Ten product types, one ladder: which offer belongs on which rung
Downloads, courses, calls, webinars, memberships, community, physical goods, lead magnets, tips and bundles — where each one sits, and the pair that clashes.
Look at your page and read the prices from top to bottom. If they are $18, $24, $19 and $29, you do not have a ladder. You have four versions of the same rung, and the customer who would happily have paid you $200 this year has nothing to buy after the first afternoon. The fix is rarely more products. It is products at different heights, in the formats that suit each height, and store.fan carries ten of them on the same page under the same store.fan/you link.
Why most catalogues flatten out
Products get built in the order they are easy to build. A guide is easy, so you write one. A second guide is easier still, so you write that. Both land in the same price band, because that is what guides cost, and within a year the whole page sits inside a $15 spread. Nobody planned it. It is just what happens when the format chooses the price instead of the other way round.
The genuinely hard part is the top rung. Cheap products are quick to make and never talk back. Expensive ones ask something of you: a course needs structure and a finished recording, a membership needs something to happen every month for as long as people pay, coaching needs your calendar. Most people stall not because they cannot think of a premium offer but because the premium offer is the only one that keeps needing them after launch day.
The second hard part is the bottom. A free thing that costs you nothing to give away is easy to underrate, and easy to make so thin that it damages the trust it was meant to build. A lead magnet has to be genuinely worth paying for and then not charged for. That is a higher bar than most free downloads clear.
One link, or one platform per format
The usual arrangement is a course on one platform, a booking tool on another, downloads on a third, a community on a fourth, and a link page trying to hold the whole thing together. Every join in that chain is a place buyers fall out. Putting all ten types on one page removes the joins, and the feature list is organised around exactly that.
| A format per platform | Ten types on one store.fan page |
|---|---|
| A new format means a new subscription and a new checkout to learn | The next format is another product on the page you already have |
| Buyers land on four different brands on the way up your ladder | One link, one look, one checkout from lead magnet to coaching call |
| Each tool takes its own cut on top of card fees | 0% platform fee on every plan; card processing fees still apply and payouts go to your own Stripe account |
| Customer records split across tools, so nobody has a full history | One customer list, with lifetime value per person across every purchase |
| Sales figures live in four dashboards and never reconcile | Views, buyers and revenue per product in one place, with traffic source |
| Bundling across tools is impossible without manual coupon fiddling | Bundles are a product type, so two rungs can be sold as one |
The ten types, rung by rung
Heights, not exact prices — your numbers depend on your field. What matters is that each rung is roughly double the one below, so the climb is a decision rather than a leap.
- 1Rung zero, free: a lead magnet priced at $0. The buyer goes through the same checkout, gets the same private order page, and lands on your customer list as a real contact. This is the rung that makes every rung above it easier.
- 2Rung zero, optional: tips. Not a step on the ladder so much as a door for people who want to pay you and have nothing to buy. Leave it on and forget about it.
- 3Rung one, roughly $9 to $39: digital downloads. Templates, presets, samples, an e-book. Delivery is instant to a private order page the buyer can return to, and replacing the file updates it for everyone who has already bought.
- 4Rung two, roughly $30 to $99: paid webinars and bundles. A live session sells at a higher price than a file because a date and a time are attached. A bundle carries someone from rung one to rung two without a new product being built.
- 5Rung three, roughly $79 to $399: online courses. A structured outcome rather than a resource. On Pro you can host the course video itself, so the material stays behind the same checkout as everything else.
- 6Rung four, monthly: memberships and community. Monthly or yearly billing, automatic renewals, self-serve cancellation, and access that follows payment. Community adds a real feed with posts, replies and pinned announcements. Pick one of the two, not both, for the same audience.
- 7Rung five, your calendar: coaching calls and bookings. The dearest rung because it is the one that costs you hours. Slots are held only once payment clears, order-form questions collect the brief up front, and on paid plans the booking syncs with Google Calendar and issues a Google Meet link.
- 8Off to one side: physical goods. Print runs, merchandise, signed copies. Address collection covers 250 countries with official region lists for 33 of them, and you set a flat delivery fee that is shown before payment and survives discount codes.
The pairing that reliably backfires
A paid membership and a paid community, aimed at the same people, at similar prices. From inside your head they are obviously different: one is a library, the other is a room. From the outside they are two monthly charges that both promise ongoing access, and the visitor solves the confusion by buying neither. Choose the one that matches what you can sustain — a library if you are happier producing, a room if you are happier talking — and fold the other in as a feature of it.
A ladder that took one evening to plan
Take an illustrator who currently sells three brush packs at $16 each. The ladder rewrite does not throw anything away. The brush packs stay at rung one. A $0 starter pack goes in below them as the lead magnet. A $45 bundle of all three packs plus a walkthrough recording becomes rung two. A $149 course on building a personal style becomes rung three. A $12 a month membership with a monthly critique thread becomes rung four, and two coaching slots a month at $120 sit at the top for the people who want a portfolio review.
Nothing here is a promise about revenue, and the same page in a different niche behaves differently. The structural point holds regardless: the same visitor now has somewhere to go after the $16 purchase, and the person who was always going to spend more is no longer forced to stop at brush packs. If you want to see how the rungs look laid out on a real page, the storefront examples show the layouts side by side.
Lay your own rungs out on one page and see where the gap is — the Free plan keeps the page, the designer and the link cards for good.
Plan your ladderThe mistake most people make
The usual error is building the ladder top-down in one go: writing the course, filming the modules, opening the membership, all before anything at the bottom exists. Six weeks of work goes out to an audience that has never paid you a penny. Build one rung at a time and let each one fund the next. The mirror-image error is stacking three products on the same rung and calling it range. If two products cost within a few pounds of each other and solve the same problem, they are competing for the same wallet, not building a ladder. Price is what does the sorting, which is why per-product revenue is worth checking before you add a fourth thing to the middle.
Three is enough to work: something free, something small, something substantial. Ten types being available does not mean ten products should exist.
A bundle is a bridge. It lifts someone from a rung they have bought to the next one up by making the jump look like good value, without you building a new product.
Yes, both are product types on the same storefront. The physical one collects a full address and your flat delivery fee at checkout; you post the parcel yourself.
No, and it is better if it is not. Publish the bottom two, sell them for a month, then build upwards using what buyers asked for.
Ten types is not a shopping list. It is a set of heights, and your job is to make sure the distances between them are walkable. Read your prices top to bottom once a quarter. If they all sit in the same band, the next thing you build should be dearer than everything already there.
Start with one free product and one paid one, on the same page, and add a rung when the buyers ask for it.
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