counts lessons across the whole store, so a 30-lesson course is already past its $19.99 tier.
• Uplinkly counts courses, so a single course fits its free tier.
• Inflowkit's free tier stops at 2 courses, 10 lessons in total and $300 in sales made through the app.
• Tevello has one paid plan, $29 a month, with no tier to outgrow.

Match the unit an app counts to the way your catalogue will grow.

When Is a Course Platform the Better Tool?

The honest case against Shopify for a course is structural. Shopify was built to sell products, so the parts that make a course a course — the lesson player, drip, progress, quizzes and certificates — come from an app, priced by that app and capped by its tiers.

If the course is the only thing you sell and no store is planned, you are paying for a storefront you don't use. The platform-wide list of trade-offs is in our breakdown of Shopify's disadvantages.

Thinkific documents a Shopify app, one-time only, now unlisted

Thinkific's help centre documents a Shopify app, Thinkific - Online Courses, but its Shopify App Store listing said on September 28, 2026 that the app "is not currently available on the Shopify App Store", so confirm with Thinkific that a new store can still connect before you plan on it. The help centre spells out what happens once it is installed: every Thinkific course is imported into Shopify as a product, and the sale runs through Shopify's checkout.

The limits are specific, and all three come from Thinkific's own supported-features page:

• One-time payments only. "Only one-time payments are currently supported," so subscriptions and payment plans stay on Thinkific.
• No bundles or memberships through Shopify. Both sell through Thinkific's built-in checkout instead.
• One store. A Thinkific account connects to one Shopify store.

One more thing to expect: if you sell courses only through Shopify, Thinkific's help centre says not to expect those orders in your Thinkific dashboard. Shopify is where the sales record lives.

Teachable and Kajabi: no Shopify app we could find

For Teachable, there is no listing at apps.shopify.com/teachable, neither Teachable's pricing page nor its features page mentions Shopify, and Teachable's help centre, which says it "only offers direct integrations with the apps listed in App Hub", lists no Shopify app there, as of September 28, 2026.

For Kajabi, the one link we found runs the other way: Kajabi's help centre explains how to sell physical products on Kajabi with Shopify buy buttons, and no Kajabi page we have found describes selling Kajabi courses through Shopify.

Shopify's own Digital Products app can sell a link to content hosted on Teachable or Kajabi, and Shopify's help page doesn't say that link enrolls the buyer on either platform.

What Does Each Route Cost at $1,000 a Month?

To compare routes on one footing, the table fixes one month: $1,000 of course sales, every price billed monthly, and card processing left out and covered below the table. The Shopify rows add an app to the entry plan at $39 a month; the platform rows add any percentage fee the tier takes on sales.

Two patterns decide the order. The first is that a percentage fee grows with sales while a flat app tier does not: Teachable's Starter tier sits below every Shopify row on price alone and, once its 7.5% fee is added, ends up above every Shopify row in the table except the costliest one, Courses Plus Professional at $118.99; its Builder tier's 0% holds only with teachable:pay or Monthly Payment Gateway.

The second is that an app tier is cheap only inside its cap. A catalogue past 20 lessons moves Courses Plus from its Basic tier to Professional, where the Shopify route costs more than Teachable's Builder tier.

Thinkific's entry tier is the cheapest row at this level, and that is worth saying plainly: for a course-only seller, the Shopify route does not win on price by default. It wins when you also sell products, or when one checkout and one customer account for everything matter more than the difference.

Card processing sits on top of these totals. On Shopify's entry plan it is 2.9% + 30¢ per online sale with Shopify Payments, and using another payment provider adds Shopify's own 2% fee on that plan; Thinkific Payments charges 2.9%, and Kajabi Payments 2.9% + $0.30 on its entry tier for US entities.

Tax is the other cost the table leaves out, and it depends on where your buyers are. Shopify's Help Center page on digital product taxes notes that EU consumers pay VAT on digital goods at their own country's rate wherever the seller is, and that some jurisdictions don't charge sales tax on digital products; it points merchants to a local tax expert.

Can You Charge a Subscription for a Course on Shopify?

How students pay is the second decision after where the course lives, because not every route can bill every model. The table sorts four common models against the routes that document them.

Shopify's own Shopify Subscriptions app is the obvious candidate for a monthly course, with two limits on its considerations page: subscription products sell only on the online store, Shopify POS, Shop and custom storefront sales channels, and bundles aren't compatible with it.

Its App Store listing names digital products among its subscription types; test a course subscription end to end before launching one. Which subscription app suits the rest of your store is covered in our comparison of Shopify subscription apps.

How Does a Buyer Become a Student?

Once the course is a product, two questions remain: where the student signs in, and what grants access. On the sign-in side, all four apps list Customer accounts among the Shopify features they work with, which points students to the store's own customer account rather than a separate course login.

On the access side, Courses Plus documents buying the course product and several ways to grant access without a purchase, among them a customer tag, a Professional-tier feature. Its help centre describes the tag route this way:

Tags are what let a store that sells physical products attach a course to one of them: a kit that comes with video lessons, or a course unlocked by a larger purchase. On Courses Plus, tag-based course access starts on the Professional tier, $79.99 a month. Courses Plus's help centre builds that with Shopify Flow in three moves, set out in its article on adding a customer tag after an order:

The other apps document less. Uplinkly lists tag-based access on its Business plan, and Inflowkit describes a learner dashboard. Tevello's help centre describes linking a course to a product, so a customer who buys that product gains access to the course content.

If you want to gate more than the course — member-only pages or member prices across the storefront — that is storefront gating rather than course access, and our guide to members-only Shopify stores covers the options.

Which Course Route Is Yours?

The verdict at the top answers by a single situation; this quiz answers by the combination: where your courses live now, whether you want a store around them, how students pay and how big the catalogue is. Five questions, and each result ends in a short setup plan.

Set Up the Shopify Route in This Order

The six steps are the Shopify route. Step one decides the app tier and everything after it; step four is where a store that also sells products gains the most, because a tag, on the app tiers that offer it, can unlock the course from any product. If your quiz result was the Thinkific route, confirm with Thinkific that its Shopify app can still be installed, then use it in place of steps one to four and run the test order in step six.

The Bottom Line

Where you start decides most of this. A store that already sells products gains the most from a course app, because the buyer gets one checkout and one account for everything. A coach with nothing else to sell gains less, and should let the cost table and the app caps decide.

Frequently Asked Questions