LearnDash WooCommerce Integration: How to Sell Your Online Courses and Maximize Earnings [2 Effective Methods]
Editorial Team
August 1, 2023
![LearnDash WooCommerce Integration: How to Sell Your Online Courses and Maximize Earnings [2 Effective Methods]](https://funnelkit.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/learndash-woocommerce-funnelkit.png)
The LearnDash WooCommerce integration offers you great flexibility in selling your courses online.
LearnDash LMS lets you create dynamic courses with quizzes and assignments and keep track of your learners’ progress. While WooCommerce offers a reliable eCommerce platform to help you sell your products.
If you’re looking to boost your earnings and earn credibility, then LearnDash and WooCommerce are the powerful duos you need.
In this post, we’ll guide you through the step-by-step process of how you can seamlessly integrate LearnDash and WooCommerce.
We’ll also cover how you can leverage both of these tools to enhance the learning experience and maximize your revenue.
Contents
LearnDash is a popular learning management system (LMS) WordPress plugin allowing you to create and manage your online courses easily.
This platform empowers all educators and entrepreneurs to deliver value to students through interactive e-learning experiences.
With LearnDash, you can easily set up courses, quizzes and assignments using a drag-and-drop course builder.
Not just that, it lets you track your student's progress with exhaustive analytics and reporting data. Also, you can award various badges and certificates to your students based on course completion and their performance.
It works with all WordPress themes and integrates with popular apps to successfully run your business.
WooCommerce is WordPress’ most popular plugin with over 5+ million installs. It is free, flexible, and allows the users to have ownership of their store and its contents.
WooCommerce is an agile platform perfect for selling any product - even online courses.
LearnDash is a powerful learning management system for hosting courses. Their team continuously invests in research & development to roll out fresh updates that creators need.
Currently, LearnDash integrates with Easy Digital Downloads, SmartCart, 2checkout, and a few more plugins to collect payments, but none of the others come close to the flexibility and affordability that WooCommerce offers.
Why wouldn’t you want it?!
Let's look at why you should integrate WooCommerce with LearnDash to sell your online courses:
Where else can you find these features and more?
So without a doubt, WooCommerce serves as the perfect medium to build your online store and pitch it to prospects.
If you're looking for a LearnDash WooCommerce integration plugin, then the answer is right here.
Now let’s discuss ways you can sell your courses online with WooCommerce. There are two ways to sell your products, and they are:
Now, let’s look closer at each of these methods.
Like in a physical storefront, where you display the products for sale to attract customers, you can also list all the courses the users can enroll in.
Many online course websites like Udemy and Foundr Courses use this method to sell their products.
You can show the courses in a grid format, and the user would need to click on the desired course to open its product description page to view the lesson plans, course reviews, and more details.
Then they can add the product to the shopping cart and proceed to checkout. The customer can even add more than one course to the cart to purchase.
Let’s look at some pros and cons of this method:
Pros and Cons of the following LearnDash WooCommerce Method:
In a course sales funnel, you’d have a dedicated sales page to explain the course in detail, along with previous course takers’ testimonials and more to make the course more appealing to the user.
Such funnels allow a more frictionless experience for the user, as the prospect is directed to the checkout page from the sales page.
From there, they can make an informed decision on the purchase because they already know about your LearnDash course.
Alternatively, you can also have a one-page checkout designed for your courses.
One-page checkout is where the checkout form is embedded on the sales page itself, and the user doesn’t need to exit the page and move to a new one to make the purchase.
There aren’t many options provided to the users to get distracted from. So they either purchase the course or exit the funnel.
A great example of such a funnel is Gabby Bernstein's meditation challenge.
Now, looks at the merits and demerits of the dedicated sales funnel:
Before we dive further into any of the above methods, let’s first create a LearnDash course.
Now that we have discussed all the components that go into creating and selling optimized and converting online courses, let’s get to building.
For this process, we only need two prerequisites:
Follow these steps to set up your LearnDash courses in WooCommerce:
Go to LearnDash ⇨ Courses on your WordPress menu and hit the ‘Add New’ button.
Add a course title and some brief information about your course.
Design the course page to attract the audience and urge them to buy the course.
You can add Gutenberg blocks to the page's text, images, and videos.
LearnDash LMS has different blocks to help you create a perfect course the way you want. It includes LearnDash Login, LearnDash Course List, LearnDash Lesson List, LearnDash Course in Progress, Course Resume, LearnDash User Course Points, and more.
Make the copy informative yet easy to comprehend so the reader gets a good gist of your course.
When you are done, hit the ‘Update’ button to save the design of the course page.
Next, go to the Builder section. Here, LearnDash LMS gives you complete flexibility to create content for your online courses.
You can add sections, lessons and quizzes within the courses to enrich the content provided to the students to enroll.
You can drag and drop each of these lessons within the section to rearrange the content order as per your need.
👉 Learn how to create sections, lessons and quizzes within your LearnDash course here. This post also covers how you can generate leads with free course funnels.
You can take a full preview of your LearnDash LMS course page by clicking on ‘Preview’.
Now that you have successfully created your LearnDash course, it’s time to start selling it on WooCommerce.
In this section, we’ll guide you through selling the LearnDash course in WooCommerce using store checkout flow.
You need to do is install the WooCommerce add-on for LearnDash to set up the integration.
Just go to LearnDash LMS ⇨ Add-ons. From there, install and activate the WooCommerce for LearnDash add-on.
Once you’ve activated the add-on, you’ll be able to see LearnDash LMS - WooCommerce Integration on your Installed Plugins section in WordPress.
You can also get this WooCommerce add-on integration from the LearnDash website.
To add the product, go to Products ⇨ Add New.
Fill in the details about the product - the course name (product title) and its description.
Next, select ‘Course’ from the Data - Product dropdown menu.
Specify the price and assign your created LMS course by its title in the LearnDash Courses field.
You can even associate more than one course with a particular product if you want.
Then to complete the whole product creation process, add the product to a category, add tags to the product, set the product image, and more.
When you’re satisfied with your created WooCommerce product, hit the ‘Publish’ button to make it public.
Next, configure the way in which a student can gain access to your course in LearnDash.
To do that, go to the LearnDash LMS plugin from your WordPress admin area dashboard and edit your course. From there, navigate to the Settings section.
Scroll down and you’ll see Access Mode. Change the access settings to 'Closed'.
Here, enter the course price and button URL. This will be your WooCommerce product URL.
Once done, hit’ Update’ to save your changes.
Now that you have enabled these settings, it means that you have restricted your course access. You have allowed the LearnDash WooCommerce add-on to handle the course access or you can even manually add users by yourself.
Once you’ve published the product, click on ‘View the Product’ to get an idea of how the courses look on the website. The added lessons will automatically appear on the page.
Clicking on ‘Take this Course’ will direct you to the WooCommerce product page, where you'll see this LearnDash course.
Take on the default WooCommerce flow path by adding the product to the cart, going to the cart page and then proceeding to the checkout page.
You’ll see the default WooCommerce checkout page, which looks bland and doesn’t match with your brand colors.
Not just that, you don’t have a shipping address, which cannot be edited natively.
That’s where FunnelKit Funnel Builder comes into play.
FunnelKit helps you design a professional, on-brand custom checkout that gives the prospects the final push to make their purchases and not abandon with cold feet.
To design your pages, you get an ever-growing template library and compatibility with different page builders, like Elementor, Divi, Oxygen, Gutenberg, etc.
Let's look at how we can create a LearnDash WooCommerce sales funnel using FunnelKit.
In case you’re not willing to invest too much time designing dedicated checkouts for each of your LearnDash courses, you can always create a compelling global checkout instead.
It’s a store checkout flow that stays consistent for all your WooCommerce products.
A good checkout page should look professional and on-brand, and our FunnelKit checkout page templates enable you to create just that.
And so much more.
Get the FunnelKit Funnel Builder from below.
👉 Refer to our guide to install and activate the FunnelKit Funnel Builder on your website.
Let's start creating a sales funnel for selling LearnDash courses on WooCommerce:
Navigate to FunnelKit ⇨ Store Checkout and hit the ‘Create Store Checkout’ button.
After directing to the templates page, select your favorite page builder and choose the template you’d like to import. Hover over the template and hit ‘Preview’.
Choose the number of steps you want on your store checkout page and click on the ‘Import This Funnel’ button.
Name your store checkout and hit ‘Add’.
Your store or global checkout template will get imported to your workspace.
Click on ‘Edit’ next to your checkout page and start customizing the design of your checkout page.
This page will load in the page builder you selected earlier.
Feel free to drag and drop elements and customize the text the way you want. Style it as per your brand colors.
👉 Check our detailed post to customize your WooCommerce checkout page here.
Next, go to the Fields section. FunnelKit has a built-in checkout form field editor that allows you to add, edit, rearrange and delete any fields on your checkout form.
Here we’ll remove all the unnecessary fields to provide a quick checkout experience to our shoppers. You can also optimize your checkout page to streamline your checkout process and reduce abandoned carts.
Since we’re selling our LearnDash courses, we don’t need shipping addresses or shipping method-related fields.
Just remove the fields you don’t want. You can even rearrange your checkout fields by simply dragging and dropping them.
Make sure to save the changes when you’re done.
👉 Read our complete guide to customize your WooCommerce checkout form fields here.
As important as it is to have convincing LearnDash course pages and checkouts, it is equally as important to have beautifully designed, converting WooCommerce thank you pages.
A custom thank you page helps you keep the conversation going. You can add relevant course recommendations or even take them to the course your customer has purchased from you.
You can customize your thank you page like the way you have designed your checkout page.
Go to the ‘Design’ tab and start editing your order confirmation page template.
You can even add and link a button on the thank you page to your social media or even a learning group on Facebook so that the customers can stay connected to you even after the purchase.
Or, you can link it to your website's ‘My Course’ page.
Copy and paste the link to the website page in the provided area; whenever a customer clicks on it, they will be auto-logged in and can access the course they just purchased.
Hit ‘Update’ to save your changes.
This is what your customized thank you page will look like:
With the button on the thank you page, you can direct the customers to let them access their online course.
To let students access the dashboard area where they can view courses when logged in, you'd need to create a category and paste a shortcode.
Learn more about that and enable the course takers to access their course directly from the thank you page.
Go back to your funnel and turn the toggle to ‘Enable Store Checkout’.
This will activate your store checkout that replaces your default WooCommerce checkout page.
Well done! This is how you can sell your LearnDash course in WooCommerce with a storefront checkout process with a custom-designed checkout page.
As we discussed earlier, another way of selling courses is through a sales funnel.
It involves guiding visitors through a path to your course and making a purchase.
To sell LearnDash courses using this WooCommerce method, you’d need to follow the following steps:
As a sales funnel will be the sales medium, we need to add a new funnel to our library.
For that, go to the Funnels section and click on the ‘Add New Funnel’ button.
As you know, FunnelKit works with all page builders so that you can customize your sales funnels the way you want.
Here, we will import the Courselog Sales Funnel template from the available template in Elementor.
Choose the number of steps you want on your checkout page. Here you can select whether you want a one-page checkout or multi-step checkout.
Then, hit the ‘Import This Funnel’ button and name your funnel - LearnDash WooCommerce Funnel.
Clicking on ‘Add’ will add four steps to your funnel - Landing Page, Checkout Page, On Click Upsell Page, and Thank You Page - and the template design will be applied to each of these steps automatically.
As this would be a product-specific checkout page, we are going to add a product here.
Click on ‘Edit’ to start customizing your checkout page.
Go to the Products tab. Then, click on ‘Add Product’ to search and add your LearnDash course to the page.
If you want, you can even offer a discount on the product(s) added.
You can customize the form fields and page design, as we discussed earlier in the post.
Once you're done, customize the rest of the steps in your sales funnel.
You can customize each page of the funnel in Elementor, just like we customized the checkout page design in the previous section.
FunnelKit offers custom widgets for most of the pages that would assist you in creating beautifully designed sales funnels on WordPress.
Edit and customize all the pages added to the funnel, like the landing page, one-click upsell, and thank you page, to have a smooth and uniform flow to your funnel.
Finally, after designing and customizing the funnel pages, test out the funnel to check if it is working fluidly.
Start from the landing page and test run the complete flow to make sure it’s working.
And that’s it!
That’s how you create a sales funnel to sell LearnDash online courses in WooCommerce.
When a user stumbles on your advertisement, they will be directed to the sales page of this course funnel and go through the guided path of knowing more about your course and purchasing it.
However, you can always optimize your WooCommerce store to provide a seamless buying experience to your users.
To make the most of the WooCommerce LearnDash integration, keep the following best practices:
If you wish that an account should be created for your course takers as and when they purchase the products through the storefront, enable these settings in WooCommerce to have the most frictionless flow.
Go to WooCommerce ⇨ Settings ⇨ Accounts & Privacy. Here are the options you can configure:
Boost your revenue with each purchase by placing WooCommerce checkout add-ons at different points in your shoppers' journeys.
The two most popular upsells include:
Order bumps (on the checkout page)
Your shoppers can add these bumps to their shopping cart before payment with just one click.
FunnelKit lets you add order bumps and customize them the way you want.
You can add a short LearnDash course to be offered as an order bump on the WooCommerce checkout.
Then, create a compelling offer by assigning some discounts there:
You can even select the bump skin, add content and style it from the Design tab.
Once everything is done, it’ll get added to your checkout page:
One-click upsells (after the checkout page)
Another brilliant way to improve the store's revenue generated is through the post-purchase one-click upsells.
This page appears after the checkout and before the thank you page. It displays offers to complement the customer's primary purchase, making it difficult for the customer to reject.
You can even add more than one product to the offer and more than one offer to the upsell page.
Therefore, adding two or more of your LearnDash courses here on WooCommerce can help increase your revenue.
FunnelKit even allows you to interlink two or more offers, including a downsell based on the user's purchase behavior of accepting or rejecting the previous offer. This can be done with dynamic offer paths.
Here’s what it looks like:
Your WooCommerce store must have multiple payment options to serve different shoppers.
For that, you can bring in the Stripe payment gateway for WooCommerce plugin that helps you feature multiple payment methods in your store.
This plugin will help you enable the following payment methods in your WooCommerce store:
Choosing the right payment options can help enhance your conversions significantly in your eCommerce store.
The retroactive course access tool in LearnDash allows you to grant access to your enrolled members.
In case some WooCommerce customers (having purchased the course) aren’t able to access their course. Then this tool helps you to scan all the orders placed in WooCommerce.
It looks for ‘Completed’ orders that are connected to the LearnDash course. Once they’re found, it automatically gives access to the course to those users.
You can find this setting in WooCommerce ⇨ Status under the Tools tab:
Once you click on the button, it’ll start scanning your WooCommerce orders. Wait a couple of minutes for the process to complete.
The average email opening rate in the education and training industry is around 28.5%. That’s why you should use it to drive user engagement and nurture your students, giving them a positive learning experience.
And what better way to do is by setting up automated email sequences for each use case?
Using a WordPress CRM tool like FunnelKit Automations lets you send automated email campaigns and keep track of their performance in real-time.
Here’s what you can do by setting up automated LearnDash email notifications for your users:
These are just some of the use cases.
FunnelKit Automations offers you different triggers to set up your automation:
Setting up these automations is quite easy in FunnelKit Automations!
In fact, you get access to some pre-built LearnDash automated recipes that can be imported with a single click and customized as per your need.
These all have pre-written emails and set-timed delays that you can customize as per your need.
You can set up hundreds of custom workflows and automate your LearnDash WooCommerce business processes.
Not just that, you can set up a variety of automated workflows such as cart abandonment recovery, winback campaigns, post-purchase automation, and more.
Join our Facebook Group and YouTube channel to get more tips about boosting your store's revenue.
In this section, you’ll find all the answers to some common questions asked related to selling LearnDash courses with WooCommerce:
1. Is LearnDash free with WordPress?
No, LearnDash is not free with WordPress. It’s a premium LMS plugin for WordPress that starts at $139.30 annually. However, LearnDash offers you the demo version so that users can experience it at their own pace.
2. Are users automatically enrolled in the course after making the payment?
Yes, users are automatically enrolled in the course if their WooCommerce order status is set to ‘Completed’ in case of transactions done with online payments. In case of offline payments, users won’t be enrolled because the order status will be set as ‘Pending’.
3. Do I need to manually remove a student from a course when the subscription expires?
No, you don’t need to manually remove a student from a course when the LearnDash subscription expires. If you have set up LearnDash WooCommerce subscriptions, access to that associated course will be removed as soon as the subscription expires.
4. Which payment gateway should I use when selling the LearnDash course in WooCommerce?
There are many payment gateways that are supported by when selling your LearnDash course in WooCommerce. These are:
5. Can I create memberships and bundles with WooCommerce and LearnDash?
Yes, you can create memberships and bundles with WooCommerce and LearnDash. All you need to do is integrate LearnDash with WooCommerce. With the LearnDash Groups add-on, you’ll be able to create membership levels for your memberships.
Furthermore, you can associate different courses into one and create LearnDash course bundles.
6. What can I use instead of LearnDash in WordPress?
There are many LearnDash alternatives that can help you build your course in WordPress. These include:
Now you know that if you have a LearnDash course to sell, WooCommerce is the ultimate platform to make the sale.
Want to sell the courses through a storefront or sales funnels? WooCommerce gives you the liberty to choose the method of sale and its design as per your liking.
No other platform would offer you as much flexibility or as many options as WooCommerce does.
You must have also realized that setting up your LearnDash courses with WooCommerce is just one part of the equation. You still need to generate leads by offering free courses, follow-up with customers using post-purchase upsells, and more.
All of this can be done with FunnelKit, as we have shown you in this post above.
So install your WooCommerce for LearnDash plugin now, and sell your courses online using the beautiful course pages and checkouts designed in FunnelKit.