Likelihood to Recommend In my experience, Podia has been well suited in every way! I am a small company with a couple of independent contractors, and I don't know how to build my own website. I am not very techy. I get lots of compliments on how my website looks! I have had some people support me with setting up my group emails for my email list and setting up automations, and these techy people complained that they needed to do more customization in the email formatting and programming, so I switched to
Mailchimp for those needs. Otherwise, I have been very happy with Podia and I am grateful to have a platform that offers so many services/features. It's affordable and user friendly. My clients and students are happy using it, too
Read full review [WooCommerce] does really well for simple stores that don't have a lot of products. It's really easy to set up and get products added so people can purchase them online. It's not the best for really complicated stores with products that need a lot of customization; you have to find 3rd-party plugins to add additional functionality to your store and sometimes those can create conflicts between one another.
Read full review Pros Web Builder Storefront Digital course creator Bundling workshops/programs easy to update and add to my website customer service is awesome Read full review Keeps track of product inventory, including details of product variations such as colors and sizes if required. Keeps track of orders so that the shopkeeper has one place to log in and see the status and history of orders to her shop. Creates shop-related pages automatically. Once you add one or more products, they will automatically appear on your shop home page. Additionally, pages for viewing shopping carts and for checking out are automatically created. Read full review Cons I sometimes wish there was more that I could customize on my website and digital programs I wish their email service (for broadcasts/group emails) had more features and customization I would like to use my brand font Read full review Because of how the Wordpress database is structured, WooCommerce isn't great for large or complex e-commerce sites. More out-of-the-box options would be nice within the base software. Because add-on plugins are developed by 3rd parties, sometimes you get conflicts that break things. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Despite very rare glitches, more connected to an excessive number of plugins, that affect the speed of the site, we are extremely satisfied with the platform, the ability to import and export products, even though we just export them, as we have our proprietary system for updating inventories. We love the ease of upgrading, enhancing, innovating, and the freedom we have to do whatever we want, which is a plus, when you consider Shopify can take down your whole store as they please, if they think you aren't abiding to their TOS or their ever changing set of rules.
Read full review Usability I gave it lots of points for being a simple product that instantly gives you a store. Very intuitive and simple for the client to update or implement. Loses LOTS of points when you want to do anything besides just sell stuff (coupons, etc) then it makes you pay big money for the add-ons and makes it difficult and time-intensive to develop your own.
Read full review Support Rating not muh support
Read full review Alternatives Considered Kajabi had lots of features all in one place. I liked their digital course creator program. I liked the ease of their their membership site program/host, too. It had an app for my clients to use. There were some problems with not being able to customize the look of pages, but they allowed coding/programming if you had training, so I sometimes hired someone to do that for me. I couldn't figure out how to use their website builder, so I didn't do much there. When it came down to it, I could use Podia and it was cheaper and easier to use.
GoDaddy was my website host for a few years. I did a lot on there. It was my website builder and host and I liked it. It was easy to use. My website looked great. It had more features than Podia with blogging and connecting to social media. I had a storefront but it wasn't great for selling digital products. Back then, it wanted to show my inventory and shipping options, which don't apply for services and digital products. I did a little with my digital courses on there, but in the end, I liked other sites better for this. It didn't work out.
Weebly was just a starting point for me when I create my first digital course. I liked how it looked and it was easy to build, but there are better options for this sort of thing now.
Read full review We were pretty sure we wanted a
WordPress site so that we had more control over the site itself, having been burned by third-party vendor sites before. The fact that WooCommerce integrates so well with
WordPress was a big selling point for us.
Magento would have been too heavy of a lift for our small dev team and we didn't want to rely on
Shopify or
BigCommerce (though all of those products could have their merits for other projects or clients).
Read full review Return on Investment Increased sales by $8000 from January to June (Added 2 more programs quickly and easily) Saved almost a thousand dollars in the first year in costs by switching to Podia Improved customer satisfaction by using 1 site instead of 4 Read full review Positive: low cost to start up, and allowed us to start selling right away. Negative: better plug-ins have a high cost of entry. For example if you want to do subscriptions you need a paid plugin for it. Positive: easily integrates with PayPal and Stripe. Justin Esgar CEO/President - 360° IT Consulting, Server Management, IT Security
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