Challenge
As a course creator, Teachable’s founder was struggling to find a solution that not only made it easy to sell his courses online, but also didn’t take a huge cut of his revenue. Ankur Nagpal launched Teachable in 2013 to help creators build and sell online courses on a platform that enabled them to keep a greater share of their earnings.
Initially, creators could accept payments from their students using third-party payment gateways integrated with the Teachable platform. But, over the years, creators started building bigger businesses and wanted advanced functionality and controls, including more payment options for their students and better payout management. In addition to meeting the growing needs of its users, Teachable also had an opportunity to access a meaningful revenue stream by embedding payments directly in the Teachable platform.
To provide a more robust and intuitive payment experience for its creators, Teachable needed a flexible payments solution that it could easily embed into its platform. But it didn’t have time to build a complex payments infrastructure from scratch—the company wanted to get up and running quickly. Teachable also sought a solution that could reduce settlement times and help creators receive funds quickly and get paid in their local currency. What’s more, the solution had to support Teachable’s international growth ambitions, provide protection against potential fraud or compliance issues, and enable payments monetization.
Solution
Teachable originally used Stripe Billing to collect subscription payments from creators. When the company wanted its own embedded payments solution that would enable creators to collect payments from their customers, it considered Braintree, Adyen, Tipalti, and others but ultimately chose to expand with Stripe.
“We strive to enable our creators with seamless and diverse payment options to get them up and running as soon as they sign up for our platform,” said Kendall Partie, director of finance at Teachable.
Using Stripe products, the company launched teachable:pay in 2017—a new branded and embedded payments solution that created a powerful revenue stream by earning a share of each payment transaction between creators and their students.
Teachable implemented Stripe Connect Express to reduce the time creators spent waiting to receive payments. “Stripe allows us to put payout frequency in the hands of the creators,” Partie said. “We currently offer daily, weekly, and monthly payment options.”
To drive conversion, Teachable enabled Stripe’s optimized checkout suite, which includes the Payment Element, payment methods, and Link, which saves and autofills customers’ payment and shipping details to support a fast and safe checkout. Stripe enabled Teachable to expand globally and better appeal to buyers through added payment methods, including the buy now, pay later methods Affirm, Afterpay, and Klarna, and local presentment, which allows customers to view prices and pay in their preferred currencies. Stripe also helped Teachable improve its internal global funds management through alternative currency payouts and cross-border payouts. Together, these solutions would help Teachable creators convert customers as the company grew.
When Teachable was acquired by Hotmart in 2020, the two companies worked together with Stripe to form a gateway in the European Union. This has allowed for local acquiring efficiencies, increasing transaction success rates and saving the companies millions of dollars.
Results
With teachable:pay embedded into the Teachable platform, creators can get started in minutes, accept payments from students around the world, more effectively manage multiple currencies, set custom payout schedules, and streamline administrative tasks. Upon launching teachable:pay, Teachable saw a 140% increase in payments revenue growth.
Quick implementation saved years of work
Teachable achieved these results after implementing the solution on a short timeline. “Stripe continually supports us to enable features and release new payment methods in a fraction of the time required if we tried to build ourselves,” said Luis Jimenez, Teachable’s director of product for commerce.
Easier, faster payments across the globe
With teachable:pay, creators can present prices in a customer’s local currency and accept payment in more than 130 currencies and through multiple payment methods, including Apple Pay and Google Pay. Teachable also enabled buy now, pay later options—Affirm, Afterpay, and Klarna—to offer students flexibility to pay in installments as well as increased conversion rates and average order value for creators. teachable:pay has also made it easy to handle VAT and other taxes by collecting and remitting VAT, GST, and other sales taxes in the US, EU, UK, and 16 other countries around the world.
“International expansion is a key priority for our team,” Jimenez said. “Stripe makes it seamless for our creators to sell courses to students around the world.”
Better tools to run their businesses
Using teachable:pay, creators can automate payout schedules to receive course earnings daily, weekly, or monthly and rely on Teachable to automatically handle any chargebacks or disputes. Meanwhile, cross-border payouts make it simple for Teachable to pay creators in their local currency.
“Part of our value proposition for creators is having payment management built into the integrated Teachable experience,” Jimenez said. “We’re committed to making the hard things easy, and Stripe allows us to do that.”
Teachable also has tools to run its payments business on the macro level. With the Stripe Dashboard, Teachable teams can monitor trends in payment volume, geographies, and chargebacks, helping them make strategic decisions and get ahead of any potential compliance or risk challenges.
Stripe helps us provide outsized value to our creators with streamlined payments, fraud protection, and tax handling and enables creators to accept payments in the preferred method of their students.