Selling a Course as a Membership
To sell a course as a membership, ensure that both WooCommerce and WooCommerce Memberships are installed and activated. Then follow these steps:
- Create a membership plan.
- Ensure that Grant access upon is set to product(s) purchase on the General tab, and that one or more products are entered in the Products field.
- On the Restrict Content tab, click the Add New Rule button.
- Select Courses from the dropdown, then search for and select the course(s) you’d like to include in the membership. (Alternatively, you can add a Course Categories rule and select one or more course categories. All courses with those categories will be included in the membership.)
- Click Publish.
Site visitors will now be required to purchase one of the products associated with the membership in order to view course content.
Auto-Enrolling with Membership
To automatically enroll learners in courses provided by their WooCommerce Membership plan, navigate to SenseiLMS > Settings > WooCommerce Memberships and ensure that “Auto-enroll in courses belonging to a membership” is enabled.
Please do not use the auto-enrollment setting shown in below screenshot within WooCommerce Membership page, as it will not revoke access to students once their membership expires.
Preventing Conflicts with Course Access
When a course has a product attached via the Products metabox on the Edit Course page, and that same product is also being used to sell the same course in a membership, it can create a conflict with course access. This is because both Sensei LMS and WooCommerce Memberships are each vying for control – Sensei LMS because the product is attached directly to the course, and WooCommerce Memberships because the product is attached to a course membership.
To protect against this, a warning will appear on the Edit Course and Edit Membership Plan pages when this situation is detected:
In order to resolve this, you can choose to either:
- Remove the product from the membership (in the screenshot above, the product is called Simple Product) OR
- Remove the product from the course
You can, of course, select a different product to use to sell the membership or course.
Read more about the Sensei LMS and WooCommerce membership integration at WooCommerce’s help center.
FAQ
Can course access be granted automatically based on user role?
No, neither Sensei Pro nor WooCommerce Memberships have a built-in feature to allow automatic course enrollment based on user role.
Restricting content based on user role would require additional plugins or a custom coded solution.