Selling Courses Through An E-Commerce LMS Platform

We aim to increase the knowledge and the uptake of LearnDash as a learning platform in 2016, particularly within the UK market where we see masses of potential for independent training providers and small businesses to move their course delivery fully online. Using LearnDash as a platform enables any training organisation to effectively sell their courses and have their platform manage both the purchase and enrolment process seamlessly for their learners. But there are a number of different choices and routes that can be taken when setting up a learning platform for the purpose of making money from online courses, so we decided to make this the focus of our most recent blog post.

Good old-fashioned licence purchase

Possibly the most simple thing that can be done with your course is to place it behind a payment wall. The beauty of LearnDash as a platform is that it integrates perfectly with a number or pre-existing, constantly updating and evolving open source shopping cart platforms. We believe that the most popualr choice out there right now is WooCommerce from WooThemes. Using WooCommerce your web store can be up and running in mere moment, with pricing structures from your course that can differ based on, for example, regional based pricing or discounts for bulk purchase. There also now exists the ability to have team leaders purchase multiple licences for courses which they can distribute to their staff at a later date, a great feature that can add value and up-selling potential to your platform.

Subscription models that add value

You may be intending to offer a whole catalogue of courses through your platform which would make little sense for someone interested in all of them to purchase one by one. So instead you may want to offer your courses on a single or recurring payment subscription model. There are many ways of doing this, we have worked with one client who wanted to have times subscriptions, so the discount was greater the more time that was purchased on the site. But we have also seen models where the purchaser could buy groups of courses which were pre-categorised by the vendor into unique subscriptions. So for example, in the style of a Lynda.com website, a platform could offer a subscription just to web design courses, or a subscription to just photography courses. The potential opportunities of how you market and profit from your new LMS quite staggering.

Taking things one step further

As a dedicated LearnDash development specialist, and one proud to be based in the North East of England, we listen carefully to our clients needs and try to tailor their platform to deliver the features and services that they want to deliver to their customers. Naturally this means that we are quite regularly redesigning platforms with a distinct look and feel to match a client’s pre existing brand, but we have also worked on a variety of different gateway and user experience re-designs within the LearnDash platform. Some of these options that we have worked on include the ability to have custom redirection for learners based on their unique course enrolments and performance related progression. We have also worked on custom graduation schemes for courses, automatically placing learners into groups that allow them to continue their learning in other courses or have contact with after sales teams that can keep in touch to offer potential promotions and upsells at later dates.

We imagine that there will be even more features we will expose and utilise in the coming months, of course what those features will be will come from your own requirements and a touch of imagination from our development team. We genuinely believe that LearnDash LMS offers the best value for money in the LMS marketplace today, and we would be more than happy to talk you through what we can achieve for you with an affordable custom built LMS solution.