An online store for people who teach

The usual arrangement is a shop for the physical work and a separate course platform for the teaching, with two subscriptions, two checkouts, two customer lists and two places to keep your branding consistent.

The same catalogue that holds your prints or your sample packs holds a twelve-week course, sold through the same checkout to the same customer. Somebody can buy the tool and the course teaching it in one order.

A student who buys a course should arrive somewhere, not receive a zip. Six kinds of lesson are supported — video, audio, a written lesson, a downloadable file, a quiz, and a live session with a time and a join link — and one course can be all six.

The classroom remembers where each student got to. Quizzes are marked on the server so the answers never reach the browser, and a certificate is issued when the last lesson is done.

A lesson or a whole module can open a set number of days after purchase, so a twelve-week course stays a twelve-week course instead of becoming a twelve-hour binge somebody abandons in week one.

Any lesson can also be marked free, and a stranger can watch it without an account. That is a far better sample than a trailer, because it sits inside the real curriculum rather than beside it.

A student gets in through a paid order or through a live subscription, and the classroom checks both. So you can sell a course outright, or put a whole library behind a membership, without choosing a different product to do it.

Video and audio stream from private storage through links minted after ownership is checked, which expire on their own. A paid lesson has no URL to pass around.

• Backstage — A studio for selling what you know: real lessons, a classroom, live sessions and a certificate.

Every theme is a live shop you can scroll before choosing it, and none of them is fixed once applied — the rest of the shelf is worth a look if none of these is right for your work.

On what any of this costs, there is what an online shop actually costs, which breaks the bill into the seven places money goes. Or build one and look at it — building and publishing cost nothing.