10 Reasons to Integrate LearnDash with WooCommerce (4 Ways to Do It)

Looking to sell your courses built on LearnDash on a WooCommerce store? You can easily integrate LearnDash & WooCommerce in minutes. How? Read along to discover the easy steps.

LearnDash is a WordPress Learning Management System (LMS) plugin that’s popular with content creators. Be it music courses, teaching material, or anything that’s subscription-based, you can create any teaching material & sell it via LearnDash.

LearnDash helps you easily build a powerful eLearning website from scratch or give a facelift to an existing website. But what is it that makes this plugin an amazing choice? And why should you consider it over the competitors?

This blog post covers ten reasons why you should integrate WooCommerce with LearnDash. Moreover, we’ve also covered how you can install LearnDash on your WooCommerce store and make the best of it.

Ready to be a creator that makes money by selling their digital products? Let’s see how LearnDash can assist you!

About LearnDash

LearnDash is a popular WordPress plugin specifically built to help creators create & sell their work. Selling digital assets can be a tricky chore on its own. But with LearnDash, the task becomes easy.

The plugin helps with content creation, such as tests, quizzes, video creation, etc., and also has payment gateway options for easy payments & customized payment schedules.

LearnDash’s key features include the following:

• Course cloning
• Drag-and-drop course builder
• Dynamic content delivery
• Membership and subscription solutions
• Payment gateway integrations
• Compatibility with several mainstream WordPress themes

Overall, it’s a complete package worth exploring. But there may be times when you feel restricted by the plugin’s native features. But that’s exactly where WooCommerce jumps in to provide a better user experience.

For instance, you might want to sell both physical and digital products. Or you already have a WooCommerce store and want to expand its scope to digital products or need more payment gateway options.

Whatever the case, you can easily enhance your site’s user experience by incorporating LearnDash and WooCommerce. Let’s see the methods to do that first, and then we’ll jump to the benefits of using LearnDash and WooCommerce together.

How to Integrate LearnDash with WooCommerce (Easy Steps)

Integrating LearnDash and WooCommerce isn’t a tricky process. With the right instructions, you can have it done in no time. Let’s explore the ways to do it.

But first things first – you need to have two things ready:

• A LearnDash account.
• A WooCommerce account. (Version 3.0 or above)

Got that ready? Let’s jump to the 4 steps to integrate WooCommerce with LearnDash:

• Install LearnDash
• Edit WooCommerce settings
• Configure WooCommerce & LearnDash
• Sync WooCommerce with LearnDash

Step 1: Install LearnDash

Firstly, you must install LearnDash, and you can do that in two ways:

• Via add-on plugin

• Via manual installation

Via Add-on Plugin

• Get the “WooCommerce for LearnDash” plugin accessible for those who have the LearnDash license.

How to get it?

1. Go to the WordPress Admin Area in the LearnDash LMS and search “WooCommerce for LearnDash”.
2. You’ll find the plugin, as shown in the picture below:

• Click the Install Now button. Once installation is done, it’ll show you the activate button. Click that, and you are set to use LearnDash with Woocommerce.

Via Manual Installation

You can also install LearnDash manually. Here’s how:

1. Log in to your LearnDash account and download the zipped file.
2. Go to your WordPress dashboard.
3. Click Plugins > Add New.
4. Click on the Upload Plugin button.
5. Select the .zip file that you downloaded earlier.
6. Click the Install Now button and follow it by activating your plugin.

Below you can see a demonstration of the steps mentioned above:

Step 2: Edit WooCommerce Settings

WooCommerce allows guest checkouts by default. You can edit your Accounts & Privacy settings to grant your audience access to the course material without any barriers.

Follow the steps below:

• Go to the WooCommerce plugin and click settings.

• Click the “Accounts and Privacy” tab.

• Check the options pointed out in the picture below:

Note: Uncheck the first option, “Allow customers to place orders without an account,” that is checked by default.

• Once done, scroll down and click “Save changes.”

Step 3: Configure WooCommerce & LearnDash

Now, you have to allocate the course by making the right configurations. Here’s how you can do it.

1. Go to WooCommerce Settings.
2. Click Product Options → Add New Product.
3. Configure your product:
   • Select “Course” in the product data drop-down menu.
   • Remove the check from “Downloadable” and check on “Virtual”.
   • Select the right category in the Related Courses dropdown. Choosing “Closed Course” means your material will only be available to subscribers.
   • Hit Publish.

Here’s a virtual demonstration of the above steps:

Step 4: Sync LearnDash with WooCommerce Product

Now’s the time to sync your LearnDash product with the WooCommerce product that you configured above. Here are the steps to do it:

• Open the LearnDash LMS and click on Courses.
• Choose a course that’s the same as your desired WooCommerce Product.
• Click the Settings tab.
• Look for Access Mode under Course Access Settings.
• Check mark the “Closed” mode.
• Enter the URL for your WooCommerce product page, as shown in the image below:

And that’s all. You are ready to offer amazing courses to your subscribers and make some cash. Now, let’s get to the benefits of integrating LearnDash with WooCommerce.

10 Reasons Why You Should Integrate LearnDash With WooCommerce

If you have a mid-sized to big eLearning platform, you can make the most of it by integrating it with WooCommerce. Here are a few solid reasons why you should integrate LearnDash with WooCommerce.

1. Free WooCommerce Addon

LearnDash is very flexible and offers several free & premium third-party extensions to integrate powerful functionalities into your LMS site. Among these, the WooCommerce addon is a free extension with unlimited support and upgrades. As such, there are no extra charges for integrating LearnDash with WooCommerce.

Not only does the plugin offers free integration of LearnDash with WooCommerce but it also offers community help in case you ever get stuck with a problem.

2. Leverage WooCommerce Functionalities

WooCommerce is the most popular free eCommerce platform and an extension powerhouse. With LearnDash, you can only do so much. But when you integrate it with WooCommerce, you open up your eLearning platform to as many as 500 extensions, allowing you to further extend your LMS site.

If you are interested, here are some WooCommerce extensions that can fit your LearnDash-powered website well. You can access these extensions by going to the “WooCommerce” tab and clicking extensions there.

3. The Checkout Experience

Neat and well-designed checkout pages are the bread and butter for eLearning platforms and have an effect on your conversions.

With WooCommerce, you can customize the checkout page(s) and significantly improve your user experience. Also, integrating WooCommerce with LearnDash lets you fully control the user checkout experience.

4. Multiple Payment Gateways

The native LearnDash checkout process offers limited payment options, including Stripe, PayPal, 2Checkout, and Razorpay.

But WooCommerce helps you integrate almost all payment methods. This means you can have a wider audience, helping people worldwide to buy your courses without any payment issues.

5. Benefit From The Strong Community

WooCommerce has more than 5M active installations and is compatible with almost all WordPress plugins and themes. Also, thanks to WordPress’s massive community, you’ll always have developers ready to help if you encounter a problem.

LearnDash also has an active community, but WooCommerce integration leaves you with way more hands to help if needed. The WooCommerce community is accessible via several mediums – The WooCommerce support forum, the official WooCommerce Facebook group, and the WooCommerce Slack channel.

6. Coupon Codes and Discounts

Coupon codes and discounts are the best way to attract new students and increase repeat sales to existing students. With WooCommerce, you can quickly create discounts (percentage, fixed cart, and fixed product), coupons (fixed value or percentage), and other course promotional activities.

It lets you set restrictions for the discount offers (common cases include setting the minimum and/or maximum spend to avail the discount, excluding categories for coupon application, and resetting the expiry dates).

As you can imagine, all these coupon codes and discounts add huge potential to your marketing activities.

7. Sell Courses in Bundles

If you offer multiple course series on your LMS site and want to give higher discounts to students who purchase the entire series, LearnDash with WooCommerce lets you bundle multiple courses into a single product.

Several plugins can help you do that – WPC Product Bundles for WooCommerce, Product Bundles, etc.

8. Simplified Student Management and Email Marketing

While LearnDash supports email marketing and has a robust student management system, WooCommerce offers a better email marketing process with many plugins.

Email marketing with a personalized experience boosts organic sales and lets you track and analyze student behavior. Integrating LearnDash with WooCommerce also helps with efficient email marketing. Plus, with so many analytics extensions, you can even track the progress of your email marketing activities.

If you are looking to use WooCommerce for hosting an LMS, it is important to choose an LMS hosting that supports the plugin, as well as other necessary technologies.

9. Sell Physical Products

Want to charter into selling physical products as well besides digital courses? WooCommerce + LearnDash is the answer. 

With the native LearnDash payment system, you can only sell digital products. But with WooCommerce, you can significantly expand your offerings and include physical products for additional revenue.

10. Recurring Revenue

WooCommerce allows you to create recurring payment options, requiring students to keep paying until they manually unsubscribe.

Also, recurring revenues bring sustainability to any eLearning platform. So, make sure you don’t miss out on this.

Wrapping It Up

That’s pretty much all. Now you know how to integrate WooCommerce with LearnDash and the ten reasons why you need to integrate WooCommerce with the LearnDash plugin.

If you are running an eLearning website of any size, this guide will be quite helpful.

WooCommerce is a popular plugin, specially built to improve the experience for your students. And combining LearnDash with WooCommerce opens up new options and avenues for making the most out of your eLearning platform.