I am always recommending WooCommerce to my clients and they are always asking “why do we need it?”. That’s why I have decided to put up an article explaining some of the biggest reasons to go for WooCommerce with LearnDash. Although I have written just 15 reasons, I am sure there must be many more reasons.
WooCommerce is built for payments
A Cardio doctor might be good for the heart but definitely it’s better to go for ENT specialist if you have an issue in your throat.
Same is the case here, LearnDash is no doubt a top notch LMS and provides way more LMS functionalities than most of its competitors. At the same time LearnDash is not meant to be very good as a payment processing system, that too for a good reason. Simply because LearnDash want to put all of its efforts in improving their LMS part without diverting to putting their energies in improving their payment processor.
On the other hand WooCommerce has been built as a specialised payment processor and undoubtedly currently it’s leading the market. It’s in the market for a very very long time and it is safe to predict WooCommerce is not going anywhere soon.
If we combine the power of WooCommerce with LearnDash, we are going to get the best payment processor along with the best LMS, all that without paying any additional amounts.
Better checkout experience
With default LearnDash system you can’t customise the checkout experience and design of checkout doesn’t look good as well. That’s where WooCommerce comes into play.
By combining WooCommerce with Cartflows, we can easily customise the checkout page as well as may embed the checkout form directly on the course landing page. That’s going to save the user from doing multiple steps and it’s easily going to ensure higher conversions.
No, you don’t need to learn any coding skills to customise the checkout page or flow. You can do that easily using your favourite page builder. Currently Cartflows ( WooCommerce extension ) offers compatibility with a wide range of page builders.
Allow the users to manage payments directly from their Dashboard
The biggest flaw I have found with the LearnDash payment processor is it doesn’t have functionality for the user to manage their payments from the front end. They can’t update their payment gateway easily, can’t see their invoices and at the same time they can not manage their subscriptions.
With WooCommerce your website users are going to easily manage their payments and enable or disable their subscriptions directly from the front end. They would be able to update their payment processor, personal details etc all through their front-end dashboard.
Integrate even your local payment gateways
Although LearnDash supports a couple of major payment gateways but what if you want to use another payment gateway? If you are in Pakistan and PayPal isn’t supported? You are in Brazil and you want to use your local payment gateway for easy adaption?
On the other end, WooCommerce offers a wide range of payment gateway integrations. Regardless of the country you are in, you can easily integrate your local payment gateway with WooCommerce.
No, you don’t need to hire anyone to build the extension. WooCommerce has hundreds or even thousands of payment gateway add ons available through the WordPress plugins area.
A wide rage of CRM integrations
SImilar to the payment gateways WooCommerce also offers a wide range of CRM options. Although LearnDash itself supports only a couple of CRM compatibilities, that gap could easily be filled using WooCommerce.
WooCommerce could be integrate with over 1000 CRM’s if not more.
Bundle courses with a single package
LearnDash itself supports selling courses individually but at the time of writing this article there is no way to bundle courses.
If you are unaware of the bundled courses feature, basically it’s combining multiple courses and selling it as a single product. If you have “Course A” , “Course B” and “Course C” either you can sell them individually or you can name a single product anything like “Course Bundle” which may include all the courses or a combination of these.
WooCommerce allows you to bundle courses either with a single payment plan or with subscriptions.
Upsell, Cross-sell or Downsell
If you have multiple products or courses on your website targeted at the same audience, this is a must have feature. You won’t believe how amazing this feature really is.
If you aren’t aware of these terms let me explain a bit. If you have a product named “Introduction to marketing” priced at $199 one time. Once the user clicks on buy now button, rather than moving to the payment form we may redirect him to another page where we are going to engage him further. On the new page we show him something that must be useful for him such as “Marketing checklist” and sell it for additional $49 or something. This kind of technique is called upselling.
Similarly if you show the user a similar course like “Introduction to finance” this is called cross selling. And finally down-selling is used to sell cheaper version of the product. Somehow if you feel the user is not able to afford the marketing course you may offer him a cheaper version of the course priced at $99, that’s called downselling.
With WooCommerce + cartflows you can easily upsell, cross-sell or down-sell your courses to boost your revenues.
Combine digital products with physical products
What if you have physical products on the site? In that scenario you have no other option than using a plugin like WooCommerce. If you are using WooCommerce for selling your LearnDash courses, it is going to allow you to sell digital products in a combination with your physical products.
Why is it essential? let’s say if you a book and you want to sell it as an add on to your course? WooCommerce comes very handy in this kind of scenarios.
Abandoned cart tracking
This is under-rated feature among many of the course creators. I have came across at least a dozen of the sites where either this feature was not setup at all or it was not setup correctly.
Let’s say if your customer reaches checkout but doesn’t buy the product and leaves the checkout? There could be a lot of reasons to it like technical error on checkout, higher pricing or maybe the customer is not sure if he really needs the product.
With abandoned cart tracking, you can track email address of similar users and may send them automated emails to convert them to your paying customers. Effectively setting it up is another debate.
This feature isn’t present in LearnDash and we have to rely in WooCommerce to add this feature to our site.
Better reporting functionality
One of the missing features in LearnDash is advanced reporting functionality. Although LearnDash has basic reporting when it comes to courses yet it completely ignores the reporting for people using their built in cart. LearnDash team clearly want you to be using a different payment processor.
With WooCommerce you get way more advanced reporting related to your payment processing such as sales per product etc.
You can further combine monsterinsights to your WooCommerce for even more advanced reporting.
Instalments and pay what you want
If you have an expensive course I would highly recommend making instalment option for your courses. That will ensure that people not having enough payments upfront will be able to take your course as well.
Although instalment functionality isn’t available in LearnDash, you can use WooCommerce to add this feature.
Similarly one of the recent trends, specially among organisations is to use “Pay what you want” for their products. You can also include a similar feature quite easily into your LearnDash sites using WooCommerce.
Pricing based upon country, state or location
Price discrimination is not a very new concept and we have seen a lot of people using it over the years. If you are targeting different countries with different income levels, pricing based on country is a great feature.
This is not a native feature in WooCommerce but you can add an add-on to WooCommerce to incorporate this feature your LearnDash website.
Offer coupons and discounts
Offering coupons is essential at least for most of the sites. LearnDash cart doesn’t have this basic feature.
Thankfully WooCommerce is native discounts and coupon feature which we can use both for our physical as well as digital products. Again you have to do some research before setting up right coupons and discounts for maximum effectiveness. Like, you can offer a high discount coupon to your abandoned cart users.
More options for marketing automation
Marketing automation is backbone of any eCommerce website. It allows you to stay engaged with your users on autopilot. Without proper marketing automation your users are more likely to leave engaging with your site.
WooCommerce allow your site to create a wide ranging of marketing automations, through a third party CRM. If we combine WPFusion into our system, it’s further going to boost our marketing system.
Affiliate Integrations
I have rarely seen affiliate feature in LearnDash sites but at the same time it’s a very promising missing feature. If you have a proper affiliate system in place, that’s going to allow you to sell your courses with the help of influencers, bloggers and youtubers.
With WooCommerce you can integrate any Affiliate plugin to your LearnDash website. Currently AffiliateWP is the most recommended affiliate plugin.
