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 WooCommerce Payments.
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.
Linking a Product 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 people who have actually purchased the course.
To link a WooCommerce product to a course, ensure that WooCommerce is installed and activated, then follow these steps:
- Go to Courses > All Courses and click on the course you would like to attach to a product.
- In the Pricing section of the Course sidebar, click the Create a new product link. 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!
Classic Editor
If you have the Classic Editor plugin activated, or are using a version of WordPress < 5.0, you will not see the Pricing section. Instead, you can add existing products from the Products section in the sidebar:
Purchasing a Course
Site visitors can purchase a course on the single 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 Learner from a Course
In order to remove a learner 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 learner from the course in Sensei LMS > Learner Management, 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 will have no effect if the user is checking out with courses in their cart.
Make sure to enable Allow customers to create an account during checkout and Allow customers to create an account on the “My account” page (or at least one of those two) in WooCommerce > Settings > Accounts & Privacy tab under the Account creation section.