How to Migrate From Teachable Without Losing Students or Sales

Migrating from Teachable is not simply a matter of uploading the same videos somewhere else. Your school may connect course access, student records, payment plans, recurring subscriptions, coupons, email, affiliates, custom domains, and years of marketing links. Moving one piece without mapping the others can interrupt sales or leave paying students unsure where to sign in.

The safest approach is a staged migration: document the current school, preserve what you are allowed to keep, rebuild one complete buyer journey, test it privately, and only then direct new customers to the new storefront. This guide provides a practical plan while recognizing that export options and plan features can change. Confirm current Teachable documentation before relying on a specific export or setting.

Start with the business reason for leaving Teachable

Write down the outcome the migration must create. Perhaps you want to remove a monthly software bill, sell downloads and memberships beside courses, simplify tax handling, or combine checkout, email, affiliates, and upsells. A precise reason prevents a long migration from becoming a feature-for-feature rebuild of tools you never use.

Sort requirements into essential, helpful, and unnecessary. A training company might require quizzes, certificates, detailed progress records, and several instructors. An independent creator may care more about a reliable checkout, organized lessons, automatic access, customer email, and simple product bundles. Use your actual delivery model as the test. If you are still comparing destinations, review these practical Teachable alternatives before choosing one.

Inventory the whole Teachable school

Create a spreadsheet with one row for every course, coaching offer, bundle, landing page, price, coupon, payment plan, subscription, student group, email sequence, affiliate, tracking script, domain, and support document. Add columns for its owner, current URL, source files, export format, destination, migration status, and final test result. Flag old products that need continued student access even if they are no longer available for sale.

Preserve source files and lawful records

Locate the original video, audio, PDF, caption, transcript, image, and design files rather than treating the hosted school as your only backup. Export the student, enrollment, transaction, and other records available to your account where they are needed for access, accounting, or support. Protect personal data, limit who can open it, and retain only information you have a valid reason to keep.

Record lesson titles, ordering, descriptions, drip schedules, download links, prerequisites, completion rules, and automated messages. Screenshots are useful visual references but cannot recreate logic. Also review the licenses for guest lessons, stock media, fonts, and templates before copying assets to a different delivery environment.

Decide what transfers and what needs rebuilding

Portable files such as MP4 videos, PDFs, text, images, and CSV exports can usually be reorganized in another system. Platform-specific features may not map directly. Quizzes, assignments, discussions, comments, certificates, course completion percentages, and automation rules often require manual reconstruction or a clearly communicated alternative.

Set a policy for historical progress before promising anything to students. You might recreate access but reset lesson progress, preserve completion evidence for selected programs, or keep the old school available in read-only form during a transition. Test with real sample records. A reassuring announcement is not a substitute for verifying that the destination grants the correct entitlement.

Separate access migration from billing migration

Giving a student access at the new destination does not automatically move their payment agreement. Stored payment credentials and active subscriptions cannot be assumed to transfer between unrelated providers. Some customers may remain on the old billing arrangement temporarily; others may need to authorize a new subscription or payment plan. Review provider rules and applicable law, then communicate the price, timing, action required, access outcome, and cancellation choices clearly.

Rebuild one complete course journey first

Choose a representative product rather than the easiest one. Rebuild its sales page, pricing, checkout, confirmation, welcome email, student access, lesson sequence, downloads, support route, and completion step. Then make a real test purchase with a fresh email address. This pilot exposes missing dependencies and becomes a repeatable template for the rest of the catalog.

Migration is also an opportunity to remove obsolete lessons, repair broken links, add captions, compress oversized files, standardize names, and improve navigation. Keep the offer promise stable during the move; redesigning the product, pricing, brand, and technology simultaneously makes failures hard to diagnose. For offer and checkout fundamentals, see how to sell an online course.

Compare costs with a worked numeric example

Compare more than the headline platform price. Include monthly software, transaction charges, payment processing, VAT and tax administration, email software, affiliate tools, upsell tools, and the time required to operate them. Add one-time migration expenses such as contractor hours, overlapping subscriptions, data cleanup, and extra customer support.

An illustrative month

Suppose a creator sells 36 course seats at $149 each. Gross revenue is 36 × $149, or $5,364. At Pocketsflow's 2% flat, all-inclusive fee, the fee would be $107.28, leaving $5,256.72 before the creator's other business expenses. This is an illustrative calculation, not a revenue forecast; substitute your own sales, prices, refunds, currencies, and costs.

Pocketsflow has no monthly fee. Its 2% fee includes payment processing through Whop, VAT and tax handling, and Merchant-of-Record service. It also includes built-in email, affiliates, and upsells. This is the lowest fee in the category: 2% all-inclusive compared with Gumroad at roughly 10%, Lemon Squeezy at about 5% or more, and Payhip at about 5% on its free plan. Competitor prices and inclusions can change, so verify their current terms for your product and sales mix.

Move email, affiliates, and domains deliberately

Export only contacts you have permission to email. Preserve consent and unsubscribe status, rebuild the few tags and sequences that still serve a purpose, and never silently re-subscribe someone who opted out. Test purchase confirmations, welcome messages, lesson access, reminders, failed-payment notices, renewal messages, and support replies. The guide to building an email list for creators covers the underlying consent and lifecycle principles.

Map each affiliate to their destination account, commission arrangement, links, and outstanding obligations. Old affiliate URLs may appear in videos and evergreen content, so provide replacements early and decide how attribution will work during the overlap. Reconcile earned balances before switching systems rather than forcing partners to reconstruct the history themselves.

Inventory links from navigation, social profiles, newsletters, ads, QR codes, partner content, and search results. Save the current DNS records before changing a custom domain. Prepare destination pages and redirects first, keep a rollback record, and route each valuable old URL to the closest relevant new page instead of sending everything to the homepage.

Test privately before the public cutover

Test on desktop and mobile with clean buyer and student accounts. Cover a successful purchase, coupon, payment plan, subscription, cancellation, refund, failed payment, login, course access, drip timing, downloads, captions, receipts, taxes, support links, affiliate attribution, email delivery, and analytics. Record the expected result beside the actual result and rerun failed cases after each fix.

Invite a small group of trusted students to use the new experience. Ask them to complete tasks rather than simply browse: buy or redeem access, locate a lesson, resume on another device, download a resource, and ask for help. Their friction often reveals assumptions the person who built the course can no longer see.

Communicate clearly and launch in stages

Tell current students what is changing, what is staying the same, the exact date, whether their login or progress changes, what action they must take, and where to get help. Send an initial notice and a reminder near cutover. Avoid manufactured urgency, and schedule the switch away from a major launch so the team can focus on migration support.

Direct new sales to the destination first while preserving old access long enough to resolve exceptions. Monitor purchases, access requests, subscription changes, refunds, broken links, and email delivery daily. Cancel old services only after the transition period, financial records, and retention obligations have been reviewed.

A careful Teachable migration replaces a risky one-day switch with observable checkpoints. If you want a storefront with no monthly fee, built-in email, affiliates, upsells, and a 2% flat all-inclusive Merchant-of-Record fee, you can start free with Pocketsflow.