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TL;DR (Quick Summary)
- Your site URL is close to permanent. If you already have live students, changing it breaks every link you have ever shared.
- Add your custom domain, but do not make it primary until the CNAME has actually propagated. Test it in an incognito window first.
- The product page versus landing page choice is not reversible. Switching later means rebuilding the course from scratch.
- Thinkific Payments makes Thinkific your merchant of record, so they collect the tax and submit it for you. Your own Stripe account costs extra in fees.
- A privacy policy and terms of use are not optional on a site that collects information, and almost nobody sets them up.
- Tax categories are per product, not per site. Every new course you add is another trip back into settings.
The boring part is the part that breaks
You signed up for Thinkific, you logged in, and there are about nine tabs across the top of your settings page. None of them are the fun part.
None of them are the course.
So most people skip them and go straight to building.
Then a month later they are back in there trying to work out why the tax is wrong, why their domain is not resolving, or why a student got a welcome email addressed to Apple. Not a person named Apple. Just Apple.
These settings are boring. That is exactly why nobody makes videos about them, and it is exactly why they are the ones that cause problems later.
In this video, I walk you through every back end setting in Thinkific, in the order you should actually do them. Watch it above, or keep reading for the parts that trip people up most.
Your URL is more permanent than you think
Thinkific hands you a URL when you sign up and it is usually ugly. Something like kimschool-48642.thinkific.com.
If your site is brand new with no students in it, change it. Even if you are not adding a custom domain, at least get some branding into that URL.
If you already have live students, leave it alone. Every link you have shared, in every email and every social post, points at that URL. Change it and they all break.
The custom domain step people get wrong
A custom domain on Thinkific is a subdomain. Something like courses.yourdomain.com or academy.yourdomain.com. It cannot be your bare domain.
You create a CNAME record at your domain host pointing that subdomain at your Thinkific URL. Then you add it in Thinkific.
This is the part to pay attention to. Do not tick make primary yet.
A CNAME can take 24 to 48 hours to propagate. If you make it primary before it resolves, you have pointed your site at an address that does not work yet. Add it, save it, and leave it alone.
An hour or two later, open an incognito window and put that subdomain in the address bar. If you get a secure connection warning, it is not ready. When your Thinkific site loads, go back in and make it primary.
Your old links do not break when you do this. They redirect.
One choice you cannot undo
Under course landing page there are two options. Product page with support for custom CSS and apps, or landing page with a simplified builder and AI content.
They both build landing pages. The difference is how much control you get.
The AI landing page builder is quick, and if you have no idea what you are doing with sales pages it will get something on screen. But you can barely customize it, and in my opinion it will never be a high converting sales page.
The part that matters: if you start with the AI landing page builder and switch to product page later, you have to recreate your course. Not adjust it. Recreate it.
Start with product page.
Who collects your tax
Thinkific Payments, also called TCommerce, is Stripe under the hood. The difference is that Thinkific becomes your merchant of record.
That means they collect payment, charge the right tax for the buyer's location, and submit that tax on your behalf. For a solo business that is a genuine amount of work you are not doing.
You can connect your own Stripe account directly instead. There are additional fees for that, so go in knowing.
One thing to be clear about: I do not work for Thinkific. I am independent, I have been in business 25 years, and I have been working with the platform since 2015. I am telling you what I would do.
If you have questions about tax, currency or payments specifically, ask Thinkific directly. That is genuinely not my lane.
The two documents almost everyone skips
Privacy policy and terms of use.
If your site collects information from people, and it does, a privacy policy is not optional. Terms of use cover your refund policy and how you handle student data.
They protect you, and they protect your students. Both go straight into your settings and they take about five minutes once you have the wording.
Tax categories are per product, forever
This is the one that keeps costing people money quietly.
Every single time you add a product to Thinkific, a course, a bundle, a membership, a digital download, you have to go back into your tax settings and set the category for it. Online course. Course with a live lesson. In-person training. Community access. Digital book.
That category decides what tax gets collected at checkout. It is not set once for your site. It is set once per product, every time, and it is missed constantly.
Do this before you build anything else
None of this is the interesting part of building a course business. It is the plumbing.
But it is the layer everything else sits on, and going back to fix it after you have students in your site is a genuinely worse job than doing it now.
Every checklist, template and resource from this series, including the privacy policy and terms of use templates, lives in the community. Come and grab them.