A WooCommerce e-learning plugin using LifterLMS

LifterLMS is one of the best plugins to use when building an e-learning platform because it offers countless management options and in the sense that you do not need much coding to achieve your e-learning platform.

Building such platforms on WordPress necessitates an eCommerce plugin to ease the process. LifterLMS eCommerce plugin is a simple plugin that we can use to implement the sales of membership and courses on an e-learning platform. Here is the question I ask myself before I was getting into this research.

Voila. LifterLMS also comes with a list of add-ons, the WooCommerce add-on, which allows you to implement WooCommerce on your e-learning platform without necessarily downloading the WooCommerce plugin separately.

In LifterLMS-WooCommerce 2.0, you get the opportunity to add a WooCommerce product directly to your LifterLMS package functionality, with the pricing table looking exactly like the native LifterLMS eCommerce pricing table and the purchase button linked to the WooCommerce flow.

• Why LifterLMS-WooCommerce add-on?
• LifterLMS integration with WooCommerce
• Setting up LifterLMS with WooCommerce
• STEP-I   Integration
• STEP-II   WooCommerce Guest Checkout
• STEP-III   Linking Courses and Membership to WooCommerce Products
• STEP-IV   Configuring Automatic enrollment Settings
• STEP-V   Configuring WooCommerce Payment gateways
• STEP-VI   Generating username and password
• STEP-VII   creating bundles and member-only products
• Benefits of LifterLMS WooCommerce

Why LifterLMS-WooCommerce add-on?

WooCommerce is the leading plugin when it comes to the aspect of implementing sales management on a website. It has to itself a couple of add-ons that permits you to perform some vital management tasks on your website.

Consider using WooCommerce if

• you plan on implementing other payment gateways from the usual Paypal or Stripe.
• You want to sell more than just courses and membership.
• You want to sell physical products rather than just digital products.
• It would help if you had a tax system integration similar to those in the WooCommerce plugin.

LifterLMS integration with WooCommerce

The LifterLMS native eCommerce plugin allows you to sell your courses only via native LifterLMS PayPal integration or their Stripe extension, which is a limitation to most companies. As of the LifterLMS 2.0, which integrates WooCommerce, giving you a sleek drive into an ocean of payment gateway options other than the normal.

Setting up LifterLMS with WooCommerce

WooCommerce helps sell courses and membership quickly on LifterLMS with all hands on deck on the management system. WooCommerce automatically takes over control of payments when we add it to LifterLMS in developing an e-learning platform.

Setting up WooCommerce in LifterLMS is relatively easy.

Just follow the six steps, and get it done;

STEP-I   Integration

• Install and activate LifterLMS and WooCommerce.
• Navigate to LifterLMS->Settings and click on integrate.
• Select “WooCommerce” and click the enable checkbox, save the changes.

Transitioning to WooCommerce is an essential step in integrating LifterLMS to WooCommerce. We need to consider existing orders that are already active in the default LifterLMS payment gateway because they do not transfer to WooCommerce orders.

WooCommerce does not sell subscriptions without the WooCommerce Subscription add-on; this means we cannot sell recurring subscriptions with WooCommerce alone.

What then do we do with the previous subscriptions?

If the accounts are limited and they have an expiry date; you can decide to leave the default LifterLMS payment gateway to run till the end of the subscription while prompting the user often to switch subscription immediately is over. Or you can offer discount coupons on WooCommerce to help all users to migrate to the new platform at a lower cost.

STEP-II   WooCommerce Guest Checkout

Anonymous users cannot be enrolled in a course or membership if we are selling. So we need to ensure that the WooCommerce guest account is entirely disabled.

Do the following to disable the guest account option;

• On your WordPress Admin panel, head to WooCommerce –> Settings, click on Account privacy.
• Find “Allow customers to place an order without an account” and uncheck the box; then click Save.

STEP-III   Linking Courses and Membership to WooCommerce Products

We sell items on WooCommerce as WooCommerce Products, so we must ensure that we create the courses and membership as products in WooCommerce.

To link our courses and membership to the WooCommerce product, we are going to proceed as follows;

• To create a course product, go to Courses > [Course Name] > “Product Options”
• To create a membership product, Go to Memberships > [Membership Name] > “Product Options.”
• Head back to LifterLMS and create an access plan. Then, instead of entering prices, and we did afore, we select a WooCommerce product that then determines the access plan’s price. You may select multiple products for a single access plan.

STEP-IV   Configuring Automatic enrollment Settings

LifterLMS sets out a sensible order automatic enrolment by default. “Completed” Order Status = Auto-Enrollment

Once the student purchases a course or a membership, the order completes, and the student enrols automatically into the course or access plan.

The problem here is; virtual products do not get instantly completed when purchased; this implies a definite need to edit the automatic enrollment settings.

In case you need a setting from the normal, go to LifterLMS-> Settings-> “Integration to configure enrollment settings.”

• Order enrollment status: this is the stage where the user automatically enters any course or membership access plan that has been paid for successfully. Selecting completed prevents students from being automatically added to a course or membership access plan until the purchase is verified.
• Order Unenrollment status: here, the user is automatically removed from every registered course if the purchase failed, was cancelled or was refunded but not expired.
• Subscription enrollment status: if a student has purchased a subscription package and the purchase was successful, this status changes to “active” as long as the subscription is not expired. The user automatically enters the subscription package associated with the purchased plan.
• Subscription Unenrollment status: once a subscription is on hold, cancelled or expired, the student automatically ejects from every subscription he/she is currently attending.

STEP-V   Configuring WooCommerce Payment gateways

The payment gateway is the tunnel that leads to your bank account. To set up the payment gateway, we go to WooCommerce-> Settings-> Checkout.

Then we select the payment method to be made available on our e-learning platform.

STEP-VI   Generating username and password

Most e-learning platforms have the characteristics of automatically creating serial numbers(usernames) for every user on the platform.

To automatically generate usernames, we go to WooCommerce > Settings > Accounts, enable the following options.

• Automatically generate username from customer email
• Automatically generate customer password

Once a user purchases a membership or course, he/she automatically receives a message from WooCommerce containing their username and password.

STEP-VII   creating bundles and member-only products

We can link multiple courses and memberships to a specific WooCommerce product which we call a package or bundle. When a client purchases the bundle, he/she automatically enters into all associate memberships and courses of that bundle.

Member-only products are products that are dedicated freely or sold only to already enrolled members of the platform. You can dedicate a WooCommerce product as a member-only product by clicking on the “Advanced” Tab under “Product Data” on the WooCommerce product, then locate and check the “Member Only checkbox.” When using variable products, the “Member Only setting is available on each variation.”

Benefits of LifterLMS WooCommerce

• With WooCommerce, we can relate our access plan to WooCommerce products.

The LifterLMS access plan system brings everything needed for a fully functional e-learning platform into one place, making it easier to associate access plans to courses and membership using the WooCommerce products.

• The courses and Membership pricing table does not change, and the easy linking of the buy now button to WooCommerce checkout flow.

It is pretty easy to transition from the native LifterLMS eCommerce plugin to WooCommerce because the external look does not change. Still, the internal functioning makes it easier for the developer to quickly adapt the WooCommerce pattern since every physical aspect looks almost the same as the former.

• Possibility to create a product that has a one-time payment option that expires with the access plan.

On an e-learning platform, you can design some courses to have limited access; this brings in the idea of limited access profiles, giving user access for a well-defined period.

• The Free access plan

Most e-learning platforms nowadays provide free access accounts where the user can access some unpaid(FREE) courses for a lifetime instead of creating courses with a billing of $0.00 that looks awkward.

You can set up a free plan to demonstrate the quality of material the platform has to offer.

• Managing student access

You can manage the enrollment and expiration of student accounts in WooCommerce. Head over to WooCommerce–>Orders you might want to give every user an extended week of access because you feel good. In the orders panel, select the users you want to extend their access to and click modify, then you select the specific order you want to modify the click update.