LearnDash Expert Advice: LD Needs WooCommerce for Selling

As a LearnDash expert, we work with business owners launching their first LearnDash course site and they are needing e-commerce. It's necessary, of course. You aren't giving these courses away for free, right?

With LearnDash's e-commerce feature, you can use it to connect with Stripe, Paypal or Razorpay. You can sell individual courses or give access to a collection of courses using LearnDash groups. What my LearnDash expert experience has taught me is that the typical LearnDash course builder needs more than what LearnDash's e-commerce offers. It's a best-in-breed learning management systems, but falls short on the e-commerce side.

LearnDash Expert on the Right E-Commerce Solution

With LearnDash e-commerce, you can only sell courses. You cannot sell a course with additional Wordpress content. You just can't do that. Offering a free trial is a challenge. Giving people free access to content requires using a difficult to use registration. It's not user friendly at all. And if you want to sell any hard items like books, t-shirts, caps or mugs, in addition to courses, there is no way to do that

My team and I are LearnDash experts. LearnDash is a big part of our practice. 80% of the sites we build make use of it. The features it doesn't have are delivered by third-party providers that have added and that's a comprehensive list to pick from.

For e-commerce, I highly recommend WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a free Wordpress plugin. Consider that a free entry-level solution that makes it easy for them to sell you upgrades. They charge for the WooCommerce Subscription for recurring payments. For a very reasonable price, you have a very complete e-commerce solution.

WooCommerce has a large number of available options. Like LearnDash, there is a BIG after-marketing of third-party providers that provide even more features. When I'm speaking with an online course builder that needs something I haven't done before, I typically begin searching and very quickly I find something that does what they need. Sometimes it takes some adjustments and customizations, but for the most part, I am able to get customers what they want without having to bring in a programming team to do customer code development.

So if you are working with LearnDash and are getting frustrated with the e-commerce experience and features you are able to offer, consider WooCommerce and I'm sure you'll have success with a LearnDash / WooCommerce combined solution.