If someone wants to purchase your course then make the process as simple as possible. Adding extra steps will result in lower conversions.

A large portion of LearnDash users sell their courses using one of the many methods we have available. You can use a shopping cart, built-in options like Stripe or PayPal, membership plugins, custom forms, and so on.

On their own, each one of these options makes it pretty simple to get up-and-running with accepting payments. Also, the purchase process is straightforward.

For example, when using a shopping cart like WooCommerce users can add a course to their cart, create their account during checkout (this is a nice touch), make payment, then be routed directly to the course they purchased. Simple, easy, and intuitive.

If using a built-in payment gateway like PayPal then your customer clicks “Take This Course”, enters their PayPal information, and after purchase they get a username & password sent to them. Again, a simple process flow.

Don’t Muddy The Waters

Removing friction in the purchasing process should be your goal when setting up the payment method for your online courses. Don’t add unnecessary steps.

For instance, sometimes our support receives questions on how to add contingencies to the purchase journey – such as requiring customers to first enroll into a free course before they are able to purchase the full version.

Can you do this? Yes, absolutely.

But do you really want to make it harder for people to give you money?

I understand that extra steps sometimes make sense depending on the use-case. I can see under certain scenarios why a member organization would want courses only available to for purchase to their members.

However, even in these instances I would ask that you really ask yourself if this is a requirement, because as more requirements are added to the purchasing process then the conversation rate will certainly be impacted.

The last place where you want people to be confused is when they are trying to purchase your products.

I suppose this is my public service announcement to those who are selling (or plan on selling) courses.

Just keep it simple and don’t overthink the matter.