Plugins are something synonymous with WordPress – they’re things that you can install that add extra functionality to your website. 

Showit doesn’t use plugins the same way as WordPress. Most of the functionality you need to use plugins for with WordPress are built right into Showit – like the page builder, SEO capability, security, and speed.

95% of people will not need any plugins. Besides, a major upside to Showit is actually the lack of plugins. Plugins often conflict with each other, mess up your site, and cause major headaches.

That being said, you can embed things in your site easily. These are services that you would sign up for outside Showit (like a calendar/scheduler service, or a live Instagram feed, or a podcast player). The service gives you something to copy and paste into Showit, and the widget appears on your website. 

Now if you REALLY, REALLY want to use a specific plugin and can’t get away without it, you can actually use WordPress plugins with Showit if you are on the highest Showit subscription.

You’ll need to use an external (paid) service in order to sell your stuff and integrate it with your Showit website. This is pretty standard for any website platform.

If you are selling a digital product, service, or online course, you can use literally any service that produces an order form for you (on which people enter their credit card to purchase your thing). You talk about your product on your website, and just create a “Buy Now” link that takes people to this order form. 

Examples of possibilities are PayPal, Shopify Lite, SendOwl,  Teachable, Thinkific, Podia, Simplero, Kajabi… the list is truly endless. It’s impossible to say which one is right for you because it depends on what you’re selling, what features you need, and what you need the service to do after they buy. Like whether you need the service to send them an automatic email with details about the next steps, or give them access to an online course, or send them a digital PDF download.

If you are selling lots of smaller items (physical items that will be shipped, or digital) and you want people to be able to add multiple things to a cart and then “check out”, aka pay all at once, then it’s a bit different. 

Our ‘extended’ templates with the bonus pages do include a shop + product page. This can be used with the method above (linking to an order form), or if you want the shopping cart feature, it works best with Shopify Lite (and our free tutorials that come with your template purchase show you how to set this up with Shopify Lite).

However, if you do have a large ecommerce store with more than 20+ products, using Showit & Shopify Lite can end up being a little hard to manage.

In this case, I recommend a full Shopify Store or something similar (like BigCartel, or BigCommerce). You set up your store on Shopify’s platform, and just link to the Shopify shop from your Showit website. Shopify, or similar, will give you a few options to customize the look so it appears to be part of your website, even though it’s technically not. 

See the question above about selling things from your Showit website for some background info. 

If you plan to sell a course or membership, you need to pay for an external service that creates an order form that you can then link to from your Showit website. People put in their credit card and then the service automatically sends them an email that gives them access to a locked ‘membership site’, which has your courses and whatever else you are giving them. 

Services that have this capability are ones like Teachable, Thinkific, Podia, Kajabi, Simplero, and a million other options. 

So technically the course/membership site is not actually part of your website, it’s part of whatever the external service is. They will give you some options to customize it so it looks like it’s part of your brand.

Having the course or membership be set up on an external service (rather than on your actual website) is 100% standard no matter what website platform you use. Trust us, it’s absolutely, hands down the easiest way to do it. All the pros do it this way.

Each of our templates has a section at the end of the pages for advertising an opt-in gift (also known as a freebie or lead magnet). This section also pops up from time to time to invite people to opt-in. You can hide or delete this section if you do not want to do a freebie. 

If you are going to offer a freebie, again you’re going to need an external service to manage this, called an ’email marketing service’. This service will provide you with a sign-up form, which gets embedded into your Showit website.

When people fill out the form with their name and email, they get put on a mailing list and the service automatically sends them an email with their free digital gift (for example, a PDF or audio file which you will need to create). You can then use the service to email people on your mailing list to keep in touch, offer them valuable info, and eventually remind them to purchase your services.

An example of the most well-known email marketing service is Mailchimp. However, we recommend Mailerlite as an alternative, because it’s free, easier, and comes with more features than Mailchimp. We give free tutorials with your template purchase on how to integrate either Mailchimp or Mailerlite sign-up forms into your Showit site. 

Showit doesn’t natively offer this as part of it (no website platform does), but yes you can do it.  

If you want a quiz to be your ‘freebie’, in addition to an email marketing service (see question above), you’ll need a quiz service. 

We use Interact Quiz for this. You set up the quiz there, and you can embed the quiz or link to it from your Showit site. When people finish the quiz, Interact passes the information to your email marketing service and the person gets put on your mailing list. 

We don’t provide a tutorial for integrating the quiz & email services – you would seek instructions for that from those services’ help docs or customer support.