Selling Courses With WooCommerce

Are you ready to sell your first course with Sensei and WooCommerce? This guide will help you get started.

What Do I Need?

To sell courses, you will need the following:

Sensei LMS (the free plugin found on WordPress.org here)
Sensei Pro (purchase and download here)
WooCommerce (the free plugin found here)
A payment gateway (see the options here)

If you don’t already have a payment gateway that you use, we recommend WooPayments.

Note: If you’d like to accept recurring payments and easily predict the revenue you’ll receive, you can sell your courses as part of a subscription.

If you’d like to ensure your course content is only accessible to paying members, you can sell your courses as part of a membership.

Block Editor

Sensei LMS is a block-based plugin, and as such, the Classic Editor plugin is no longer supported. If you’re having any trouble using Sensei Pro with WooCommerce, first check whether you are using the Classic Editor. If so, try disabling it and see if that resolves your issue.

Linking Products to a Course

By default, Sensei Pro provides the ability to link a course to one or more WooCommerce products. This enables someone to purchase a course on your site. When a course is linked to a WooCommerce product, the lesson content is only viewable by those who have actually purchased the course.

To link a WooCommerce product to a course, ensure that WooCommerce is installed and activated, and then follow these steps:

Go to Sensei LMS > Courses and click the course you would like to attach to a product.
In the Pricing section of the Course > Course Settings sidebar, click the Create a product button. (Alternatively, if you’ve already created a product, you can select it from the list instead.)
Enter the product name, price and an optional description:

Click the Create product button to create the product and automatically link it to the course. The Take Course button in the editor changes to a Purchase Course button.
Click Update to save the course.

The product you created or selected will now be used to sell your course!

If you want to add other products that also grant access to the course, you can either create another new product in the same way, or select an existing product.

Students will be able to choose which product they want to purchase on the course page. This can be useful if you want to sell courses individually, or as a package that gives access to multiple courses.

Note: When you link a course to a product within the course editor via the Create Product button, it’s automatically set up as a virtual and downloadable product. This combination is necessary for an order status to be automatically marked as ‘Completed’ when payment is made on your site. Other virtual products will keep the Processing status until they get manually changed to Completed. Read more here.

Linking a Product to Multiple Courses

Courses and products have a “many to many” relationship, meaning you can link one or more courses to one or more products. Linking a product to multiple courses means purchasing that product will grant access to all the courses it is linked to.

You can link multiple courses to the same product when editing the courses themselves, as described above. Or if you’re editing the product, you can add/remove courses in the Product Data > General tab:

Students who purchase (or previously purchased) this product, will be enrolled in all of the courses listed here. Removing a course from the product will unenroll all students who previously purchased it.

Selling Courses as Memberships or Subscriptions

You can also sell courses as part of a membership or subscription by integrating additional WooCommerce extensions. For more details, please refer to the below guides:

Purchasing a Course

Visitors to your site can purchase a course on the course page. They will be enrolled as soon as payment has been made (i.e. when the order status is Processing or Completed):

Removing a Student from a Course

In order to remove a student from a course that they have purchased, the status of their order needs to be changed to one of On hold, Cancelled or Refunded. Changing the order status to one of these values will unenroll the student from the course in Sensei LMS > Students, and they will no longer be able to access it.

Guest Checkout

It is not possible for your site visitors to purchase a course without a user account. This means that WooCommerce’s Allow customers to place orders without an account setting has no effect if the user is checking out with courses in their cart.

In WooCommerce > Settings > Accounts & Privacy tab, in the Account creation section, ensure that at least one of the following is enabled:

Allow customers to create an account during checkout
Allow customers to create an account on the “My account” page