How To Sell Online Courses On LearnDash?

If you have a skill and some experience in a particular subject, then one way that you can make some serious money is by teaching through an online course.

This gives you so much flexibility regarding how you structure your course, how you advertise your course, and how to accept payment for your course.

LearnDash’s learning management system plugs straight into your WordPress account and allows you to customize your website so that it is easy to access for your students. (Check out ‘LearnDash Review – Everything You Need to Know 2023‘)

You can choose to advertise it to people who are not followers of your LearnDash or people who are students already.

So, how do I sell courses on LearnDash, you might be wondering. How much will it cost you to set up an account? How can you effectively market your e-learning company to others?

Well, we have all the info that you need so that you can start making some serious money straight away.

How Do I Sell Courses On LearnDash?

When you have set up your LearnDash account and created one or more courses, then you’ll need to start selling them to your audience.

This is where the plugin WooCommerce really comes in handy. (See ‘Does Woocommerce Need Memberpress? ( All You Need To Know)‘)

This plugin will allow you to set up many different payment options.

Having a diversity of payment is very important if you are trying to get more students to sign up for your online course.

This plugin helps you design a payment structure on your course website without any restrictions whatsoever.

Using WooCommerce with LearnDash helps to make your website far more dynamic and a lot more diverse to use.

It will expand the range of features that you are able to employ and how you can use them.

This will increase the scope of your LearnDash account and allow you to target a wider audience.

What Are The Features Of WooCommerce?

There are plenty of create add-ons that come with the WooCommerce plugin.

It will give you the option of not only creating products through which you can sell bundles and discounts for your own online course, but it will also allow you to sell both digital and physical products as well as make signing up for your courses much more streamlined.

Let’s have a look at some of the add-ons that you can download through WooCommerce:

1. Easier Automation

One of the main benefits of automating a lot of these processes on your online course structure is the fact that it doesn’t require you to do anything and it can operate without your participation.

The best example of this is probably enrolment. Students can sign up for your courses without you having to accept or validate them first.

A long registration procedure can often turn students off enrolling, but with automation, they can move from registering to signing up a lot quicker.

One of the most difficult things to process is a refund.

But with WooCommerce, this is much easier, as it will allow you to process refunds automatically through your website.

Automation is amazing as it makes the whole experience of your website much smoother and more user-friendly.

2. Payment Options

As soon as you sign up for LearnDash, you will be provided with certain payment options: Stripe and PayPal.

However, the best thing about WooCommerce is the fact that you have literally hundreds of payment gateways that you can choose from.

Here is a short list of some of the main payment options you can choose from:

·        PayPal

·        Stripe

·        WooCommerce Payments

·        Afterpay

·        Square

·        Amazon Pay

·        Payfast

·        Braintree

·        Xero

Online students are very discerning and they’ll want to get the most for their money.

However, if they have decided to hand over money to you, then you’ll want to be sure that they can do so quickly and without any additional fees.

3. You Can Sell Digital And Physical Items

If you are trying to build a large learning brand, diversity is one of the key things that will draw people to your online school.

The same will go for products that you’ll want to sell.

WooCommerce gives you the option of selling digital items as well as physical products.

This could take the form of textbooks or merchandise.

Merchandising is a great way of getting your brand out there and building up a reputable following.

You can also sell webinars, which are great digital products that will offer students extras for their learning if they want to take it.

These optional extras can cost an additional fee or you can offer them as a bundle deal when creating online courses.

4. Creating A Checkout Experience

If you are expecting customers to buy more than one course, then you’ll want to make sure that your checkout experience is easy to understand, so that the student doesn’t feel like you are misleading them.

Most of the time, you’ll probably want your courses laid out in a grid-style fashion, as this will be a better way of organizing them, especially at the reviewing stage before they enter the final checkout.

You can also create a sale funnel by creating a one-page checkout experience that will process orders much faster.

You can also use this feature to upsell certain products, which is essential for advertising your courses to general users outside of your WordPress site.

You can also enable students to edit their shopping cart much easier during these final stages.

We all know how people like to ponder and make changes during checkout, which is why they will appreciate you giving them the space and the functions to do this.

You can also drive people subtly towards making a purchase by including testimonials on the course sales page.

If you feel like this might be too much of a hard sell so late in the payment process, then you can always choose to leave it out.

As a general rule, the more control you give to the user at the checkout stage, the better.

5. Subscriptions And Memberships

This is a great feature if you want to create more consistent revenue streams for your website.

This is great for people who want the full course experience, purchasing bundles and multiple courses at once who want to study over many months or possibly even years.

Again, allowing the student more options is crucial to making your course more appealing to others.

You can do this by enabling the auto-renew feature, which means that a subscription will automatically roll over into the next semester once it has expired.

You can also offer upgrades for your course, so that if your student is enjoying what they are learning, then they can access more elements of the course itself.

You can also downgrade your course, meaning that if a student wants fewer options, possibly because they cannot afford an enhanced course for a certain period, then they can downscale.

Another great way of enticing people to your website is by offering them a free trial of one of your free courses.

Market research has shown that once a customer is able to try the product, they will be more likely to pay for the full version.

6. Automatic Tax Calculation

If you are running a small business, then you won’t be exempt from tax calculations.

While WooCommerce won’t do your taxes for you, it will calculate the amount of tax that needs to be deducted from each purchase, which will make doing your accounts much easier.

Another way of helping to foster your community and increase the number of users on your website is by offering coupons.

Through WooCommerce, you can give your existing customers incentives for recommending your website to other people, such as discounts or free webinars.

What Other Features Come With WooCommerce?

There are hundreds of extensions that you can use with your WooCommerce account, each one offering you a new feature for your WordPress site.

However, you won’t need to use all of them, and you should only really choose the few that you’ll need for your website.

This selection of extensions will be a process of trial and error, with certain extensions being more useful to you at some point before losing their value later on.

Here are some of the best WooCommerce extensions that we think will keep people engaged with your online course business, even when they have completed your course:

1. WooCommerce Payments

To make the payment for your online courses of merchandise go as smoothly as possible, then setting up a WooCommerce payment system is ideal.

It will allow your customers to keep all their payment options in one place.

This does not require any additional fees for you to set up or use, so it is a great way to earn some revenue from your online courses.

One of the biggest turn-offs for potential buyers is having them redirected to a third-party website for payment.

By keeping them on your checkout page, you can be sure that they won’t get dissuaded or have to worry about the privacy of the information they are trading.

2. Follow-Ups Via Email

This kind of detail will help you to keep your students on track, drip-feeding their course materials and extras through email.

This will help certain students who might be struggling to keep up with the course materials. It will prompt them to complete certain assignments in a way that is not too intrusive.

You can also offer them more course material for free if they complete the courses very quickly.

Once a student finishes the course, then you can also activate a Twitter notification that will send them offers for new courses that you think they might be interested in.

This is one way you can keep people engaged with your site and have them subscribe for courses in the long term.

3. WooCommerce Instagram

Instagram is one of the most common methods of promoting your website.

This extension will promote your website on your Instagram account with links to click through to the main site on your page.

This will also create hashtags that will allow you to promote your product website and help people to find the courses that you are selling through specific hashtags.

This will also allow your students to help keep track of updates that they might find on your website when selling online courses.

4. WooCommerce Affiliates

Creating a community is very important if you are trying to promote your LearnDash course and get your customers to keep coming back and recommending your channel to others.

You can reward people who have championed your channel by making them affiliates.

This will help you to track and process payments to members as well as set up commissions, which are great one-off payments for you and your course website.

How Can I Get A WooCommerce Account?

WooCommerce comes as a plugin with LearnDash, so you’ll have to ensure that the latter is installed before installing the former.

Setting up your LearnDash and WooCommerce accounts is very easy and won’t take you long at all. Here’s how you go about installing it:

1.      Go into your LearnDash dashboard and select the ‘add-on’ tab.

2.      Find the WooCommerce add-on and click it.

3.      Install the add-on and then activate the plug-in for your account.

This is the automatic method and probably the easiest way of getting WooCommerce. However, you can also install it manually using the following steps:

1.      Log into your LearnDash account through your WordPress account.

2.      Go to ‘Plugins’ and find the zip file for WooCommerce.

3.      Install the zip file.

Once you have activated your WooCommerce plugin, then you can start to use it. This is a great method of boosting the sales of your online courses and getting you started with creating payment options for multiple courses.

Conclusion

We hope that our guide to WooCommerce has helped you to start making money from your LearnDash courses.

It will involve a lot of trial and error as you figure out which of the extensions will be useful to you and which ones will soon lose their utility.