Payhip

Payhip is an eCommerce and digital course checkout system designed to help anyone sell and deliver their product online.

They have over 130,000 sellers onboard who rave about their dedication to help independent sellers create a successful online business.

Although Payhip is a bit different from your run of the mill online course platform, it could be the perfect lightweight alternative for course creators.

It’s also very adapted for people selling physical products online.

Payhip isn’t exactly and all-in-one platform for online creators but has a ton to offer:

A well-rounded set of features and some very unique tools we’ll detail later.

Now, since this review is dedicated to online course creators, we’ll make a point to compare these features with other platforms.

Let’s break down the core things Payhip offers.

Store/Page Builder

Although Payhip isn’t really a website builder, it offers a relatively flexible way to build pages.

It’s not exactly a drag and drop, but you’ll simply add section and blocks to design these to your liking:

There are quite a few premade Sections to choose from for a more efficient build.

You can also set up a global header and footer that will apply to all pages - it doesn’t sound like much but you’d be surprised how many page builders don’t offer this!

You can also create a blog with posts and build a base of content to get some awareness organically with SEO.

Overall, Payhip’s page builder is nothing out of the ordinary and some course creators might still prefer a more serious solution, but it could just be enough for some to get started!

Checkout & Affiliate System

The core feature of the platform is its checkout system.

You can create and sell anything you want: downloads, online course, services, physical products, memberships and bundles.

Each of them will have their own checkout page, that unfortunately you can’t design (although it’s already fairly optimized).

You can setup any kind of pricing you need:

• One-off payments
• Subscription (including free and paid trials)
• Split payments
• Free

There are two choices of payment gateways to integrate: Stripe and Paypal.

This should cover most of the world except for some specific countries.

Another great news is that the platform can handle VAT & taxes for you!

This should help with the accounting headache this can often create.

Another great way to increase your sales that Payhip makes easier is cross selling.

This feature resembles a bump order as it appears on the checkout during the purchase.

Upsells on the thank you page are also available.

Lastly, you can set up your very own affiliate marketing program through Payhip.

You’ll get a link to send your partners to register, once they sign up they’ll be able to find their unique affiliate links.

Note that affiliate payments are currently not automated and will have to be made manually, which is fairly standard for most platforms.

Online Course & Membership

This is probably how Payhip stands out from other checkout platforms the most.

Payhip offers a full course builder integrated in the platform with a tons of feature:

You can create and manage your curriculum from the back-end easily and choose different lesson types: Video, text, survey, assignment, quiz or embed.

Note that video hosting will cost an additional $5/mo.

But you’ll also be able to get a lot of advanced features:

• Drip content: this will allow you to drip your online course modules based on a specific date or from the day of the student’s enrollment.
• Certificates of completions: these are pretty simple but can really boost the student learning experience and get them something to walk away with.
• Prerequisite lessons: if you don’t want your students to skip ahead you can make some lessons mandatory.

If your course or membership is much more simple and you just want to deliver a few documents to downloads, you can do that with the Digital Product type.

The course will look pretty neat in the front-end, even if there isn’t much you can edit:

Overall this feature is really up to par with specialized online course tools and make Payhip that much more interesting for course creators.

Other Features

Although these are the main features the platforms offers, we wanted to highlight a few others that could be interesting:

• Refer a friend scheme: this is a well-thought out feature that allows someone to get a discount for them and their friend when they refer them.

Very useful to boost sales and tap into people’s network beside the affiliate program.

• Social discount: this is a simple tool that allows you to automatically give a discount to someone that shares your offer on their social media. (Facebook only)
• Email customers: this isn’t exactly an email marketing tool but you can send broadcasts to people that have purchased something from you.

Payhip is fairly easy to use overall.

The process of setting up anything is straightforward and the language just makes sense.

There is a lot you can optimize too in order to get the end product as closely to your branding as possible.

You have a few fonts to choose from and most section’s colors can be adjusted.

If you’ve used any other course builder or checkout system before, the learning curve should be short!

There are also quite a few additional options to influence and optimize your customer’s experience too.

Payhip has a very unique pricing offering.

There are 3 plans to choose from to get started:

The great news is that any plan you choose will give you access to all of the features Payhip offers.

The free plan is a great value proposition, as it means you can get started with an advanced platform at no cost.

The 5% sales fee can become a drawback as you grow and that’s when you’ll want to upgrade.

If we compare this to other platforms, most don’t have a free plan and will start you with ~$30 per month right away.

The only additional cost to be aware of is Payhip video. If you want to use video content on your pages or inside of your products, you’ll have to pay an extra $5 per month.

This will give you 16 hours of uploading per month.

That’s a low price to pay for hosting when you compare it to video hosting platforms, such as Vimeo or Wistia, that start at $10 per month.

Overall Payhip pricing is very competitive for what it offers!

There are a few ways to get help or answer some of your questions when learning the platform.

The first one is the Help Center that contains a lot of helpful articles for all of the standards request you’d have:

If that’s not enough you can email the support team directly or pop a message in the chat widget.

This will usually get you an answer pretty quickly!

In terms of community, unfortunately Payhip only has a very small Facebook group right now.

This doesn’t have to be a dealbreaker but it simply makes it more difficult to connect with other users (if you ever wanted to).