How to sell courses and restrict access with Learndash

Restricting access to Learndash courses

There are often questions in the Learndash Facebook Group about how to give students access to Learndash courses, so here is a short overview of some ofthe options. Since there are a few, this should help you choose, plus plan for the future, because what will be best when you start out might not be the best long term. If you haven’t started making a course yet, take a look at the Learndash website.

Easiest and quickest way to sell courses with Learndash

Learndash comes with a built-in facility to allow students to pay for and enrol on courses, via PayPal without anything extra, or via Stripe with a free add-on. This is the simplest method and requires users to create an account and will restrict access on a course by course basis. Use this if you want to get up and running quickly and only sell courses. It assumes you wonโ€™t be bundling courses or selling non-Learndash products. If you want to sell bundles of courses, or expiring subscriptions, or products unrelated to Learndash too, youโ€™ll need extra tools.

Sell Learndash Course Bundles

For selling bundles, (or if you want more control over the checkout and account creation process), you can use Woocommerce, with the free Learndash Woocommerce integration, creating Woocommerce products with more than one course. You can also customise the checkout experience for better user experience with a bit of fettling, e.g. to streamline it for digital products which need no address (but they could add one later if they want to print an invoice for example). This is the setup Iโ€™m currently using to sell my Running For Beginners online course << IF YOU CLICK THIS LINK to nose around, PLEASE dwell a while and maybe click other pages in the menu so google doesn’t penalise me for high bounce rates – THANKS!!

Note that Woocommerce and Learndash need to be on the same domain; on my setup, I use a marketing site on the top domain, with Woocommerce checkout links on the sales page buttons which take the user straight to the checkout on the subdomain where Learndash (and Woocommerce) reside. My main reason for choosing this setup is keeping the price down during startup.

Woocommerce is quite intensive unless you know what you are doing, so you may want to look into methods to dequeue Woocommerce scripts on Learndash post types etc. to speed up your site, but it’s a bit outside the scope of this article – I used a plugin that deactivates other plugins depending on page or post or post type. Comment below if you need more info on this.

Sell Learndash Subscriptions

If you want to sell subscriptions, you can use the built-in Learndash solution or use a number of different plugins, e.g. Woocommerce subscriptions, Memberpress, Paid Memberships Pro etc. with official Learndash integrations. Some of these plugins are premium priced plugins (not free).

Sell Learndash Courses with 3rd party cart systems

If you want to offload the marketing and cart process, to make the process more streamlined for your customers, you could pay for something like Samcart (also Thrivecart in the works as of time of writing), and use the official Learndash integrations. Check the situation with selling course bundles though.

Sell Learndash via CRM / tagging integration.

For when you want to get all fancy and have money to spend, you can use a paid-for 3rd party CRM / user tagging system like Drip or Infusionsoft, or a number of other providers (which is your favourite? Comment below). The latter will do the whole landing page / checkout too I believe. To achieve this, youโ€™ll need WPFusion or similar which will apply a tag to the studentโ€™s email address in your chosen 3rd party system and apply the courses to their user. The advantages of this setup are numerous, but it is more expensive. You can easily keep the marketing and cart site server separate from the Learndash server, reducing load – important if you have a very busy learning site. You can also start automating student messaging based on progress through courses in a very powerful, multi-rule way, e.g. โ€œhas reached lesson 3 AND has not logged in for a weekโ€. The scope of this setup is incredible, helping with student completion rates / retention and cross-sell marketing of other courses. However, learning it all will take a long time though, so be ready to spend money on experts or have lots of spare time.

Get a Learndash Consultant

If you need help getting your project off the ground or making it run smoothly, look for a Learndash Consultant that can guide you on best practices and hold your hand every step of the way.

What did I miss?

Comment below and Iโ€™ll update the article accordingly.

9 thoughts on “How to sell courses and restrict access with Learndash”

  1. Hello! I am trying to find ANY information on how to get woocommerce and learndash to work together on separate subdomains. I’ve been looking online for days with no luck. I have set up my domain and the subdomains, but I haven’t figured out how to use webhooks. The one I tried skipped the purchase step. ๐Ÿ™ Also, is there a way for one login to work for everything – to give woocommerce customers access to woo and then if they sign up for a course, give them access to learndash? Thank you for any help you can provide

    1. Woocommerce creates an account on the same domain as woocommerce. You’d need some sort of custom code to sync users on the two domains. I wonder if wpfusion could help. If you use an email list CRM, it could tag a CRM user at purchase and request a new user on the other domain I think.

      Is there a reason to not have woocommerce on the same domain as LD?

      1. I had a bad experience with my site breaking and everything was down. I really just want to keep them separate so if one thing breaks, it doesn’t take it all down. I’ve seen so many recommendations that this is the way to go, but nobody explains how to do it.

        I also read that you shouldn’t have too many plugins on one site, so I thought having woocommerce on one domain and learndash and buddypress on another would be safer. If I add instructors in the future, my e-commerce will already be separate from the areas they will need to access.

        I found a plugin that lets me create a custom thank you page for each product, so I’m thinking I could use a custom link. I’ve decided I’m fine with asking them to create a new registration for learndash. But I need a way for them to have immediate access to the courses they purchase. Do you have any ideas? Thank you for responding.

        1. Put Woocommerce on the Learndash domain (plus the official woocommerce / Learndash integration plugin). On the other marketing domain put links in buttons like https://courses.learndashdomain.com/cart/?add-to-cart=1074 (where 1074 is the woocommerce product id). Then use “woo product tools” to have a separate custom thank you page for each product that points to the relevant course once they have paid.

          The other way to do it is more expensive and requires using a cart plugin on the marketing site that has tagging integration for your CRM/Email marketing platform which then syncs to the Learndash domain.

          1. Is it also possible to split the shop from the site and from the LMS? (as my shop will also contain offline training into it)

            How can you let woocommerce from the shop.*.com connect to learndash from the online.*.com?

          2. Sorry for the delayed reply. To do this, you would need to use wpfusion across all domains with a CRM tagging system like Drip or Infusionsoft.

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