Webflow: 3 Ways To Sell Online Courses? (And How) 

Webflow has greatly grown in popularity in the past few years and is even challenging the giant of the CMS space, WordPress.

Its flexibility and ease of use has made it a great choice for online businesses selling any type of product.

But is Webflow good enough to help course creators host and deliver their online programs or memberships?

If so, how does it compare to specialist LMS platforms like Kajabi or Teachable?

That’s what we break down in this review.

Webflow's appeal is that it’s a no-code visual builder that allows you to build a custom site.

It’s no secret that its specialty is not to help you host online courses.

That being said, Webflow does have advanced ecommerce checkout and functionalities so you can take payment for anything you’re selling, including online courses and membership.

From there, comes the questions of how to deliver the online course.

Typically that's done through some type of Learning Management System (LMS), where you can manage your curriculum and member’s area.

See for example in Kajabi:

That’s not something Webflow offers natively and therefore any solutions we’ll explore in this article are work-arounds rather than ideal tools.

That being said, if you’re already using Webflow for all of your website and funnel needs, it might be worth trying these solutions to minimize the number of platforms you’re using.

The bottom line here is that Webflow can be a good fit to sell online courses, depending on your current situation.

Let’s now see what this might look like for you.

There are essentially 3 ways to achieve this, some being more complex solutions than others.

Of course, which one of these is best for you depends on exactly what you plan on delivering to your students.

Solution #1: Downloadable course content

This is the simplest way to deliver the program’s content to your students.

You can use Webflow native checkout and payment system to take payment from the user.

Then simply email or add to a page, a ZIP file containing all of the content of the program.

Of course this can be automated.

The obvious downside with this solution is that it doesn’t provide a great learning experience, with none of the benefits of having a proper member’s area protected by login.

This also makes your course content prone to be shared with others that haven’t paid for the course.

Downloadable content can work well for very simple programs or perhaps assets/templates if that’s what you intend on selling.

Of course the main upside of this solution is that it's very simple and straightforward.

Solution #2: Gated Pages

If you think about it, hosting and delivering a course is as simple as pages behind a paywall/login.

Users paying for the course get access to those pages where the videos/content of your program is sitting.

There are some Webflow templates that simply allow you to create gated content, such as the Academy template:

This lets you select pages that are password protected and only members can access.

What you can do is then upload your videos and course content to these.

You could have 1 page for each Module, then create a menu for these pages to link all of these modules pages together.

This is still keeping things relatively simple but can be a little hard to manage.

Since this is not a versatile curriculum builder like you would have on an LMS, any update has to be done manually on the pages instead of in the back-end.

The Webflow User Accounts achieves essentially the same thing here.

You’ll create Access Groups, for which each can be assigned pages to unlock when granted.

This can also be specific elements on the page rather than the whole page’s content.

Solution #3: External Tools

Lastly, if you need a more advanced way of delivering your course or managing memberships, products and content, you can use external tools.

This will still help you deliver your programs on Webflow, but by using 3rd party apps.

A popular way to do this is using something like Memberstack.

This is essentially a power up version of the native Webflow User Account.

It includes templates that already have most of what you need for your program, and generally just makes the whole process easier to manage.

Memberstack also helps you sell your online courses better with a checkout that’s more adapted to this kind of selling: upsells, tiers,etc.

Another solution is Memberspace:

This is a similar type of tool that you’ll manage on the Memberspace platform to handle both payment and help to gate your content.

These are slightly more complex solutions than the one we’ve previously mentioned but also help with more advanced features.