Podia is a service that will provide you all the tools that you need to sell digital products online. You are able to build a website to create a blog, to promote your product, to create landing pages. You can sell digital downloads, online courses, you can create membership sites.
Pricing
The pricing is really competitive compared to what you can find on the market. They have 3 levels, $39 /month $89/month and $199/month. If you look into their competitors in the market with everything that they offer, $89 per month is really, really a good deal.
They don’t charge you any fees. So all the fees that will be charged will be from either PayPal or Stripe. They do have a little bit of a restriction on how you can use PayPal, but they don’t charge any fees.
Podia Features
Podia takes payment using Stripe and PayPal. They have an email marketing platform where you can host your emails and do all your email marketing with them. An affiliate option where you can use affiliates to promote your products.
They also have a messaging chat option which will allow you to have a chat support option on your pages. The chat feature will help with the presale questions and also with any questions that your customer may have.
Somebody that wants to purchase your product can send a question on your landing page, and you can have a live person answering those questions or those questions can be answered later on. You can offer the same chat support to your students.
They offer you a lot of tools in one place to save your money so you don’t have to purchase different services to be able to sell your digital products online. They have a 14 days free trial at the time I’m recording this video.
Their dashboard is very easy to use , you can see all the options that you need regarding email marketing. To access your affiliates, you can just click on an affiliate tab on your top right and then from there you can just add an affiliate.
All the person has to do is click on affiliates and click on invite affiliates and you will just enter the person’s email address, and send an email invite. The affiliates will basically be able to accept their invite and have access to their own dashboard, where they can access the links and see earnings. With the affiliate program you have the option to choose to provide a percentage of the cells or to pick a fixed amount.
Also you decide when to pay your affiliates. You can pay them per month, you can pay them right away after the sale or you can pay them after a week or two weeks.It is going to be up to you.
The affiliates get paid by sending the payment to their PayPal account. If you want to pay your affiliates outside of PayPal, you will have to set it up yourself, because Podia only supports payment via paypal.
Regarding your chat messaging options, you just click on messaging on the top and then you have access to your chat box message options. That chat box option is automatically set up on the pages that you have created.
And as soon as somebody starts sending you a chat, you will have access to those messages and you can start a conversation. You have the option to put yourself online or away, or you can put yourself automatically online so that as soon as you log into Podia it will show that you are online.
For every option that they have, they have a video tutorial to teach you how to use it. So for example, if you want to set up your membership, all you have to do is just click on the membership set up and you have a short video. They will show you exactly how to use it. You even have the option to speed up the training videos if you want.
I will go through all the features that I like about podia, but will also go through my issues with their services. And I will give my honest opinion as to who should use this service. One of the features that I really like is the live chat option.
They are one of the rare services that will provide you a chat option on your landing pages, which is huge for people that want to make a purchase but may have other questions that need to get answered before they decide to buy your product.
You can create a bundle product if you want to. If you have multiple products that you are selling, you can bundle them and offer them at a cheaper price so that your customer can access all of them in the same place.
If you are already selling online courses, or if you have membership sites already and you want to transfer all your products and customers, they can set it up for you. But to provide you that service you have to sign up for an annual billing for any of the plans that they have.
Or if you don’t want to pay for the annual billing, you will have to pay $249 toward a monthly plane or an annual plan. It’s up to you. Now all the transfers they do are manual, so you will have to provide them with your login info for them to have access to your data. They will also host your videos for you. So if you have video content, you don’t need to use a third party service to host your them.
With the videos, your students will have the option to watch them at a higher speed like on youtube. Some people like this new way to consume content at a quicker pace , so you will have the tools to provide them with that option. I really appreciate their support options. They have live chat hours, which are from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM Eastern time.
I don’t know why they mentioned that they, they will respond to you 24 hours a day, seven days a week because they will only respond to you live during those hours. 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM from Monday to Friday. So if you send them a message after those times, after those days, they will reply to you when they are back. They also have a help center with good tutorials.
I really liked their getting to start process because it does show you exactly what you need to do. Simple, it’s clean, it’s really simple to understand. If you want to learn about the services they have, about emails, about affiliate integrations, analytics, everything is simple to learn. They have video base and text-based format tutorials.
So now we’ll go ahead and discuss the issues that I have with the service that podia.com offers. One of the biggest shortcomings with Podia is that they don’t have any template that you can choose and download for your lending pages, or even for your online courses or for your membership site. They don’t have any pre-made template that you can use. You have to build everything by yourself. Now credit to them. Their editor is really easy to use.
It’s simple to use. If you are somebody that use WordPress for example, or you ever built a website for yourself, you will able to understand exactly how to use it. They have simple tutorials on how to use everything. That’s really fine and dandy, but you don’t really have any premade templates.
And for somebody like myself that doesn’t really have a great touch of creativity, having pre-made templates that are made by professionals will really help me. So that’s my biggest issue with them.
They don’t offer a PayPal option for a membership site. So if you want to use Podio for membership, you cannot offer PayPal as a payment option. You can only offer stripe as a payment option. So it’s something that you have to take into consideration for your business.
Who shouldn’t or should use Podia
This is not good for somebody that is just starting with selling digital products online. If this is your first trial is going to be a little bit hard for you to start because it does not have pre-made templates.
And one of the hardest things in marketing is to be able to build your funnels, have templates made. You have so many services nowadays that offer pre-made templates for everything, and you can just change a little bit of thing or put your own texts and just start sending your traffic to it.
If you have to spend hours and hours to build a page, especially if you are somebody like myself that doesn’t really have that artistic mind, you will question everything because you don’t know if what you’re building is any good and will convert.
But if you have templates and if you look at them and you see one that you like, one that inspires you, you can use it right away. So at the time, I’m doing this review again, they don’t have any template, pre-made template that you can use.
You’re literally how to build everything by yourself. It’s also not good for people who want that Flexibility to have multiple types and vibe of lending pages. No A/B testing. If you look at all the example websites that they provide, they all have the same vibe to them. You don’t really have a lot of options.
For me, Podia should be used by an experienced online marketer with the knowledge of the budget to hire a team to create converting pages from scratch. Typically those marketers already have a following and are making money, and podia would be a cheaper alternative with great options like the live chat one.