Simvoly

Simvoly is an online business platform with a great feature range allowing you to market, sell and deliver your product online.

As for most all-in-one platforms, the promise is to provide creators with everything they need in one place!

The platform also aims to make the whole process of selling anything online easier with simple to use and visual tools.

We’ll review through this article how Simvoly fulfills this premise and how it compares to other popular platforms for online course creators.

Before diving deeper into each of the main features, let’s look at an overview of what Simvoly offers:

This shows a very well rounded platform which could potentially be a great fit for online businesses selling both digital and physical products.

Of course this also includes website hosting and regular updates to keep the site safe and secured. (SSL encryption, spam protection,etc.)

Now, let’s break down each of these and see how Simvoly performs compared to its competitors.

Site & Funnel Builder

Simvoly page builder is everything you could wish for!

It’s a very easy drag and drop visual builder that requires very little experience to create beautiful pages.

What I really like about it is the many pre-made templates at your disposal, with categories for all your needs:

You can set up global styling elements to keep everything handy and tidy such as custom fonts, branding color palettes,etc.

You can also set global elements so that updating them once will do so across the site when you re-use them.

A range of widgets/blocks is available for everything you might want to add to the page, including: forms, quizzes, booking, sliders, countdown, search,etc.

You can create different Websites within Simvoly (with different custom domains), and Funnels depending on the plan you’re on.

The Funnel builder gives you a visual flow to see the different steps you may like to build as well as a range of analytics.

This is also where you’d be able to use the A/B testing feature.

Using this for eCommerce is also made easy with the Store widgets and different ways to show your physical products.

The eCommerce feature is actually one of the biggest strengths of the platform, you’ll be able to create and manage these Products very well in the Store section.

This means the creation of a product with multiple variations, inventory tracking, shipping information and everything that will make selling these physical products easy for you!

Last note, Simvoly also has a Blog feature to allow for posting and creating content that will have SEO potential.

All in all, this feature is a smash for Simvoly and compares very well to other platforms in the industry.

Checkout & Payments

One of the main appeals of Simvoly for online creators is that it allows them to sell digital and physical products as well as services.

You’ll create separate Products in the back-end depending on what you want to sell:

One limitation to point out here is the pricing options: you can’t set up a free trial for your membership, which can be a deal breaker for some creators.

You will be able however to set up recurring subscriptions and split payments.

The number of payment gateways you can connect to Simvoly is rather impressive and much more than the standard Stripe/Paypal combo.

These are: Stripe, Paypal, Braintree, 2checkout, Afterpay, Authorize.net, Klarna, bank transfer,...

This should cover taking payments from people anywhere in the world and provide alternatives including “buy now pay later” with platforms like Klarna.

Simvoly’s checkouts are added as blocks on any page you want and can be extensively customized.

The good part is that if you’re selling physical products you can allow people to “Add To Cart”, adjust quantity and then go to checkout all products, just like you would expect from any ecommerce platform!

Within the funnel builder you also have the ability to add order bumps, upsell and downsells.

The only other main weakness of the checkout system is the lack of an affiliate program feature.

Email Marketing

Whether you plan on selling mostly digital or physical products, email marketing is probably going to be one of the main channels of promotion you use.

Simvoly allows for the management of an email list with tags and segmentation.

You then send email campaigns and set up automated sequences based on different triggers.

You’ll be able to create templates for these emails that can be reused, Simvoly uses a visual block builder for these too.

There are also a lot of pre-made templates for you to start from.

Again, Simvoly is not coming short with this feature and offers a much better visual Automation builder than many other course platforms.

This visual builder looks very much like what you would expect from a fully fledged email marketing and CRM system like ActiveCampaign.

A Split and Target feature are in the works to allow you to create different paths in your automations based on a set of conditions.

This means that you’ll have the ability to create very advanced sequences to optimize your funnel and increase your sales.

Here is the catch with Simvoly emails: the email sending allowance is very low.

Even on the highest plan, you’ll only be able to send 12,000 emails a month.

What this means is that you’ll pretty much have to either pay extra for this (see pricing section) or use your own SMTP which will also add to your bill…

Online Course & Membership

Although Simvoly doesn’t advertise itself as an online course platform exclusively, it does have the ability to create them.

This will be different from other popular platforms however (Kajabi, Teachable,etc.)

You won’t be managing your course content from the back-end, but instead build everything from the front-end.

So you’ll create a main page for your course, linking out to the different categories and lessons of your course.

You’ll have to manually build each page manually, upload content directly there and link pull everything together.

These pages can then be protected to only be accessible to someone who’s purchased a certain level of membership that you’re selling:

This process has pros and cons.

One the one hand it does give you more flexibility when it comes to the layout and design of your course or membership.

On the other hand, it makes it a lot harder to manage.

But here is the main downside of Simvoly on this end: video hosting is not included in any plan.

Meaning that if your online course or membership has any video content (as most do), you will need to pay for an external video host (Vimeo, Wistia).

There is also a relative lack of learning tools such as assessments, lessons drip and scheduling and other tools you’d find in other platforms.

This is probably the feature Simvoly has the most shortcomings for compared to other tools reviewed on the website.

Other Features

These are the main features Simvoly has to offer for course and membership owners but let’s review the other tools you’ll also be able to use.

1. Appointments/Scheduler: this feature will simply replace any need for an external calendar/scheduler system! You’ll be able to setup availability, get a booking link and even set up multiple Operators (aka coaches or team members) to handle calls based on different criteria.

This is not something you’ll find in many online course platforms and should be highlighted!

It can be a great tool to run a coaching program or simply schedule 1-1 calls with people.

Note that this isn’t really meant to be used for group coaching/classes.

2. Survey/Quiz: This is fairly self-explanatory but this feature will enable you to create quizzes and surveys that can be used for quiz funnels and as lead magnets. You can set up relatively advanced rules to skip questions based on previous answers,etc.

All in all, Simvoly has a lot of features and a lot of value for its money. The additional cost from tools needed (email and video hosting) still makes it a great bang for your bucks.

One area Simvoly doesn’t disappoint in any way is user experience!

The platform’s backend is blazing fast, and everything is so intuitive.

Of course this is one of the biggest upside of SaaS platforms, but Simvoly is really shining here.

There is a real sense of design and ease of the eye which make spending time on the platform a pleasant experience.

You can change the website’s language in just a click for better accessibility as well as any system text you want and that your clients will see.

In the front-end and since everything is built through the visual builder, things will look and feel exactly the way you want for your users.

Simvoly’s pricing is attractive, but has a few gotcha’ to understand.

You can start with a 14 days free trial as an individual user and start paying a affordable amount:

Beyond the entry level plan at $12/mo, you’ll probably want to start with the Business plan at $29/mo to unlock all of the main features the platform offers.

The main limit you should encounter beyond that point is the email sending limit we’ve already mentioned.

Which will very probably force you to pay extra or use an external SMTP (around ~$29/mo) depending on how many emails you send per month.

The Growth plan at $59/mo should cater better to mature businesses with more funnels or with a larger members base (over 200).

We’ll note here again that Simvoly does not provide video hosting, therefore you’ll need to add that to your tech stack for roughly an additional $19/mo.

There are a few ways to get support and training on how to use the platform.

The first one is to contact the tech team via the chat widget which is very responsive during business hours.

This will act as a ticketing system to help you troubleshoot any problems.

But there are also a lot of video tutorials and articles at your disposal to learn the platform better and fix it yourself.

Lastly, if you want to connect with other fellow users or simply get some advice on strategy and marketing, you can join a private Facebook group that has over 3,000 members:

There is regular posting there and the Simvoly team also chimes in to answer some technical queries.