When using E-Commerce to sell Courses in your Portal, the Catalog is among the most effective methods to direct existing Users to new content. What about external Users, or potential customers who don't yet have an account in your Portal? This article focuses on configuring your E-Commerce configuration so that you can sell Course Content outside of your Portal.
Public Purchase
Public Purchase is an essential toggle that determines if a Course will appear on the Public Dashboard or not. If a Course is not on a Public Dashboard, external Users (without an account, or not currently logged in) will not be able to locate or purchase the Course directly. When configuring a Course, under the Enable E-Commerce toggle is the Allow Public Purchase toggle.
The Allow Public Purchase toggle, once enabled, will allow a User from outside of your Portal to discover, and purchase it from the Public Dashboard. Through the process of purchasing their Course, they will be able to make an account and enroll into the Course. The Allow Public Purchase is not the only change that must be made however. The Self Enrollment Rules of the Course must be set to All Learners.
With the Allow Public Purchase toggle enabled, and Allow Self Enrollment set to All Learners. The next step is to make sure that the Course can be discovered. There are multiple different methods of doing this, as suggested by the following:
- Direct external clients to your Public Dashboard where a Catalog is clearly displayed and contains Courses configured for Public Purchase.
- Utilize Deep-Links in an existing website or online community to direct traffic to specific Courses you are selling.
- Sell Courses in person, or online and handle the transaction personally. Once the transaction has cleared, manually or through the use of an integration create a User account for the customer and provide to their an Enrollment into the Course directly, or an Enrollment Key to access the Course.
Integration Options
In addition to, or instead of using our E-Commerce feature it is possible to handle the sale of Courses outside of the LMS and then manage Enrollments into content after. An example may be a custom integration that adheres to this order of operations:
- A Course is sold in-person at a conference.
- This example will use an in-person sale, but the concept is the same across methods.
- Details from the sale are taken such as Course purchased, Email Address, First/Last Name and more.
- The details are fed into a custom application. The application performs the following tasks:
- Use Absorb's Integration API to generate an Enrollment Key for the Course purchased.
- Send the Enrollment Key details to the Email Address of the provided User.
- The User receives their Enrollment Key details and creates an Account in your Portal.
- The User is enrolled via the Enrollment Key into their purchased Course.
The above represents but one potential solution using our Integration API. It is also possible to advertise and handle Course sales on a website you design and then use the Integration API to fulfill the Course Enrollment in your Portal.
Enrollment Key Options
Enrollment Keys are an excellent method of providing access to a Course to a User that may not yet exist in your Portal. By distributing the Enrollment Key instructions to an external client they will be guided through the process of creating an account in your Portal and accessing the intended Course Content.
When utilizing an Enrollment Key for Instructor Led Courses remember that an Enrollment Key will increase the Max Class Size at the time of redemption so the Enrollment Key User is always granted a place in their requested Session. Keep in mind the existing class size, and the number of Enrollment Keys distributed so that your Instructors aren't unintentionally overwhelmed with students.
More Information
Additional articles related to configuring E-Commerce are attached below:
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