Developing a Scalable Online Learning Environment with Shopify

Digital education is almost as old as the Internet itself.

Yet it has only begun its exponential growth in recent years, with thousands of new courses informing and educating millions of new people each year.

Valued at roughly $217 billion in 2022, the digital education market is estimated to reach around $842 billion by 2030, demonstrating just how much growth there is for those who create digital learning environments.

For many, the journey has only just begun.

Shopify already hosts thousands of courses as one of the leading eCommerce platforms worldwide. Its ability to quickly offer your courses to paying customers makes it an excellent platform for scaling your learning environment.

But how?

If you’ve already established your first digital education course, you’re halfway there to complete business success—all that’s left is to scale.

We’ll show you how to correctly set up your Shopify account for eLearning to help you scale your learning environment and gather more users. We’ll also give you tips and tricks on effectively scaling your course using all of Shopify’s most valuable tools.

Understanding the Potential of Shopify for Learning

A far-reaching e-commerce platform that facilitates the sales of both digital and physical assets worldwide, Shopify has recently become an excellent learning management system (LMS).

With around 2.1 million daily users, Shopify is one of the world’s largest eCommerce platforms, making it the ideal marketplace to set up your educational stall.

Shopify also has a range of specific features and abilities that make it ideally suited not just for hosting the sale of online courses but also for scaling them.

These include:

Infrastructure for Scaling: As a large eCommerce platform, Shopify is uniquely designed to cater to small and large online sellers. It provides the platform and infrastructure needed to seamlessly transition from a small selection of courses to a vast learning environment.
E-Commerce Integration: At its heart, Shopify is about selling online. It makes it easy for you to monetize your course in a way that suits you while integrating easily with the most popular payment methods.
Customizability: You can easily customize your sales page via Shopify’s theme system, allowing you to align your brand across your courses and Shopify page.
Quality Security: Shopify handles payments and protects your page with cutting-edge security. It gives you a secure webpage from which to sell your online courses.
Broad App Ecosystem: Learning is all about using the resources around you. Shopify’s wide range of app integrations gives you plenty of scope when scaling to incorporate many different features and apps into your course offerings.

Of all these incredible benefits Shopify brings, its ability to integrate with other apps is paramount.

Apps such as Tevello help bring everything together, helping you more easily manage your courses at scale, as the business Launch Party discovered:

“This is THE BEST course and community app for Shopify. I’ve since moved over three courses from another platform … and I’ve moved my community from a private Facebook group to Tevello.

I love that my customers now have a super seamless experience and get their course access immediately in their Shopify store accounts after purchasing.” – Shelley Easter from Launch Party

Setting Up Shopify for Learning

To set up your Shopify store, the process is relatively simple:

Sign up for a Shopify account using your preferred email and password, and select the payment plan that best fits your needs.
Select an appropriate theme for your new store. Themes such as “Minimal” can be good starting points for a professional look, but always select the theme that best fits your brand.
Customize your store settings to incorporate the correct courses/brand name, your logo, and essential contact information.
Add your courses as a product, including a price, name, and description.

To get the most out of your Shopify store page, you’ll want to integrate a unique Learning Management system such as Tevello, which will help connect all your elements.

With your Shopify store set up, you can do this by:

Selecting your chosen courses and communities app such as Tevello.
When you choose Tevello, you can install it from the Shopify App Store and sign up once downloaded.
Follow the video guides to migrate your current course content to Tevello. This process is simple and stress-free, and you will have direct access to the developer, who is always on hand to help.

Once installed, Tevello hosts all your courses on one reliable platform that automatically interfaces with Shopify and its payment systems.

This means you can easily manage your courses, subscribers, and payments in one place while gaining from Shopify’s reach and notoriety.

Key Features and Tools to Use for Shopify Learning

As one of Shopify learning’s key strengths, it’s important to take advantage of the wide array of apps and tools available to be integrated.

These tools and features may be found in separate apps or rolled into one package.

Learning Management Systems

Organizing and running one course is difficult enough, but once you start expanding and adding more courses to your learning environment, you’ll want an effective LMS more than anything.

As mentioned, Tevello is an excellent choice for integrating an LMS within Shopify, although there are other options such as Thinkific or LearnDash.

Discussion Forums

As you grow and gain more users, creating a thriving, respectful, and vibrant community will become even more vital.

Finding tools that allow you to host discussion forums and facilitate user interactions is crucial for any expanding learning environment.

Video Hosting

Video content is often an important part of your course content. Finding tools such as Vimeo that allow you to safely, securely, and reliably host video content is important for crafting a successful course.

Tips and Tricks for Creating a Scalable Learning Environment

Aside from having the best course content and using all the apps and features listed above, there are also some valuable tips and tricks you can use to help create a scalable and manageable learning environment.

Searchability: Try to add a search feature within your content platform to allow users to quickly find the content they are looking for, no matter how big you grow.
Use Analytics: Utilize Shopify’s native analytics to track what users like and don’t like, helping you optimize your scaling process.
Back-Up Your Content: Always and consistently back up your course content and other relevant data to keep everything safe in the event of technical issues.
Create Automated Onboarding: Use automated email systems to create automated onboarding systems for new users, which will help you easily recruit new learners as you grow.

Customizing Your Shopify Learning Environment

Shopify is not an eLearning platform by default, which is why it’s important that you customize your Shopify store.

Firstly, you’ll want to match your current brand with your Shopify store.

This should include selecting brand-appropriate color themes, fonts, and overall design for your Shopify page. In addition to the visual design, make sure to include descriptions, headers, and overall site copy that is aligned with your brand.

You should also consider creating custom page templates for specific course listings and offerings, which should help increase conversions.

Just like your actual course, your Shopify site should incorporate aesthetic images and video demonstrations. This will showcase your course content and tempt visitors to try it out.

Managing and Scaling Your Learning Content

One of the most challenging elements of scaling your digital learning environment is effectively managing the vast amount of new content.

Luckily, there are some valuable strategies to help you keep on top of everything.

Make use of Shopify’s tagging system to categorize your courses easily
Organize your courses logically, either by topics, difficulty, or learning paths
Create and regularly update a course content plan to help you track new content releases

Alongside these strategies, consider using tools such as bulk-editing tools to help you quickly edit and update multiple courses simultaneously.

Learning Management Systems such as Tevello are also excellent tools that can help you more easily manage your course content, no matter how many new users you get.

Making Use of Content Management Systems

Alongside an LMS and other tools, using a CMS that can integrate with Shopify makes managing your course content much easier as it grows.

A CMS such as WordPress is an excellent choice, allowing you to host educational blog content on a subdomain to help separate out your content.

Marketing and Engagement Strategies

Creating new content is only one half of scaling – you also need to promote all your new courses.

To attract new users and scale quickly, you’ll want to employ a wide range of different marketing strategies.

Effective strategies should include:

SEO: Make sure your site and blogs are optimized for search engines to bring as many new visitors in as possible
Engaging Forums: Aside from improving your course, creating engaging and active community forums around your course encourages existing users to return for new classes, as well as boosting word-of-mouth sales.
Paid Advertising: A great way to boost users immediately, paid advertising, such as through Google or Facebook ads, can help bring new customers in quickly. You can then use other engagement strategies to retain them.
Loyalty Programs: Providing incentives for joining multiple courses, completing course elements, or inviting friends is a great way to keep students engaged while retaining and gaining new customers.
Social Media/ Email Marketing: Active social media, regular and targeted email marketing, and even influencer partnerships can all be effective ways to drive more users to your course.

Helping You Craft Your Scalable Learning Environment

Developing a scalable learning environment isn’t easy.

More course content, more users, and more data all equal more challenges and work. But when done right, it is worth it.

By using Shopify as your primary eCommerce platform, you can take advantage of its native analytics and customization features, as well as its huge reach, to help attract new customers.

Signing up for a learning management system like Tevello makes scaling your learning environment a breeze, helping to fill in the content management gap that joining Shopify leaves.

Capable of integrating with Shopify’s payment systems, Tevello helps organize all your course content into one easily manageable place while giving you the tools and support you need to create, manage, and expand your digital courses.