Integrate LearnDash with WooCommerce Memberships: eLearning Business Series (Part 2)

LearnDash being a WordPress LMS plugin, is quite popular in creating and selling online courses. On the other hand, we have WooCommerce as an incredible eCommerce plugin for WordPress websites to sell products online. Merge the two plugins on your site, and you get the combined functionality to sell tangible products along with online courses.

Many eLearning sites are based on LearnDash-WooCommerce integration. While the LMS (Learning Management System) plugin excels in creating and delivering online courses, WooCommerce takes care of the payment side. Similarly, there are tons of benefits to using this integration, including the availability of several options of payment gateways, easy integration with most CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools such as Agile CRM, easy to sell physical products alongside, to name a few.

If you run a LearnDash site you might consider selling online courses with memberships and subscriptions. There are two aspects that would like to grow it further, depending on your business type:

Selling online courses in the form of membership to a user
Selling the courses to a group or a team

In this blog, we will discuss how to work on each of these aspects using the two popular WooCommerce membership plugins – WooCommerce Memberships and Teams for WooCommerce Memberships.

Also see: How to use LearnDash for Webinars

Adding Memberships to LearnDash Site with WooCommerce Memberships Plugin

Adding a membership feature is one way to increase sales and ROI on your Learndash site integrated with WooCommerce. Using this feature, you can offer special discounts to loyal users. Also, with this feature available on your site, there is a high probability that more learners would like to try the other courses and related materials you sell.

WooCommerce Memberships Plugin

Setting up membership plans becomes easier with the help WooCommerce Memberships plugin. It’s a premium plugin that offers a comprehensive solution to offer memberships through your online store. It is easy-to-use and can help you bring the course content, shop, and memberships together in one place. You get full control over the restrictions of memberships. You can create online courses using LearnDash and make them available only for members over a restricted time period.

LearnDash-WooCommerce Membership Integration

Tough there are no special integrations with the 2 plugins. You can still the following tasks by integrating LearnDash with WooCommerce Memberships plugin:

Create a Membership System for Your Site

Whether it is about selling a set of content/courses to limited members or restricting access to the site’s content, this plugin can help you out. You can not only add restrictions to make online courses/products accessible to the members but also drip the content to make it accessible over time.

Sell Memberships

Many people think of memberships as a type of WooCommerce product, which is not true. Instead, they are created from products. Using WooCommerce memberships plugin, you can enjoy maximum flexibility to assign various products to a membership plan for sale. You can sell memberships to your site as a stand-alone product or offer it when a user buys a specific product from your store. If you want to create recurring billing based subscriptions for your members then you need to use the WooCommerce subscription plugin.

Allow Restricted Content Access

Creating members-only content, be it a specific product or an online course, takes time and effort. It is why you want complete control over how the member would get familiar with the content. With this plugin, you can schedule/drip content or put a restriction for content to be accessible only after a user stays as a member for a week.

Restricting Purchasing of Members-only Courses and Products

WooCommerce Memberships plugin lets you transform your online store into a purchasing club. By including certain products/courses into membership plans, you can restrict their availability to non-members.

Offer Discounts and Special Shipping Options for Members Only

If you’re selling physical products along with your courses you could give free shipping options to members only or for gold members. Also, you can give special discounts for members if you sell physical or downloadable products along with your courses. You can relate the discount for members with a specific course product or product category.

Send Membership Notes

Frequent communication is the key to running a successful business while dealing with customer service queries and managing members on your site. This plugin comes with a ‘membership notes’ feature, which aims to simplify this aspect. You can create/share notes and communicate with the members via email. You can also set reminders to inform the members about the expiring memberships.

Also See: the best WordPress Themes for LearnDash sites

Creating Memberships for LearnDash Courses

Before you move to this step you have to install the LearnDash-WooCommerce integration plugin that allows courses to be included in WooCommerce products.

The install and activate the WooCommerce Memberships plugin and then,

Create ‘Memberships’ as a WooCommerce product category by going to Products –> Categories –> Add New
Then go to Products –> Add New
Create a product for the membership with any name and link it to the Memerbships product category
In the Product Data section, you can link the respective Learndash courses with this membership plan.
You can choose the ‘Variable product’ and use ‘Attributes’ section to name different memberships plans as variable products
Publish the variable membership product
Now go to WooCommerce –> Memberships –> Membership Plans
Then click ‘Add Membership Plan’ and create your membership plan
Here you can link the respective membership product with the membership plan that you’ve created
Then click ‘Publish’ to launch the membership plan

How to Smoothen LearnDash and WooCommerce Memberships integration?

Though LearnDash and WooCommerce memberships plugins can work together, there are still some rough edges when using the 2 plugins. But there is a MemberDash plugin that offers a straightforward integration between WooCommerce Memberships and LearnDash. Let’s see what this plugin offers:

Smooth Switching

This plugin intelligently checks whether the user has any other memberships that are still granting them access to a course and it will only remove the enrollment if no other memberships are granting the user access to that course.

Easily Add New Courses to Memberships

Normally if you want to add a new course to a membership plan you have to manually hunt down every past purchase and grant access to them individually. But with this plugin when you add a new course to a membership, everyone with that membership will get access to it.

Selling Memberships to Companies using Teams for WooCommerce Memberships

Having the WooCommerce Memberships plugin installed on your website can bring in significant sales. You can sell products and online courses created using LearnDash to the members of your site only. However, if you have physical products and digital courses intended for a group or team, having this plugin does not suffice the requirement.

It is where you also need Teams for WooCommerce Memberships plugin in addition. This plugin has been designed to take the functionality of WooCommerce Memberships to the next level. Having these two plugins installed on your site means you can sell memberships to teams, groups, or companies instead of limiting it to individuals only.

Teams for WooCommerce Memberships

Another aspect of selling a team product/course online is that one user handles the billing settings and other administrative control, while other users only get the product access right. This aspect is also covered in the features provided by Teams for WooCommerce Memberships plugin. You must also know that for this plugin to work, you must have WooCommerce Memberships version 1.9.4 or newer installed on your site.

Here is how you can use this plugin to grow your business:

Sell Online Courses/Products to Teams

This plugin lets you offer team memberships online through your WooCommerce-based online store. By setting the per-member sale price, per-team sale price, and minimum/maximum member count, you are good to go to sell team memberships. Furthermore, you can sell the memberships to groups as simple or variable products supported by WooCommerce.

Offer Complete Control Over Team Accounts

Using this plugin, you can offer a seamless experience to the buyers as they buy team memberships. Post-purchase, the user can easily add new members by sharing a ‘Join’ link or sending invites right through the user account. Also, he/she can assign permissions or roles to the team members.

For instance, if User A is given the role of a manager, he gets the right to add new members to the team – a task which only the administrator can do otherwise.

Manage Teams Efficiently

Not only the users of your site get better control over teams, but you also get that too, being the store admin. You can view the teams, check the details of each of the teams on your site, change team attributes, and add/remove team members.

Integrate WooCommerce Subscriptions

Just like WooCommerce Memberships plugin, Teams for Memberships also works well with the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin. Using the Subscriptions plugin, you can easily team memberships as simple or variable subscriptions. You also get the freedom to set the per-member or per-team pricing to a subscription to enable recurring billing.

Did you try creating memberships with the above-mentioned plugins? Which membership plugin are you using for your LearnDash site? Tell us in the comments section.