Tour the LifterLMS voucher system for bulk sales, bulk enrollments & offline sales
How The LifterLMS Voucher System Handles Bulk Sales And Offline Enrollments
The LifterLMS voucher system activates courses and memberships without sending a student through checkout. Generate one shared code or hundreds of unique codes, hand them out after an invoice, gift card sale, or corporate deal closes, and students redeem them from the registration screen or their account dashboard. This walkthrough covers creating vouchers, exporting redemption reports, and common use cases for bulk and offline sales.
What You’ll Learn
- The real difference between a voucher and a coupon, and why that matters for offline and business-to-business sales
- How to create a voucher, attach courses or memberships to it, and generate one shared code or many unique codes
- How students redeem a voucher from the registration screen or their account dashboard
- How to export and email voucher codes and redemption reports as a CSV
- How to use vouchers for corporate training, gift and offline sales, and private course beta tests
Key Takeaways
- Skip the shopping cart entirely for bulk deals. Invoice the buyer directly, then hand off a CSV of voucher codes once payment clears
- Generate one code with a use limit for a group, or unique per-student codes when you need a record of who activated and when
- Vouchers only activate access. Use the LifterLMS WooCommerce integration if you want checkout and voucher issuing connected, even manually
- Pair a voucher with a free membership to bring people into a community tier before they ever see a paid course
- Test a course privately before launch by handing a small group a voucher instead of publishing it to your full course catalog
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. An already-enrolled student redeems a voucher the same way a new student does: they open the Redeem a Voucher screen on their student dashboard, enter the code, and any courses or memberships attached to that voucher activate on their existing account immediately.
Yes. LifterLMS generates a random string for each code by default, but you can overwrite any code in the admin before publishing the voucher. Renaming codes to something recognizable, like a company name, makes them easier for a bulk buyer to manage and hand out.
Not out of the box. The LifterLMS email engagement system supports triggers like course purchased, membership purchased, and lesson completed, but there is no built-in voucher redeemed trigger yet. Adding one would require custom development.
Yes. A free access plan still requires a student to register for an account, and a voucher works the same way on a free course as it does on a paid one: it activates the course on the student’s account once they redeem the code.
No. A voucher only controls whether a student has access to a course or membership, not the pace at which they move through it. To release lessons on a schedule, use the drip content setting on individual lessons instead.
Not automatically. The closest workaround uses the LifterLMS WooCommerce integration: sell a bundle as a WooCommerce product with volume pricing, then manually generate and send voucher codes once the order comes in.
Not directly. A course is a fixed set of lessons. To add more value for a specific group, bundle the course inside a membership that includes bonus lessons, live sessions, or other content, and use a voucher to activate that membership.
Full Webinar Transcript
What Makes A Voucher Different From A Coupon
A voucher is not a coupon. That is the first thing to clear up. A voucher works more like an activation code: a student never sees the checkout screen to redeem one. Instead, they enter the code from the registration screen if they are new, or from the Redeem a Voucher screen on their student dashboard if they already have an account.
Whatever the voucher is attached to, whether that is a course, a membership, or several of each, activates on the student’s account immediately. Functionally, a voucher behaves like a 100 percent off coupon without the checkout process.
The Best Use Case For Vouchers, Selling Bulk Seats To A Business
The most common and most valuable use of the voucher system is selling bulk seats to an organization rather than single seats to individuals. Cash flow and market validation stall a lot of new course platforms in the early days, especially when there is no email list yet. It is easier to close one deal for 10, 30, 50, or even a thousand seats with a company, school, or group than to win that many individual customers one at a time.
In a bulk sale, one person, a decision-maker or an HR contact, buys access for their whole organization. The voucher system is what lets that one buyer activate everyone on their team, in their community, or in their school without you having to process each seat individually.
Selling Vouchers Offline Through Gift Cards And In-Person Sales
Vouchers also cover sales that never touch an online checkout. A physical gift card with a scratch-off code and redemption instructions works the same way a digital voucher does. So does a conference booth where a card reader on a phone takes a one-time payment. Charge the card in person, then hand the buyer a voucher code they redeem later in the online course environment.
Distributing Course Access For Schools And Corporate Training
Vouchers also work well for a school administrator or a teacher who just needs to distribute activation codes rather than sell anything. A teacher can hand a student a code tied to one course or a specific group of courses, and the student redeems it whether or not they already have an account.
The same pattern fits internal training: safety training, on-the-job training, or continuing education requirements for employees. A site owner does not have to manually enroll every employee. Handing out voucher codes shares that responsibility with the people who actually need access.
Why The Voucher System Is An Activation Tool, Not A Sales Tool
The voucher system is not a checkout replacement. It is an activation system. Bulk deals rarely close through an online cart in the first place. They usually go through a negotiation: a signed contract, a check in the mail, or an invoice to the buyer’s HR or finance department, especially when selling into a larger company.
The recommended workflow is to invoice the buyer directly, for example through an invoicing tool connected to a Stripe account, collect payment outside of LifterLMS, and only then deliver a voucher good for the number of seats purchased.
How Students Redeem A Voucher From Registration Or Their Dashboard
On the front end, a logged-in student clicks Redeem a Voucher on their student dashboard and enters the code. A brand-new student who lands on the registration screen without an account sees a Have a voucher? toggle next to the standard registration fields. Clicking it reveals a voucher code field right on the registration form.
Either path lands the student in their new content immediately. There is no cart, no checkout screen, and no payment step for the student to work through.
How To Create A Voucher And Attach Courses Or Memberships
To create a voucher, go to Orders → Vouchers in the WordPress admin and add a new voucher. Name it something recognizable, ideally the buyer’s name or company rather than the default title, then attach the courses and memberships it should unlock. A single voucher can be tied to one course, several courses, one or more memberships, or any combination of the two.
One Shared Code Versus Unique Codes Per Student
There are two ways to generate codes on a voucher. Generate one code with a use limit, for example a single code good for 40 redemptions, and hand that one code to a buyer who purchased 40 seats. Or generate 40 unique codes when the buyer wants to distribute a different code to each employee and see a per-person record of who activated and when, which matters for something like mandatory safety training.
Either set of codes can be renamed from the auto-generated string to something easier for the buyer to recognize, like the company name.
How To Export And Email Voucher Codes As A CSV
Once the codes exist, export them straight from the voucher. LifterLMS offers two export options: a vouchers-only export that lists each code, its uses, and its remaining uses, and a redeemed-codes export that lists student emails, redemption dates, and which code they used.
Either export can also be emailed directly to one or more addresses separated by commas. That makes it easy to send a buyer their full list of codes right after they pay, and a follow-up report a month later showing who has activated so far.
What A Student Sees After Redeeming A Voucher
From the student’s side, redemption is close to instant. A logged-in student with no courses enters a voucher code, sees a confirmation that the voucher redeemed successfully, and their dashboard immediately shows every course or membership tied to that voucher.
A brand-new student who registers and enters a voucher code in the same step gets the same result. As soon as their account is created, their new courses appear on their dashboard at zero percent complete, ready to start.
Tracking Who Redeemed A Voucher And When
Every redemption gets tracked against the voucher. Refresh the voucher in the admin and the redemption count updates immediately, and the redeemed-codes CSV export shows exactly when each person activated their code. That record is what makes the per-employee unique-code approach useful for compliance-driven training, where a company needs proof of who completed activation and when.
How Vouchers Differ From The Coupon And Checkout Experience
The coupon system is a different tool for a different job. Coupons apply inside the LifterLMS checkout, discounting a dollar amount or a percentage off a one-time payment, a recurring payment, or a trial period, and a student still goes through the full e-commerce flow to redeem one.
A voucher skips checkout entirely because the buyer has typically already paid outside the system, through an invoice, a card reader at a conference, or a package deal sold separately. There is a time and a place for each: coupons for individual e-commerce sales, vouchers for access that was already paid for another way.
Can Checkout Connect Directly To Voucher Issuing
Two attendees asked essentially the same question: can LifterLMS connect checkout directly to voucher issuing, so a customer who buys a five-seat bundle gets their voucher codes emailed automatically. As of this recording, that pipeline is not built in.
The closest available workaround uses the LifterLMS WooCommerce integration. Set up a bundle product in WooCommerce with quantity-based or volume pricing, and when an order comes in, manually generate and send the voucher codes once you see the order. It is not fully automated, but it is a workable way to sell small bundles today while an automatic checkout-to-voucher connection stays on the list of frequently requested features.
One attendee also asked about giving a designated group leader visibility into their team’s progress after a bundle sale. That kind of reporting layer does not exist as a built-in role. Today, only the site administrator can see enrollment data and progress across users, so a group leader’s report would need to be run and shared manually by the site owner.
Using A Voucher To Privately Beta Test A Course Before Launch
Attendee: My team has a course ready that we would like a small group of students to go through and give us feedback on before we make it public. What is the best way to give ten people access without opening the course to everyone else?
Chris Badgett: There are three options: a 100 percent off coupon, a voucher code, or manually adding the students to the course yourself. With a group of only ten people, any of the three works, but a voucher is usually the simplest.
The course still needs to be published for anyone to get in, so keep it out of your public course catalog while it is in private beta. Build a dedicated page that links directly to that one course, and hand your testers a voucher code to redeem there. The [lifterlms_courses] shortcode also accepts an id attribute, which lets you display only specific courses on a catalog page, so once you are ready to launch you can decide exactly when that course becomes publicly visible.
Can A Voucher Provide Access To A Free Community Tier
Attendee: Can a voucher work almost like a CRM signup, where redeeming one voucher gets someone into an introductory community without giving them access to premium content?
Chris Badgett: Yes. Create a basic, free membership level and lock content like your blog posts or a members-only resources page behind it, then hand out a voucher that activates that membership. The voucher gets someone through the wall into the free tier, and a separate paid membership or course can sit alongside it for anyone who wants to upgrade.
You do not have to build the entire experience before opening that door either. LifterLMS lesson content can be dripped out over time, so it is fine to publish only the framework of what is coming, open access early, and keep adding lessons as you finish them.
