If you sell content or products on your WordPress site, then you know how important it is to get your online shop set up just right. Even the slightest delay or error in a check-out process can deter a potential customer. This is especially true if you’ve created a storefront on a custom-built WordPress site – your checkout experience needs to be seamless. 

Fortunately, there’s a popular plugin in the WordPress world called WooCommerce that serves as the gold standard for WordPress shops and checkout solutions. WooCommerce unlocks the ability to turn your website into an online shop, allowing you to sell products, collect payments, and let customers manage accounts.

If you sell courses, using WooCommerce as your storefront is one of the simplest decisions you can make, but there are a few considerations before you move ahead. Let’s explore when it makes sense to use WooCommerce. 

Reasons to use WooCommerce for selling courses

WooCommerce has become the go-to storefront on WordPress because it offers robust features. Considering how specific features will meet your needs can help you determine if it’s the right option for selling your course. Here’s why you might want to use it: 

Use any payment gateway: One of the biggest strengths of WooCommerce is the vast number of payment options available. LearnDash is already integrated with Paypal, Razorpay, and Stripe. If you’d like to use another payment gateway, there are 100+ payment gateways available for WooCommerce— more than any other ecommerce plugin.

Tons of customization: WooCommerce lets you customize to your heart’s content and control the way customers experience purchasing your course. You can easily add discounts, coupons, and course bundles and packages. Plus, there are thousands of extensions available for shipping, marketing, automation, payments, social media, and anything else you can imagine. We like combining WooCommerce with IconicWP, which is a plugin that helps you create a fast and profitable ecommerce store without any technical knowledge.

Sell physical goods along with courses: Since WooCommerce allows you to sell any product, you can also list physical products for sale along with your courses. For instance, you can also sell T-shirts or merchandise to not only add a passive income stream but to create a community of fans. 

The LearnDash WooCommerce integration is popular because it provides enormous flexibility. If you’re looking to build the ultimate custom ecommerce experience, play around with WooCommerce as you build your storefront. 

Reasons not to use WooCommerce

While it is incredibly powerful, WooCommerce does come with more of a learning curve than most other plugins and integrations. You might not want to use WooCommerce for LearnDash if:

You’re looking for a quick and easy setup: Loads of customization options can also add confusion. If you’re looking for a super simple setup to get going immediately, you might find WooCommerce slowing you down.  

You have limited courses with a small audience: One of the best perks of WooCommerce is automation. But if you prefer to manage a small learner group manually, you may find you don’t need all of WooCommerce’s extra features. 

You’re concerned about site speed: If you don’t have premium hosting and you’re worried about site speed, keep in mind that WooCommerce is a huge plugin that takes up space on a website. You could potentially face unnecessary slowdowns with all of WooCommerce’s features.

If you’re offering a straightforward checkout experience without extra bells and whistles, you may want to stick with a smaller, simpler ecommerce solution. 

The best of both worlds: WooCommerce with LearnDash Cloud

If you’re ready to harness the power of both WooCommerce and LearnDash, you can get started one of two ways: WooCommerce works with both the LearnDash plugin as well as LearnDash Cloud.

• If you’re looking to integrate WooCommerce into your existing LearnDash site, our knowledgebase article walks you through how to do this.

• If you’re setting up a new course site, LearnDash Cloud makes it easy to hit the ground running with WooCommerce. During set-up, you have the option to install WooCommerce right away as you configure your LearnDash Cloud website. This is a big perk if you already know you’d like to use a payment gateway other than Stripe upon setup. You can also rest easy knowing that your premium LearnDash Cloud hosting provides the speed you need to efficiently run WooCommerce on your site. 

Ready to try out LearnDash with WooCommerce? Give the LearnDash Demo a spin to see how our plugin works from a user’s perspective. Then, sign up for your own demo website with WooCommerce pre-installed to play in a sandbox environment.