If you’re setting up an online website that will sell online learning courses, you may find that you want to sell courses using both a one-time purchase model and a subscription model. For instance, you might wish to offer a course for $99.00 for one time access, but also offer the course as one of many courses the user has access to as long as they subscribe to a $29.99 a month subscription plan.
With the one time purchase option the draw for the user is that they will have access to the course for life. Pay once, then access the course as many times as you want. From a seller’s perspective, this is a fair trade at a fair price. However, there may be times where it’s beneficial to offer this course as a part of a bundle with other courses on a subscription basis. The plus for users is that they get access to more courses than they normally could afford to buy outright and the plus for you as a site owner is that you get predictable, recurring revenue as users will lose access to the course if they stop paying for the subscription.
If you’re a user of the LearnDash LMS software for WordPress, however, you might be wondering how you can sell courses on both a one-time and subscription based model. There are a lot of guides online on how to sell courses on a subscription basis, however not many actually talk about how you can sell the same course using multiple modes of sale. This guide will show you how you can have the same course available to two different types of customers, the one-time purchaser and the subscriber, using LearnDash.
LearnDash Course Access Levels: Buy Now vs Closed
If you’ve researched how to sell courses in LearnDash on a subscription basis, you’ve probably come across quite a few articles that suggest using a third party plugin for this purpose. In testing these solutions, however, you’ve probably noticed that you’ve had to set the access level of your course to Closed in order for these plugin based solutions to work. This works fine if you’re only selling a course on a subscription basis, but what if you wanted to also sell a course as a one time purchase? You switch the course to the Buy Now mode inside of LearnDash and find that while you can now purchase the course, you can no longer access the course as a part of your subscription membership. So, how do you solve this problem?
LearnDash Groups: The Solution That Allows Multiple Access Types
When you configure a course to use the Buy Now access mode, you can add the course to a LearnDash group to override the default access level of the course and give access to the course to members who have purchased a subscription. This is because in LearnDash when a course is added to a group this access overrides any other access controls you might set on a course.
Now, the last thing that you need to configure is how the user actually gets added to the LearnDash group when a subscription is purchased.
Handling a Subscription with LearnDash’s Native Group Functionality vs Paid Memberships Pro
Within LearnDash you can set a group’s access level to Recurring for a subscription to a group that will charge a user a set amount at intervals you set. Using this default functionality of LearnDash is a great, simple option for giving your user access to a group on a subscription basis, however it lacks some important functionality that is essential for any serious membership website.
For instance, if a member wants to cancel their subscription using the default LearnDash group recurring payment system there is no interface created by LearnDash in which they could cancel. A user who wishes to cancel or modify their subscription would have to reach out to the site administrator to manually modify their membership. In addition, the user would have to ensure that they properly cancel the recurring payment for their subscription inside of either Stripe or PayPal to ensure they are not charged for a subscription they no longer want. It’s easy to see how lacking proper functionality to cancel a membership might cause confusion for users and site administrators alike.
Luckily, a more comprehensive solution exists in the free Paid Memberships Pro plugin along with LearnDash’s Paid Memberships Pro Integration Plugin that makes the subscription and cancellation process much easier. An undocumented feature of using PMP and the integration plugin provided by LearnDash is the ability to add a course group to a membership. This is kept under the Other Settings section of the membership inside of Paid Memberships Pro and allows you to control access to a LearnDash group based on the membership status set in Paid Memberships Pro. Oddly, this functionality isn’t actually documented anywhere on LearnDash’s or Paid Memberships Pro’s website, but it works quite well for allowing access to courses as a part of a subscription.
One main advantage to the Paid Memberships Pro plugin is that it provides custom pages where your members can view purchased subscriptions as well as the ability for a user to edit or cancel a subscription in a self-service manner. This is functionality that the core LearnDash plugin’s subscription ability unfortunately lacks.
Other Considerations When Combining LearnDash and Paid Memberships Pro
While the setup of using Paid Memberships Pro with LearnDash works mostly without issue, there are a couple of minor things to consider when using these two plugins together. The first is that both plugins handle payments a little differently, so users may have one path they take when purchasing a course on a one-off basis but another path when purchasing a subscription. This shouldn’t be too big of an issue, however it is something to be aware of.
Another potential issue is that with this approach you will end up with two different account centers, one managed by LearnDash and one managed by Paid Memberships Pro. Users who want to see which courses they have purchased will have to go to one page, whereas users who are a part of a subscription will need to go to another page. In addition, there may be some overlap between LearnDash and Paid Memberships Pro as far as functionality provided, including login and registration functionality. These differences can be worked out by disabling certain pages or implementing redirects using a plugin like Safe Redirect Manager to disable duplicate functionality or login pages. I would recommend using the pages provided by Paid Memberships Pro, as they seem to be a more robust solution to those provided by LearnDash.
Building Your Custom Subscription Based E-Learning Website
Now that you know how to sell courses on both a one-time and subscription basis using LearnDash and WordPress, you’re ready to start building your custom E-Learning website. It’s our hope that you found this guide helpful.
If you are looking for assistance in creating a custom LMS based website, the web design experts at Your Right Website would love to be a part of your project. We offer custom WordPress and LearnDash web development that can build an E-Learning website built around your unique specifications. We can also help customize your existing WordPress website to work with LearnDash and Paid Memberships Pro as well as assist in setup and configuration of these plugins and payment gateways such as PayPal and Stripe.
Schedule your free consultation with us today and let us build the E-Learning website that’s right for you!