How to Pick the Right eCommerce Engine & Payment Gateways for Your Course

---

Choosing The Right eCommerce Engine And Payment Gateways For Your Course

This webinar walks through how to pick an eCommerce engine and payment gateway for an online course: what a LifterLMS access plan can do, when the built-in checkout is enough versus when to add WooCommerce, how a Stripe or PayPal checkout compares, and how vouchers and third-party connectors let you sell from a completely different platform and still enroll students automatically.

What You’ll Learn

• The full range of pricing and access models LifterLMS access plans can create, from one-time payments to member-only pricing and enrollment windows.
• When the built-in LifterLMS checkout is enough, and when adding WooCommerce actually solves a real problem like tax handling or payment gateway coverage.
• How the LifterLMS voucher system and third-party connectors let you sell through ClickFunnels, Infusionsoft, or a corporate deal and still enroll students automatically.
• What a Stripe checkout inside LifterLMS actually looks like, and what shipped recently in the LifterLMS Stripe add-on.

Key Takeaways

• Get your course content and community in place before you go shopping for eCommerce tools. Course creators who wait until the content is ready make faster, clearer tool decisions.
• Offer credit card as your primary checkout option and add PayPal as a second option, rather than trying to cover every possible payment method.
• Only add WooCommerce when you need something the native LifterLMS checkout does not provide, like a payment gateway in an unsupported country or a dedicated VAT tax engine.
• Reach for the voucher system before custom development when you hit an unusual sales situation. A manual process you can run today beats an automation you have to build first.

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Why LifterLMS Gives Away A Free Manual Payment Gateway

Our mission at LifterLMS is to democratize education in the digital classroom. What that means in practice is giving people a teaching tool that is accessible, powerful, and integrated: the technology and systems you need to create, sell, and protect online courses, available at a global scale.

Even the free version of the plugin includes the manual payment gateway, which means someone can launch a course, get it validated, and start generating income before spending a single dollar beyond web hosting and a domain name. Not every course needs to be sold on the open market either. Some are for internal use, or a teacher is just using LifterLMS in the classroom with no sales involved at all. But when you do want to create and sell courses and memberships, that’s where the eCommerce side of LifterLMS comes in.

Get Your Course And Community Ready Before You Shop For Tools

The biggest mistake we see people make is getting into the technology piece, including the eCommerce piece, before they have a community built up or their content created. It’s a lot easier to go shopping for LMS and eCommerce software once you already have at least 80% of your course built and a community you can launch to.

I see a lot of obsession over tools before there’s any course together at all. Getting your eCommerce dialed in should really be one of the last steps in your project, not one of the first.

The Access Plan Pricing Models You Can Build With LifterLMS

Part of getting organized before you come to the technology is getting dialed in on your pricing model, and this is another area where I see a lot of over-complication. LifterLMS has a powerful access plan engine that can create just about any pricing model you can think of. In most cases I recommend keeping your pricing simple. It’s okay to have one, two, or three options, but once you get into six or seven different options it can be confusing. It might make sense in your head, but a visitor landing on the page might just find it overwhelming.

A few of the pricing models you can build with an access plan: a one-time payment, which is simple and straightforward. A flat recurring payment, like $30 a month, for a lifetime, 60 days, six months, or whatever length you want. And a payment plan, which usually pairs with a one-time option: a recurring payment that totals more than the single payment price, but gives people another way to afford the course or membership in steps.

Free, Member-Only, And Trial Pricing Options To Consider

Beyond the basic payment structures, there’s free with membership, where a course is included at no extra cost once someone joins a membership level. There’s members-only pricing, where you have to join a club or membership level first, and then either get access to a course or get it at a discounted price because you’re a member.

There’s also a dollar trial, letting someone try a course or membership for a dollar for a week. That’s a great option in some cases, especially if you’re new and need to build trust, while still filtering for people willing to spend some money. And there’s a straightforward free trial, which is a good way to give people a taste when you’re just getting started.

Sign-Up Fees, Sale Pricing, And Keeping Your Pricing Simple

Another model is a sign-up fee plus recurring pricing: a bigger payment up front, like $100, followed by a smaller ongoing monthly payment, like $30 a month afterward. This is common when the first part of your training platform is time-intensive for the instructor and then becomes more automated over time, so it’s a way to manage cash flow. You can also do launch or special-occasion sale pricing, and of course a free course, since not everything needs to cost money.

Whichever models you land on, I don’t recommend getting too complicated. If you’re doing anything beyond a simple payment plan, especially a lifetime one, the most important question is whether there’s ongoing recurring value behind it. If you’re charging recurring income, you need to be providing recurring value, and that can be as simple as a monthly webinar or some kind of regular office hours where people can get help.

Lifetime Access, Limited-Time Access, And Enrollment Windows

In addition to pricing, there are access models to think about. There’s lifetime access, which we mentioned already. There’s also limited-time access with an expiration. Lifetime access sounds good and can help a sale, but think about your own life: even a book you own forever, do you actually go back and reference it? Some do, some don’t. A limited-time access window can also help encourage students to actually get through the program while they still have access, especially if there’s a live component and you’re moving cohorts through the course together.

You can set a special access window too, where a course has a specific start date and a specific end date, building on that cohort idea. And LifterLMS also supports a special enrollment window, an ability-to-buy window separate from the course dates themselves. This connects to piloting and pre-selling a course before you disappear into building it.

Piloting Your Course Before You Disappear Into The Creative Cave

Before you lock yourself away and spend weeks, months, or years creating a course, it’s worth making sure there’s real demand out there and that you can get some students in as quickly as possible. That gives you validated learning: you can see how people respond to your early lessons and adjust your curriculum or structure on the fly, instead of spending all that time in what I call the creative cave and hoping that if you build it, they will come.

There’s a great book called The Lean Startup that I highly recommend on this. It talks a lot about working in small batch sizes, launching early and often, and valuing that feedback loop.

Inside A Real LifterLMS Checkout Powered By Stripe

Here’s what a simple access plan actually looks like on a real course. This is a paid course with a classic one-time pricing setup: a one-time payment, a payment plan, and free access if someone becomes a member instead. (In my demo examples, I sometimes joke about a “million dollar coaching” upsell membership tier, just to illustrate that a course can have a higher-touch upsell sitting above it. It’s a demonstration, not a real product.)

Clicking Buy Now opens the LifterLMS checkout screen. Part of that checkout experience is creating a new user account right there on the page, and the form includes a coupon code field alongside the credit card fields. On this particular site, the credit card processing is powered by the LifterLMS Stripe add-on: someone enters their card, Stripe processes the charge and deposits the funds, and the checkout creates the user’s access to the course all in one step.

How Do You Want To Get Paid, Credit Card Or PayPal

Once you’re past the pricing and access-model questions, the next thing to figure out, and try not to over-complicate, is how you want to get paid. Do you want people to pay by credit card like the checkout we just looked at? Do you want to offer PayPal? Do you need a payment gateway that LifterLMS doesn’t offer directly, because Stripe doesn’t work in every country and some people don’t want to use PayPal?

There’s also the free manual payment gateway that ships with LifterLMS core. Someone can go through the checkout process, and instead of immediate automated access, you follow up manually: an invoice through a service like FreshBooks, PayPal’s own invoicing feature, a check in the mail, a wire transfer, even cash. It’s a powerful option, especially early on, because it lets you validate that there’s a real market for your course before you invest in eCommerce tooling at all.

Why Offering Both Credit Card And PayPal Checkout Works

You don’t need to offer every payment method under the sun, but it’s worth offering a couple. Some people are comfortable with credit card. Others don’t trust or don’t know PayPal, or the reverse: they prefer PayPal and don’t want to hand over a card number. If I could pick just one option, I’d choose credit card, the way we just looked at with the LifterLMS Stripe add-on. If I were adding a second option, it would be PayPal.

In my own experience, in a predominantly United States market, when a checkout offers both, roughly 60 to 70 percent of buyers choose credit card and the remaining 30 to 40 percent choose PayPal. That’s from watching real sites, not a published study, but it’s consistent enough that offering both options and giving buyers a little flexibility tends to be worth it.

The eCommerce Equation, Transaction Plus Access Management

Here’s a simple way to think about what eCommerce actually is: eCommerce equals transaction plus access management. There’s an exchange of money, and then access is granted. It sounds simple, but there’s a lot of nuance packed into both halves.

The transaction side is a product for sale (in our case, an online course or membership), a checkout flow, and a payment gateway to move the money from buyer to seller. The access side is everything that happens after the money moves: what type of access does the buyer get, how long does it last, and what happens if a recurring payment fails. That second half is exactly what LifterLMS access plans are built to handle.

Why You Might Skip WooCommerce And Keep Checkout Native To LifterLMS

A question that comes up constantly: to Woo or not to Woo. WooCommerce is a popular, free WordPress eCommerce plugin with its own paid add-ons, and there’s a lot of confusion around whether you need it alongside LifterLMS.

If I were building a site today, I would not use WooCommerce. I’d use the native LifterLMS access plans, because switching to WooCommerce trades those away for WooCommerce’s own add-to-cart buttons and its own recurring payment system. WooCommerce brings real strengths of its own, but that’s the trade-off you’re making by adding it.

Why You Might Add WooCommerce For Broader Payment Gateway Coverage

The reason we built the LifterLMS WooCommerce integration in the first place is to tap into WooCommerce’s much larger ecosystem. Some payment gateways only exist as WooCommerce extensions, and some countries aren’t supported by Stripe at all but do have a WooCommerce-compatible gateway. WooCommerce also has a very large extension catalog, with pages upon pages of different payment gateways, including ones built for specific countries you may never have heard of, because that’s simply what people use to get paid there.

WooCommerce was acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress itself, and it has grown rapidly since. If your buyers need a gateway that isn’t Stripe or PayPal, WooCommerce’s ecosystem is usually where you’ll find it.

Handling VAT And More Complex Tax Requirements With WooCommerce

Another reason people move to WooCommerce is tax handling. A lot of course creators dealing with customers in Europe run into VAT, value-added tax, and need a more complete tax engine than LifterLMS’s core checkout provides on its own. WooCommerce’s ecosystem includes more complex tax plugins built for exactly that kind of requirement, which is one of the real reasons to add it rather than just a nice-to-have.

How LifterLMS Reacts When A WooCommerce Subscription Payment Fails

If you want recurring payments through WooCommerce, that comes from a separate WooCommerce Subscriptions add-on. LifterLMS is aware of the state of a WooCommerce subscription: if a recurring payment fails in WooCommerce or WooCommerce Subscriptions, LifterLMS can automatically remove that student from the course. That status awareness is built into the LifterLMS WooCommerce integration itself, not something you have to wire up separately.

Running Courses As One Product In A Larger WooCommerce Store

There’s another reason to use WooCommerce that has nothing to do with payment gateways: your courses aren’t your main business, they’re just another product in a larger catalog. If you’re already running a store and selling all kinds of things, it makes sense to let WooCommerce be the engine for everything, with LifterLMS handling course access on top of it.

Sometimes it makes more sense to split things up instead: run your main store and catalog on one website with WooCommerce, and run a separate school website with LifterLMS’s own tools. Either approach can work. It comes down to what you actually need and what your business objectives are.

Selling Through Enterprise Deals And Distributing Access With Vouchers

Sometimes you’re selling to something else entirely: a corporation or a large business buying seats in bulk. If you’re trying to sell a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand seats into a course for a big company, that’s usually an enterprise sales cycle, closed with a check or a wire transfer rather than someone landing on your site and clicking Buy Now.

Once that deal is closed and you’ve been paid however that happens, you can use the LifterLMS voucher system to generate a batch of activation codes and hand them out to the buyer’s employees for all the seats they purchased.

Automating Voucher Delivery With Marketing Automation Tools

If you want to automate that voucher hand-off, it’s possible with some custom development. For example, if you’re using a marketing automation tool like Infusionsoft as your eCommerce engine, a follow-up sequence can be built to automatically merge in a specific voucher code generated from a sale, and deliver it to the customer by email with a link to register.

Tagging Students Into Courses With WP Fusion And Similar Tools

There’s another way to build a more complex eCommerce system using a tool like WP Fusion. If you’re using ActiveCampaign, Infusionsoft, Ontraport, or Drip, you can apply a tag inside that marketing tool, and the connection WP Fusion makes will activate the corresponding user in a course on your LifterLMS site. I’d still recommend keeping things simple where you can and figuring out the minimum effective eCommerce solution for your situation before reaching for something this custom.

An Open Invitation For Developers To Build New eCommerce Integrations

LifterLMS’s primary focus as a company is the learning management side: the course experience, engagement, and solving the problem of people buying courses they never finish. eCommerce is important, but it isn’t where our attention is centered, and because LifterLMS is free and open source, that leaves real room for other developers and entrepreneurs to build integrations we haven’t built ourselves.

A few examples people ask for regularly: a ThriveCart integration, an Easy Digital Downloads integration (a WooCommerce alternative made by the same company behind AffiliateWP, which already integrates with LifterLMS), and a SamCart integration. There are also payment gateways specific to individual countries, like ones used in Kenya, that nobody has built a LifterLMS connector for yet. If you want to build an integration for yourself or turn it into a product, that’s exactly the kind of thing the open-source nature of LifterLMS and the WordPress community make possible.

Why Learning Templates Built A Direct Stripe To LifterLMS Connector

Patrick: I was a contract programmer for twelve years and got tired of trading time for money, so building online courses to share what I knew just made sense. I looked at a lot of platforms. Most were expensive with features I didn’t need, and LifterLMS was the right size and the right price. Once I started asking questions, the support I got was honestly amazing, and I mean that.

I got up and running fast. I already had a Stripe account, a small mailing list, and I got people into my courses quickly. After a few weeks, like everyone, I needed to start marketing more seriously, and that’s when I found ClickFunnels. It can feel like it does everything at once, but it worked really well for me, and I needed a way to connect it to LifterLMS. I thought hard about it, and it comes down to exactly what you said: a transaction happens, and then there’s some kind of access control. Really you just need a database entry once somebody pays. So when something happens on Stripe, our plugin gets notified, creates a new user, and gives them access to whatever membership or course they purchased. It’s a simple idea, but it solved a real need I had myself, so we put it out there for other people too.

Pairing LifterLMS With ClickFunnels For Marketing While Keeping LMS Control

Patrick: There’s a version of the plugin built specifically for how ClickFunnels formats its Stripe data, since ClickFunnels handles Stripe in its own particular way. ClickFunnels is a competitor to LifterLMS in the sense that you could technically run a membership site on it, but it isn’t a learning management system. That’s exactly why I chose this setup: LifterLMS is a real LMS, with quizzes, certificates, and everything an LMS should have, and I stay in control of my content because it’s built on WordPress. ClickFunnels does marketing really well, but I didn’t want my course content living inside it. So LifterLMS handles the LMS side, and ClickFunnels handles marketing. That’s what works for me.

Where The Stripe Transaction Actually Happens In A ClickFunnels Funnel

Patrick: The Stripe transaction happens right on ClickFunnels. You build a page, add a product, and connect that product to Stripe. You can have a whole marketing funnel leading up to that sales page, but the actual charge is the last step, and it’s entirely hosted on ClickFunnels. Stripe is everywhere: LifterLMS has it, WooCommerce has it, ClickFunnels has it. As long as you can get to Stripe, you can use either this connector or the direct Stripe-to-LifterLMS plugin to bridge a sale made anywhere back into enrollment on your LifterLMS site.

Designing The Student Experience Before You Chase Conversion Metrics

Bradley: With the Great eCourse Adventure, our main focus is building learning experiences that genuinely surprise people. We design the student experience first, figure out the most basic tech we need to support it, and let it scale from there. The Courses Worth Sharing site actually started as an outline for an ebook, and we realized we don’t read ebooks ourselves, so why would we make one for other people. Instead we built an interactive website: trail signs to click on, content reveals, and a few points where you choose your own path through it. It took about a month to build once the articles were written, and it’s completely free with no opt-in at all.

What The Courses Worth Sharing Site Teaches About Engagement

Bradley: Everything we’re building, including a master class with an outer-space adventure theme, comes from wanting to make something we’d consider a work of art, something we’d be excited to go through ourselves as a student. There are so many brilliant teachers out there with real wisdom to share, but the way it’s delivered often doesn’t match how people actually consume media today. A fourteen-module course built out of sixty-minute PowerPoint presentations made sense when e-learning first started. It doesn’t match how distracted and impatient people are now, and I think that mismatch is a big part of why completion rates are so low: course creators aren’t getting creative enough about keeping people engaged.

Why A Small List Of True Fans Can Outperform Chasing Sign-Up Rates

Bradley: I got into e-learning by teaching hundreds of in-person meditation workshops, then decided to put that work online so I could go from two hundred workshops a year to about half a dozen. In my first couple of years I wasn’t technical at all. I built my first courses myself with nothing more than a PayPal button, and I still sold to people in more than twenty-five countries, because people were coming for the content, not for a polished checkout.

I think there needs to be a flip in the industry, where people get obsessed with creating the ultimate student experience instead of obsessing over conversion rates, click rates, and sign-up rates. We may not have a huge email list, but we have a loyal one full of people who love what we create, and that matters more. There’s a well-known idea about a thousand true fans: if you focus on serving those thousand people well, you can support the business you actually want.

Chris Badgett: eCommerce is an important piece, and there’s nothing wrong with working to improve conversions and the buying experience. But at the end of the day, the people we’re really serving are the students learning from you, not the metrics on a dashboard. eCommerce is often just one step on that journey. There’s so much more that goes into building the actual experience around it.

New In The LifterLMS Stripe Add-On, One-Click Refunds

Before we move into questions, one quick eCommerce update: the LifterLMS Stripe add-on just shipped a new release with one-click refunds. It’s a small feature, but a genuinely useful one. Refunds are part of running any eCommerce business, and before this you had to log into your Stripe account, cancel the recurring payment or issue the refund there, and then go back into LifterLMS to mark the order as refunded. Now that whole flow happens with one click, right from the Orders tab in your LifterLMS admin.

Avoid Building An eCommerce Frankenstein, The Closing Recap

If I had to sum up everything in this webinar in one line, it would be this: avoid building an eCommerce Frankenstein, a setup with too many pieces stitched together because you kept adding one more tool without stepping back. Explore the pricing models and the tools that are actually available to you. Some course creators want more advanced marketing, others want to keep everything as simple as possible, and either one is fine. What usually happens is things get a little messy as you experiment, and then you come back around and simplify.

Whatever you land on, don’t lose touch with your end user. When a student reaches the point of buying your course, make that experience as easy, understandable, and intuitive as you can. Pick the tools that do the job the way you want it done from the start, so you don’t waste time or money working around the wrong ones later.