LearnDash WooCommerce Integration – Sell Courses With WooCommerce – eLearning Business Series (Part 1)

LearnDash WooCommerce integration is an easy, innovative way to create and sell online courses. Wondering how to integrate LearnDash and WooCommerce? It’s an alternative for people who look for the WooCommerce courses plugin. In this article, we will see how the LearnDash WooCommerce integration is possible and how to configure it for maximum ROI for your business.

Why Should You Integrate LearnDash and WooCommerce?

Creating and selling online courses is one way to monetize a blog or develop a full-fledged virtual learning business. It is where LearnDash plays a vital role in infusing the cutting-edge eLearning methodology into a WordPress website. As a WordPress Learning Management System (LMS) empowering diverse businesses across the globe, LearnDash is much more than just a WordPress plugin. You can add comprehensive courses, lessons, and quizzes into your site using this plugin.

WooCommerce is a popular eCommerce plugin empowering millions of online stores across the globe. Install it as a plugin on your WordPress website, make some technical configurations, and you will be ready to sell products online. The best part is – You can use it to sell physical and downloadable goods related to your online courses created using the LearnDash plugin. 

In other words, the prospects will benefit from the top-class shopping cart experience while buying online courses.

LearnDash plugin offers a free LearnDash WooCommerce add-on that lets you do this integration. Let’s dig deeper to know about the benefits of LearnDash WooCommerce integration.

Advantages of Integrating LearnDash with WooCommerce

Enable Coupons for Learners

Think of selling online courses similar to selling a tangible product online. The targeted customers do feel attracted to coupons and discounts. Whether it is about attracting them to buy more products through coupons or sharing coupons for referrals, there are many ways in which you can grow the sales and ROI by integrating LearnDash with WooCommerce.

Also see: the Best WooCommerce Coupon Plugins

Sell Course Bundles

You might have closely related online courses that you want to sell to your customers. For instance, if you have created a course on Java tutorials, you might have distinct modules created separately to form the entire course. Of course, selling each of the modules separately does not make much sense. With LearnDash WooCommerce integration, you can create course bundles and offer them online. Similarly, you can also plan to cross-sell/upsell diverse online courses by creating separate bundles or bundling the courses with various related tangible products.

Offer Membership Plans to Access Courses Online

Another way to monetize online courses is to sell them via membership subscription to the users. This way, you can allow time-based access to your courses, say with three month or six-month subscription. With LearnDash integrated with WooCommerce, it becomes easier to sell course memberships.

Also See: the Best WooCommerce Memberships Plugins

Connect with Email Marketing Platforms 

Ever thought about the promotional emails you get from the brands you have subscribed to? That’s a part of their email marketing campaigns to attract existing buyers. You can also create such campaigns for your online courses with LearnDash-WooCommerce integration.

Also See: WooCommerce Email Marketing Extensions

Install Various Payment Gateways

Adding LearnDash to your WooCommerce site also means you tend to sell online courses along with other products. For the transaction to happen with a learner, you need to install WooCommerce payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, and others, which you can easily do based on this integration.

How LearnDash Modifies a WordPress Site

When you install the LearnDash plugin to your WordPress site, you will see several items getting added to your site. These include:

• Menu items
• Course custom post type
• Taxonomies for lessons, topics, quizzes, and courses
• New widgets, shortcodes, and database tables
• User roles (Administrator and Group Leader)

Requirements for LearnDash WooCommerce Integration

Before using this integration, you need two things on your site:

1. LearnDash plugin – LearnDash 3.0 or Legacy
2. WooCommerce version 3.0 and above

It’s good to use the most recent versions of both the plugins.

Installing the WooCommerce for LearnDash Add-on

Before you get to locate LearnDash WooCommerce add-on, you must have an active LearnDash license. Next, follow the few steps given below:

1. In the WordPress dashboard, click LearnDash LMS –> Add-ons
2. Search for/locate ‘WooCommerce for LearnDash’
3. Install the add-on by clicking the ‘Install Now’ button
4. Lastly, activate it by clicking the ‘Activate Plugin’ button

Manual Adding the plugin file

You can also manually download the file by logging into your LearnDash account.

1. After downloading the plugin file in the WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins -> Add New
2. Click the ‘Upload Plugin’ button
3. Search for the .zip file you downloaded.
4. Click the ‘Install Now’ button
5. Activate the plugin by clicking the ‘Activate Plugin’ button

How to Setup LearnDash Course As A WooCommerce Product

A setup is involved in both the plugins to help WooCommerce products communicate with the LearnDash courses. It is integral for the integration to work as expected.

Settings to be Done in WooCommerce plugin

When a user purchases your course using WooCommerce, the LearnDash plugin must be told about providing access to specific users only. It allows the users to first create an account before getting enrolled in this course. It also requires you to disable the guest checkout option.

Here are the steps to be followed:

• Go to WooCommerce –> Settings
• Navigate to the ‘Accounts & Privacy’ tab
• You will find a checkbox next to the text – ‘Allow customers to place an order without an account’, Uncheck this box.

Alongside this, you would also want the end-users to have the facility to create an account during checkout. To make it happen, do this:

• In the same ‘Accounts & Privacy’ tab, check the box you see next to the text that says – “Allow customers to create an account during checkout”.
• Keep in mind to save changes by clicking the ‘Save Changes’ button.

Quick Tip: 

To make sure the existing users can purchase the additional course, enable “Allow Customers to log in to an existing account during checkout”.

How to Assign a Course to a WooCommerce Product

Before you do these steps you need to have a LearnDash course. If you haven’t created any courses, go and create a new course and then follow these steps.

Here are the steps to create a WooCommerce product:

• In the WooCommerce tab, click Products –> Add New
  
• Add details about the product (check this guide about adding products in WooCommerce).
  
• In the ‘Product Data’ section on the same page, click on the ‘Simple Product’ dropdown menu and select the ‘Course’ option
• In the ”LearDash Courses’ add the respective course that you want to add as a product. You can add multiple courses and sell them as a bundled product.
  
• In the ‘Related Courses’ option field, select the course you want to associate with this product
• You can also add multiple courses in a single WooCommerce product. Just hold the SHIFT key when you select the course/courses from the list
• Once you are finished following these steps, make sure you publish or update the product
  

How to Stop Direct Payments After the WooCommerce Integration

After you are done creating the product, there are similar changes that you need to do to the LearnDash course as well. If you don’t do this then users will be able to buy the course using the Payment methods available with LearnDash. Follow these steps:

• Go to LearnDash LMS –> Courses
• Select the course that is related to the WooCommerce product you have created above
  
• Go to Settings –> Course Access Settings –> Access Mode
• Set the Access Mode to ‘Closed’
• In the ‘Button URL’ field next to it, you need to enter the URL of the WooCommerce product page.

With these settings, the course page visitors will be redirected to the WooCommerce product page by clicking the ‘Take This Course’ button. Going forward, they can add the course to the cart and pay for it.

What Else Can You Do with LearnDash-WooCommerce Integration?

In addition to receiving payments from WooCommerce, you also do more with LearnDash WooCommerce add-on. You can,

• Add a Purchase Note using the built-in field in WooCommerce. You can use this field to provide instructions or steps to be followed to take the course.
• Make use of several product types such as Variable Products
• Enable post-purchase redirects to send the learners to the course page directly
• Sell Subscriptions to courses and many more.

We will see some of these in detail in the future. If you want us to write on any of the topics mentioned above, do tell us in the comments section.