How to sell courses on LearnDash LMS using WooCommerce

LearnDash is a highly popular and versatile Learning Management System used to create and sell courses. Since its inception, LearnDash has always focused more on providing features to course creators, so as a result it offers limited default options to sell courses. However, it does offer integrations to multiple eCommerce platforms one of which as we know the most widely available option is – WooCommerce.

WooCommerce is a highly popular option that works perfectly with LearnDash and also highly recommended by LearnDash .The key advantages of using WooCommerce is that it offers a wide variety of payment gateway integrations which LearnDash doesn’t offer by default, gives you a detailed sales reports and most importantly it gives access and integration to a plethora of WooCommerce addons that you can use along with LearnDash.

Once you have set up your courses on LearnDash , you can proceed to set up WooCommerce. You need to install WooCommerce plugin first and along with that you need to install WooCommerce integration for LearnDash.  Now after installing both plugins we are all set to integrate LearnDash with WooCommerce.

Before we actually begin to setup WooCommerce, I would like to give you a quick background on how WooCommerce and LearnDash actually work together. So, basically after creating LearnDash courses, you need a WooCommerce product listing associated with each course that you wish to sell. The purpose of this associated WooCommerce product listing is to accept payment for the linked course and after successful payment enroll the student for the linked course.

So, let’s first install WooCommerce. After downloading, please install it by going to Dashboard > Plugins and click on ‘Add New’ button and upload it. When you install it, their installer helps you set up basic things for you. 

Screenshot 1: Plugin Installation

After WooCommerce has been installed, you can now install the WooCommerce Integration for LearnDash. If you have purchased LearnDash, you can go to LearnDash site > My Account > Downloads. After downloading, please install it by going to Dashboard > Plugins  and click on ‘Add New’ button and upload it.

You can find plugin under https://www.learndash.com/extensions/ 

Screenshot 2: WooCommerce Integration download

So after installing both the plugins, you need to create products in WooCommerce for each of your courses. To do that, in your dashboard go to the ‘Products’ menu > Create Product. You need to enter product name ( course name), product price – the desired price at which you wish to sell the course, optionally choose a featured image for your product, and the most important part – select the LearnDash course which you want to actually sell using this WooCommerce product from the multiple select field as shown in the screenshot below 

screenshot 3: WooCommerce product page backend

Usually, we associate one WooCommerce product with one LearnDash course. However if you wish to sell multiple courses using a single WooCommerce product then you can choose multiple courses that you wish to sell and add a price accordingly.

So after you have linked the course, click on ‘Publish’ and bravo you have successfully linked a LearnDash course with a WooCommerce ready which is now ready to accept payments!

Now similarly, you will have to create WooCommerce products and associate them with their corresponding LearnDash courses. Once you are done, you need to set up payment options in WooCommerce. To do this you need to go to WooCommerce > Settings > Payments Tab.

Screenshot 4: WooCommerce Payments tab

 By default, WooCommerce offers you default payment options – PayPal and Stripe. (If you need another payment gateway provider, you can usually find their WooCommerce integration in WordPress repository or ask your Payment Gateway for the same – and after installing it you will be able to see it listed in the Payment Tab) For the purpose of this blog, we’ll assume it’s Stripe, so we’ll enter all the Credentials and click on Save. Hurray! We have completed the payment setup and we are now ready to accept payments for our courses.

Screenshot 5: WooCommerce Stripe payment initial setup

Screenshot 6: WooCommerce Stripe payment gateway

To see if it actually works, you need to actually buy the course and see if it all works out smoothly. (For testing purposes, you can create a dummy course with a $1 and test it with real payments or if you don’t wish to make any live payments you can use ‘Test Mode’ on stripe ). Now navigate to your course listing, click on ‘Buy Now’ and it should now redirect it successfully to WooCommerce product page, Once you click on ‘Add to Cart’ and then it redirects to Cart Page > Checkout page > Payment Gateway and on successful payment to Thank You page. If you now visit the Course page, you can see you have been successfully enrolled for the course, and Voila! You can successfully access the course content.

Screenshot 7: WooCommerce Cart Page

So, LearnDash integrates quite well with WooCommerce, allows your customers to feel a complete eCommerce checkout experience, and also provides a lot of payment options if you don’t like to go ahead with standard options. 

If you have completed WooCommerce setup successfully, you can also consider installing addons like UpSells for LearnDash and Frequently Bought Together for WooCommerce to boost your sales.

If you have questions or find it difficult to do this yourself, our team can assist you with LearnDash Setup.