By Denn Mokaya, Published on March 29, 2022
How sell webinars on shopify
Seminars have long been beneficial ways for organizations, businesses and entrepreneurs to:
- conduct trainings
- share valuable information
- unveil new products or features to their audiences.
It also has become an important way for entrepreneurs to earn extra income. Now, in the 21st century with the advent of streaming services, seminars happen online as webinars! A webinar is simply an online seminar.
Are you planning a seminar? Make sure to plan for a webinar to run parallel to it. There are many advantages that come with running a webinar.
TL;DR
- You need a shopify store account
- Install and set up Courses & memberships app on your store.
- Connect your zoom account. Here’s how.
- Create content and add Zoom meeting/Webinar page
- Publish your content to make it available by clicking publish.
- Create shopify product and Link your content to it for one-time-purchase
- If you’d like a subscription service create a selling plan and link it to your product
- You are done. But you might want to look at how your attendees will access the webinar
Why run a webinar alongside your seminar?
For starters, not all your audience can attend your seminar in person. But by having a webinar, you can expand your audience significantly, giving opportunity to those unable to attend in person to still attend online. Streaming services are available that reduce the complexity of hosting webinars. Here are some benefits of having a webinar:
- Reach a wider audience
- Increase possibility of capturing a new audience
- Because it’ll be stored in the cloud, it can be re-watched and can capture new audiences perpetually.
- It can be monetized for as long as it is still relevant, earning the organizer passive income.
The last point, monetization of webinars, is even more exciting and valuable for its hosts. The ultimate goal of seminars and webinars is to increase value to the audience and the host.
In this short post we’ll show you how to get more value from your live events, as they happen and long after the fact.
Install Courses & memberships
Install courses & memberships and follow the steps to get it set up in your store. This app has a rich feature set that will enable you to create and sell webinars. Because the webinars are stored in the cloud, you can experience all the benefits of selling webinars, particularly, recurring income!
Connect your zoom account
The app integrates with Zoom, one of the most popularly used platforms for webinars and online meetings. To use this feature, you need to connect your zoom account first. You need a zoom account to get started, create one if you don’t have it yet.
To connect the app to your zoom account, click settings on the side menu then zoom integration on the settings page.
This will open the connect Zoom account page, where you can click connect. If you are logged on, it’ll take you to an authorization page click authorize to allow it to use your zoom account. Go back to settings > Zoom integration to confirm that you are successfully connected.
Now that you are connected, you are ready to schedule your first zoom meeting or live webinar!
Create content
To sell your zoom webinar, you need to create content. Content on the app is a container for whatever you’d like to sell, it could be an online course, or digital products like downloads or music or webinars etc. In this case we’ll create a Zoom meeting/Webinar.
Go to content on the side menu and click + content to create your content, enter the name and description.
Add Zoom page
On the content page click +Page and select a Zoom meeting/Webinar layout.
On the following page enter your webinar details and make sure to select cloud recording if you want it to still be available after the webinar has ended. Enter an email reminder and choose how often to remind attendees. Click done once you are finished.
Publish Content
Click on the Generate preview link button so that you can have a glimpse of how the final webinar will look like.
Click the Publish button to publish the content once you are done. Publishing creates all the necessary pages as designed in the content outline page and makes the webinar publicly available. It takes a few minutes to finish publishing the course.
Sell the webinar on your shop
Now that we have the webinar created, it’s time to sell it. The app gives you two revenue models to choose from:
- One time purchase - Allows your customers to pay once and have access to the webinar for a limited or unlimited time depending on the expiry period.
- Subscription - Allows your customers to renew their access to the webinar daily, weekly or monthly. This also can be limited by the expiry period.
To use either of these options we need to link the content with the webinar to a shopify product.
- Create a shopify product that corresponds to the course. You can give it a name and cover image similar to the content created before.
- Choose your selling method, there are two options available, one time purchase, or subscription.
To set up one time purchase, click Set up how you will sell this course and select set up one time purchase. Follow the wizard to complete the set up.
For detailed instructions on how to set up one time purchase see here, for subscriptions setup see here.
The final result of a proper set up is this:
How will customers attend the webinar?
Once the product linked to the webinar is bought, the user receives an email with a link to their own dashboard where they can access the webinar. If they don’t have an account on your shop yet, they will receive an email requesting them to create one.
With their account details they are able login right from your storefront to their member dashboard to access zoom webinar.
In the content (container) the Zoom webinar details are available and on clicking the join button they can access the ongoing webinar.
But if the webinar already happened a recorded version will be available on the same page.
Conclusion
Now you can monetize your webinars with Courses & memberships app on your shopify store.