Shopify & Thinkific Collaboration Helps Entrepreneurs Sell Products And Skills In One Basket

While impacts of the pandemic to businesses have varied wildly across sectors, it has been particularly painful for small operators.

For many service based entrepreneurs; coaches and instructors, beauticians, stylists, and personal trainers, ‘business as usual’ literally shuttered overnight. Those running small online businesses selling physical goods, themselves struggled with cratering supply chains, disrupted shipping and a multitude of other gaping potholes that appeared in their road overnight.

For Sheryl Gatzke, founder of Beauty Inc. Canada, the inspiration in January 2020 to create an online beauty course using Thinkific, with the ability to reach many, versus her in-person workshops which were always limited to a few, came just in time to save her business.

“Without Thinkific, we would have been dead in the water,” she says.

Through utilizing a new app-based integration of Shopify and Thinkific, Sheryl was able to take things one giant step further. With the new found ability to sell her physical beauty products right alongside her digital beauty courses, she was able to take her business to an entirely new level.

Despite the COVID-19-related chaos that ensued just three months after her first course had been locked, the combination of physical and digital products she was able to offer led to an exponential increase in business. It resulted in a six figure revenue that year—300% higher than even the previous year.

With simple, app-based integrations into each other’s platforms, over 3,000 Shopify store owners and Thinkific course creators are already working beyond the traditional structure of selling a single type of product. They’re getting creative, selling tailored digital products right alongside complementary physical ones, operating stores and course-based businesses as one.

“At Shopify, our mission is to make commerce better for everyone. Over the last year, entrepreneurs of all types have had to pivot their businesses to meet consumers where they are,” said Diana Glenn, Senior Global Lead, Shopify for Startups.

“With the help of integrations like Thinkific, we’re able to support merchants as they build upon their existing business models to bring value to consumers through their knowledge, skills and entertainment, adapting their in-person strategies for a digital-first economy.”