Content creators are spoilt for choice when it comes to platforms for selling their work. Stan Store is one of the newer offerings in that space, offering an easy-to-use, polished interface for selling digital products, with some handy tools for marketing on Instagram, Facebook, and other popular social media platforms.
If you're a new content creator, or you're looking to diversify and try some new platforms, you may be wondering whether Stan Store is worth a look.
Here, we'll explore what the platform has to offer, how much it costs, and how to get started selling your digital goods.
What is Stan Store?
Stan Store is an ecommerce marketplace for digital content creators. It allows creators to sell memberships and online courses, manage email lists, and even book virtual meetings. Creators can even sell access to content hosted elsewhere, taking payment on Stan Store and then directing users to the URL of the content.
What sets Stan Store apart from some other ecommerce platforms is the presentation of the store itself. Creators can add a link from their social media profiles to their stores, and the store will open in a web view when the user clicks that link.
The layout of the store is designed to make the transition from Instagram or TikTok to the Stan Store feel seamless, making the whole shopping experience feel more professional and polished.
Stan Store is often compared to other ecommerce solutions like Shopify, although it's digital-only and doesn't venture into the realm of physical products.
There's plenty you can do with digital products, though, and Stan Store's link-in-bio solution also sees it put side by side with Linktree.
Who can use Stan Store?
Stan Store is a versatile platform that could appeal to all kinds of content creators, from authors and podcasters to coaches of all kinds. It's possible to sell one-off products and recurring memberships on the platform, and there's also an affiliate program that allows marketers to refer people and earn 20% of their Stan Subscription fees each month.
Course creators and influencers make up the bulk of Stan Store's current user base, and that makes sense given how it brings a social media page and a payment button into such close proximity.
That being said, there aren't too many restrictions in terms of who can use Stan Store, and if its feature set matches what you want to sell there's nothing stopping you from signing up.
What can you sell on Stan Store?
Stan Store supports a variety of digital products, including:
- PDF ebooks
- Guides
- Templates/themes (e.g. WordPress themes)
- Music
- Video content
- Courses
- Coaching calls
- Custom products
- URLs
- Webinars
You can create as many products as you want to sell on your store, however, the platform suggests creators list only a handful of products on their store page, as offering too many options can reduce conversions.
The platform does make it easy for creators to add and remove products from the store, so you can easily rotate which products are featured, to see which ones generate the most sales.
Creators also have the option of running more than one Stan Store, as long as each store is created with a different email address. But be aware that if you go this route you'd have to pay a subscription fee for each store too, and with fees starting at $29 per month, this could quickly add up.
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Do you need a website to sell on Stan Store?
There's no need to have a website to start selling on Stan Store. In fact, the platform is aimed at people who have a strong social media presence. This is obvious when you go to create your store, as there's a section at the top of each template dedicated to sharing social media links. In addition, the previews of your sales pages are shown as if they're being viewed on a mobile device.
Stan Store expects people to market products on social media, and link to their store pages from their posts and profiles. You could link to it from a traditional website too, if you have one.
However, given the popularity of social media platforms today, it's likely your largest source of traffic would be social media posts.
It's also important to note that while Stan Store is separate from the social media platforms it receives traffic from, it's not something you'd want to treat as a dedicated website.
Your brand's store is a folder on the Stan.Store website, rather than on its own domain, and while you can customize the look and feel of the store to an extent, you can't make changes to the meta tags or otherwise tweak the site for SEO purposes.
If you want to have a platform for sharing long-form content, posting regular updates and doing SEO/link-building work, you'd need your own domain name and a web host that supports that.
Stan Store focuses on a different area of online marketing, providing a convenient, easy-to-use way to set up a store to sell a handful of digital products to your existing social media audience.
Getting started on Stan Store
Getting started on Stan Store is easy. Simply go to the website and sign up for a free 14-day trial of the platform. You'll have to provide an email address, mobile phone number, and payment details as part of the registration process.
You'll also be asked for a username. This name will be used to generate your store URL, in the format stan.store/YOURUSERNAME, so try to come up with something distinctive and memorable.
Once you've signed up for an account, you'll be taken to your dashboard where you can upload a profile picture, connect your account to your TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook social media pages, and set up Stripe and PayPal for payments.
Creating products to add to the store is easy:
- Open your Dashboard
- Go to My Store
- Click Add Product
- Choose the product type (e.g. Digital Product, URL, or Coaching Call)
- Fill out the details for the product, including the title, subtitle, and button text
- Write a description for the product and upload any associated media
- Set a price for the product
- Choose what information you'd like to collect about buyers (e.g. name/email address)
- Upload the product
- Click Publish to set the product live
Creating courses with Stan Store
In addition to selling digital downloads and links to other websites, Stan Store also allows offers a course option. The platform has a built-in course creator that makes it easy to put together a course with multiple modules, each of which has multiple lessons.
When you create a new course, you'll be presented with a course template that's ready to edit. Simply click on a Lesson within a Module to edit that lesson's content, or click Add Lesson to add a new lesson.
When you edit a lesson, you'll have the chance to edit the title and description, as well as upload a video for the lesson, and any supporting materials (e.g. PDF documents, spreadsheets, source code, or video transcripts) to complement the lesson.
Any changes you make will be shown in the preview window to the left of the course editor, giving you an idea of how the lesson will look on a mobile phone.
Once you've finished editing a lesson you can Publish your changes. If you're not ready to publish yet, you have the option to save a draft and come back later to complete your edits.
In addition to the course content, each course can have a homepage that tells learners what the course will cover and explains why a prospective learner should take it. You can upload a header image for this page and set the font and color scheme to help it fit your brand.
It's very easy to create courses on Stan Store, but the course builder's features are quite limited. The platform doesn't have sophisticated learner tracking or analytics. It also lacks an option for quizzes and doesn't provide an easy way to schedule modules to unlock on specific days, so it's not easy to run cohort courses where everyone gains access to the same modules at the same time.
If you're just looking to release a video course and want an easy platform to use to split the videos up into modules, Stan Store does a good job of this and has a polished and intuitive interface. However, for those who want a more sophisticated learning platform, Stan Store may fall short in terms of the features it offers.
Customizing your Stan Store
Each product you add to the Stan Store will show as a product card. When you add a product to the shop you can choose whether to include a button with a call to action such as "Download" or "Book Now", or whether to just list the products with a title, price, preview icon and other details.
The platform offers several templates to choose from, ranging from simple, minimalistic layouts to ones with a more magazine-style appearance. The colors and fonts on each template are customizable, and it's easy to add links to social media platforms, including:
- TikTok
- X (formerly Twitter)
- YouTube
In addition to your general storefront, you can also create a landing page for a specific product. This landing page isn't visible from your store's main page.
The idea is to use this landing page to target a specific audience, either through paid advertising, or by emailing links to your existing mailing list subscribers. The landing page will promote one specific product, so you'll have more space to add sales copy, preview images, etc.
Analytics and tracking tools
Stan Store offers a built-in analytics tool that tracks the number of store visits that occurred over the last 7 or 14 days, the number of leads generated, and total revenue earned.
Sellers on the Creator Pro plan can add tracking pixels for Facebook, Google Analytics, TikTok and Pinterest to get even more detailed analytics.
Engaging with your community
Depending on the subscription tier you have, Stan Store offers several options for communicating with your customers. Sellers who have the Creator Pro membership can take advantage of the platform's built-in email flows.
Alternatively, sellers can use the platform's integrations with MailChimp and Zapier to send messages using third-party email providers. The integrations are easy to set up, and once they're up and running anyone who signs up for email communications via Stan Store will automatically be added to the relevant mailing list in MailChimp (or other supported mailing list platforms), and tagged so it's clear that they're a Stan Store subscriber.
How much does it cost to sell on Stan Store?
To sell on Stan Store, creators must have a paid membership. There are two plans to choose from, Creator, and Creator Pro.
The Creator plan costs $29 per month when billed monthly, with a 20% discount for annual memberships paid up-front. This offers access to the platform's main features:
- Mobile store
- Calendar bookings
- Digital downloads
- Integrations
- Analytics
The Creator Pro plan costs $99 per month, again with a 20% discount if you choose to pay for a year in advance. Creator Pro gives sellers access to all the features of the basic Creator plan, plus:
- Order bumps
- Affiliate links
- Email flows
- Funnel builders
- Advanced pricing options and payment plans
The monthly/annual fee is the only fee Stan Store takes from sellers. The payment processors (Stripe and PayPal) may charge fees, depending on the volume of sales and the currencies used by the seller and buyer.
There is a 14-day trial, so it's possible to test out the platform's features without having to spend money. However, you are required to provide payment details as part of the signup process, and the trial covers only the basic Creator features.
To access any Creator Pro features, users will have to upgrade their membership, and upgrade fees are taken immediately.
How does Stan Store collect payments?
Stan Store uses Stripe and PayPal to collect money from customers. Stripe is a trusted name in payment card processing and works with large global payment networks such as American Express, Visa and Mastercard as well as more local networks such as Interac, which is popular in Canada.
Stripe charges a payment processing fee, but Stan Store doesn't take a commission on each sale, making the platform an appealing option even for those who expect to sell a high volume of products.
PayPal can be used to receive credit or debit card payments or for payments from PayPal wallets. PayPal also charges a payment processing fee, with the fee depending on the type of PayPal account you have, how the payment was made, and whether there are any currency conversions required.
What are users saying about Stan Store?
When reviewing any platform or app, it's always a good idea to understand how its user base feels about the product. We checked out Trustpilot to see what users are saying at Stan Store.
Stan Store has an impressive 4.7 out of 5 stars. With 201 reviews in total, 97% of these are positive, with many users praising Stan Store's ease of use and customer service.
However, there are also some negative reviews, with 4% of users giving Stan a one or two-star rating. Surprisingly, these low reviews also relate to customer service, with the majority of reviews stating a lack of support and some users mentioning a lack of features.
However, overall, reviews for Stan Store are largely positive.
Is Stan Store a good option for creators?
Stan Store is a good option for creators who already have a strong presence on social media, and who want to monetize that presence with a handful of products. The platform isn't a replacement for a full storefront. It performs best with six or fewer products advertised on a single-page store that's similar in layout to a Link Tree.
Stan Store is versatile enough you can use it to sell coaching sessions, conference calls, digital downloads or simple courses. However, if courses are your core product and you'd like to use gamification features, offer quizzes, create a space for community conversations or track learner activity in-depth, you may want to look at other platforms.
If you're in the target audience for Stan Store, you'll find the social media integrations it offers invaluable. For those selling more unusual products, or who want more control over their branding, other platforms may be more suitable.
The best Stan Store alternative: Whop
If you're intrigued by what Stan Store has to offer, but feel it's lacking in some features, or that you'd rather not pay a monthly subscription fee to be able to sell your products, then Whop is the best choice for you.
Whop is a platform dedicated to helping everyone make money online. Whop offers the ability to sell a variety of products, including digital downloads like ebooks and worksheets, online courses, community access, trading signals, software, live events like webinar and masterminds, and just about any other digital product you can imagine.
Benefits of selling with Whop
Stan Store is very much a premium solution for entrepreneurs, and positions itself around the middle of the market with its two-tier offering. This can help at scale, but some creators may find that these plans take a not-insignificant bite out of their revenues.
Pricing
Whop's pricing hits the perfect middle ground that can appeal to creators irrespective of where they are in their journey or what sort of scale they're operating at. By eschewing any sort of flat subscription or membership fee, Whop lets you run your business on its platform at no cost. Charges only start to kick in when you start making sales, and they begin at an industry-low 3%.
Payments
Your customers can pay you in a variety of ways through Whop, including with their credit or debit cards thanks to Whop's payment gateway built off of Stripe's renowned architecture. This means even more geographical accessibility, since Whop can process payments in even more currencies than Stripe can, including crypto via its ETH gateway.
Ease-of-use
Whop is also really easy to get started with. You can sign up using an email address or selected social media accounts. Then simply name your whop (your new internet hub where you'll be selling all of your digital products and running your community on) and you're good to go.
We already mentioned that Whop allows you to monetize just about anything digital, but there are few platforms that can even come close to how Whop does online courses and communities.
Can you sell courses with Whop?
Once you've created your own whop, you can launch any sort of digital product by adding the relevant app. Here's how you do that for courses specifically:
Now, your newly installed Courses app will prompt you to get started. All you need to do is hit that Begin setup button, and you'll see Whop's course builder.
Whop's course builder organizes courses into chapters, which are made up of one or more lessons. You can add both chapters and lessons to your new courses with a single click, and video uploads can be done right away if you've got all of your materials ready to go.
Whop: The best way to sell digital products
Stan Store is an easy to use ecommerce platform, but Whop is an all-in-one solution that handles digital products in an innovative, effective way.
By giving you a modular way to add features to your own whop, you get to choose what you want and what you don't, and the result is a unique digital storefront for your brand.
Whop gives plenty of options in terms of marketing, not just in terms of your SEO copy and user-generated content that apps like forums can generate, but also the Discover page. Whop itself is visited by millions every week, and whops like yours that claim the highest ratings and engagement rates can be seen by all of those eyes and give you even more traffic.
Unlike Stan Store, which gates many features behind a substantial subscription fee, Whop lets sellers access the platform's key features and integrations immediately, giving them access to a huge audience of potential buyers. Whop also lets you sell as many products as you want, not limited in either type or quantity.
If you're a creator considering running more than one Stan Store profile, but you don't want to have to pay for multiple memberships, Whop is the flexible solution you need. Whop's app-based design allows all of your creations to live in one place, keeping your customers right where you want them so that you can monetize with ease.
Start selling with Whop today.
