If you had asked me last week about selling LearnDash courses via subscriptions, I would have told you that the best way was to install WooCommerce and then add the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension and go from there. But that will change next week when we roll out a new feature in our 3.6 release – the ability to use native LearnDash Subscriptions.
I'm positive we'll put more news, posts, documentation and videos on this feature on our LearnDash website.
But I'm cheating by telling you about it early. Current customers can even go to their account now and pull down the beta release to test it out.
Selling LearnDash Courses via Subscriptions
If you've read this blog over the past years you know I love WooCommerce. Even when it's not perfect, it's flexibility lets me do amazing things. And the Subscriptions extension is one of the most valuable extensions in the market. It's fantastic, amazing and powerful.
When it comes to LearnDash, we love that you can combine it with WooCommerce to do a lot of great stuff. If you know WooCommerce, it's often exciting to use it to sell LearnDash courses via subscriptions because you get all sorts of other cool WooCommerce features (via extensions) like funnels, post-purchase upsells and more.
Nevertheless, not everyone knows WooCommerce well. And not everyone wants to add an entire cart ecosystem if they're only trying to create a simple solution for recurring revenue.
That's why we've built a feature that works with both Stripe and PayPal.
You've seen this screen before, where you can pick from open, free, buy now or closed access options for your LearnDash courses.
But now you have a new option, “Recurring.”
The Name of the Game is Recurring Revenue
LearnDash subscriptions works the way you would expect it to. You can pick a price, a recurring interval (like monthly or yearly), and a limit to the number of times you repeat billing.
It will not replace WooCommerce Subscriptions if you want to do a lot of complexity (like creating a Variable Subscription Product). But for the normal recurring revenue approach, this will do it.
It's Part of the 3.6 Release
Next week we'll be releasing LearnDash 3.6 and this will be part of that release. It's one of my favorite features in this release because it keeps your site fast, simple, and powerful all at the same time. Keep an eye out for it.