Your checkout flow is the journey, or sequence of pages, a customer actually sees in order to purchase your course. Here's what that journey includes. Once customers hit your sales page, your single goal is to convince them to click on your "buy" button. The buy button takes customers to a single-page checkout experience, where they enter their personal and payment information. Once customers submit their payment on the checkout page, they see a final "Thank you!" page where they can access their new online course. This checkout page flow is already built for you in Teachable, so in this lesson, I'll cover the elements included on your checkout page, and how to optimize them to maximize your conversion rate. You want to make it as easy as possible for customers to say yes to your online course.

The first thing you'll notice about your Teachable checkout page is that we've created a single-page experience. So what does that mean? After someone sees your sales page, they'll land on this checkout page, where all they need to do is enter their payment information in order to make a purchase. As a comparison, some sites - including former versions of Teachable - used to have an in-between page, where customers had to make a Teachable account before they could submit a payment. The problem with this approach is that it adds a step, and it was just giving customers one more opportunity to say no to your course. By removing that, we've reduced friction in the checkout process, and hopefully you'll end up with more customers.

The next thing you'll notice is Teachable checkout pages reinforce your transformation by including testimonials and course bullet points. The testimonials in particular are a great way to remind people about that social proof that other students have already had amazing results from your expertise, while the course bullet points remind your prospective buyer about the great outcomes in store for them after they take your course.

The last element we want to cover on the checkout page is the purchase guarantee, sometimes called a trust seal. This guarantee significantly de-risks your customer's decision. If they hate your course, they can get a full refund within 30 days, it's as easy as that. There's a reason why most stores offer some kind of refund policy; it lowers the commitment level. Although most of us do make refunds, and inevitably someone will use the refund policy on your online course as you grow in popularity, the purchase guarantee significantly lowers the barrier to entry. It appeals to our logical side because even if the decision doesn't pan out, we always have the option to undo our action and get our money back.

Once someone hits "submit" on the checkout page, they'll land on a thank you page inviting them to either purchase an upsell or to jump right into your course material. And if they've made it to the thank you page, you did it! Congratulations, you've got a new student. This is definitely a milestone worth celebrating.