10 Benefits of Integrating WooCommerce with LearnDash

When you set out to build an online school, university or any other kind of e-Learning site, LearnDash is the one of most popular options you’ll hear about. And when you want to integrate a shopping cart solution with it for selling your courses, the obvious option is WooCommerce. It’s unarguably the solution of choice for anyone wanting to sell anything using WordPress, and you too should consider it to sell your courses created with LearnDash. Well, that’s precisely what we’re going to answer in this article.

First of all, we’ll take a look at 10 benefits of using WooCommerce with LearnDash, and then we’ll go through the process of integrating these two platforms for selling courses.

Let’s get started:

[lwptoc skipHeadingLevel=”h3,h4″]

10 Benefits of using WooCommerce with LearnDash

There are many benefits of using WooCommerce as your shopping cart solution with LearnDash. When you sell your courses with help of this robust ecommerce platform, here are 10 major benefits that you derive:

#1. More streamlined payment options

One of the biggest strengths of WooCommerce is the large number of payment options that are available with it. It allows you to integrate PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net, Square and many other payment gateways. In fact, there are 100+ payment gateways available for WooCommerce, much more than you’ll find with any other shopping cart solution. And more importantly, all these payment gateways work seamlessly with this platform.

#2. Robust eLearning-eCommerce system

There’s no doubt in the fact that LearnDash is the most robust e-Learning platform available for WordPress. And there’s also no doubt in the fact that WooCommerce is the most solid ecommerce platform available for WordPress. So when you choose one of them, choosing the other becomes a natural choice because both of them go along very well with each other. By combining a robust LMS with a robust ecommerce solution you can reach economies of scale that won’t be possible with other solutions.

#3. WooCommerce has tons of extensions

Just like payment gateways there’s no dearth of WooCommerce extensions too. There are thousands of extensions available for WooCommerce that can be used for adding any ecommerce features of your choice to your e-Learning site. There are extensions related to shipping, marketing, automation, payments, social media and everything you can think of. Same is, however, not true for other shopping cart solutions.

#4. Lots of ways to boost course marketing and sales

As we just explained, there are a large number of extensions available for WooCommerce, which includes extensions related to marketing and sales. You can use those extensions to boost the marketing of your e-Learning site in many different ways. For instance, you can automate various marketing related functions (i.e. social media posting, email marketing etc.), you can monetize your site in a different way through Google Ads or Google Product Feeds integration, you can collect a lot of data about your marketing campaigns through various analytics tools available, and so on.

#5. Sell physical products with your digital courses

Since WooCommerce allows you to sell any kind of products, you can also sell physical products along with your courses. For instance, you can sell t-shirts or merchandise with branding of your online school or university to market yourself in a cost effective manner and create a community. Similarly, if you’re teaching technical skills then you can also sell tools that help in implementation of those skills.

#6. Sell course bundles

LearnDash coupled with WooCommerce allows you to sell individual courses as well as bundles of courses chosen by you. You can create your bundles either with the help of a LearnDash extension or with the help of a WooCommerce extension (i.e. WISDM Custom Product Bundles). If you choose any other shopping cart solution, it’s not a guarantee that it’ll allow you to sell course bundles created in LearnDash. It works in WooCommerce largely because of the flexibility provided by it.

#7. Automate enrollments after payment

With WooCommerce and LearnDash the enrollment in your courses also becomes super easy. WooCommerce also automatically enrolls the students into your courses after they’ve registered on your site and a payment has been made by them. That way you don’t need to manually check for the payments made by your students before enrolling them into your courses. This is again something not provided by other shopping cart solutions.

#8. Integrate subscription-based payment modules for your courses

LearnDash allows you to sell your courses not only on a one-time fee based model but also on a subscription-based model. And the extensions required to enable that functionality are all bound to be compatible with WooCommerce, because that’s the shopping cart solution of choice among WordPress users. Other shopping carts, though available, are not as popular as WooCommerce so there’s no guarantee that the extension enabling your subscription-based payment functionality will work with it.

#9. Track your abandoned carts and encourage them to enroll

WooCommerce has a robust cat abandonment tracking system in place, and that system can be coupled with various email automation tools (i.e. LearnDash MailChimp integration extension) to help you enroll those users who were going to enroll but abandoned the cart at the last moment due to some reason. If you don’t like the LearnDash MailChimp integration extension for some reason, there are other extensions available for integration with WooCommerce as well that can provide you the desired functionality.

#10. Easily offer coupons and discounts

Finally, it’s easy to offer various types of discounts and coupons to your customers with help of WooCommerce. You can simply add new coupons to your site by navigating to WooCommerce >> Coupons area of your WordPress dashboard, or you can take a slightly different route with help of various extensions available for the purpose. The in-built method is simple and easy, while plugins provide you more control, flexibility and features to run various types of discounts and coupons. It’s your choice!

2 Options to integrate WooCommerce with LearnDash

Now, there are two ways to use WooCommerce along with LearnDash.

1. Using an extension developed by the LearnDash
2. By creating a different site to only sell your courses (less popular)

1. Using the WooCommerce extension

You need to install the ‘WooCommerce for LearnDash’ add-on from LearnDash LMS >> Add-ons page of your WordPress dashboard. This add-on allows you to link your LearnDash courses with products you create in WooCommerce so they can be sold and students can be enrolled into them once they complete the payment.

Once you’ve installed the plugin, here’s the step-by-step process you need to follow to start selling your courses using WooCommerce:

That’s a simple way to integrate WooCommerce with LearnDash.

2. Using a Separate WooCommerce website

A standalone WooCommerce website can give you the flexibility to implement independent strategies on our LearnDash and WooCommerce sites. You’ll have more control on the selling aspect, and can even sync multiple LearnDash sites with a single WooCommerce site. But you’ll need custom development to make this work.

Conclusion

So these were some of the major benefits of Integrating WooCommerce with LearnDash instead of any other shopping cart solution, and the process of integrating it. If you still have any doubts about it or want to know something else on the subject, leave it in the comments and we’ll try to answer your queries at the earliest.

[lwptoc numeration=”none”]

Also share your thoughts on using LearnDash with any other shopping cart solution, if you’ve done it already.

• LearnDash
• With tags: learndash, selling courses, WooCommerce