How to Sell Certificates for WordPress eLearning Courses

Certificates are a great way of showcasing accomplishments. In the WordPress world, virtually every LMS plugin offers easy ways to create and award certificates. The idea is pretty simple – whenever a user completes a course or a quiz, you can award a certificate to the user.

This is enough for many eLearning sites. Users take a free or paid course and completion of that course unlocks a certificate. If the course is paid, the purchase price includes the certificate.

On the other hand, there are many educational institutions that offer a different model. They’ll make the courses available for free or at least cost. Then they’ll charge the user extra if they want a certificate.

If you’re looking for a way to use the above business model for your eLearning site, then you’re in the right place. In this tutorial, we’ll show the step-by-step process of how you can easily sell certificates for WordPress eLearning courses. Let’s dive in.

How to Sell Certificates for Your Course (Step by Step)

We’ll be using Uncanny Automator and LearnDash to show how you can easily sell certificates for your courses in WordPress. The process involves 4 simple steps:

1. Create a certificate in LearnDash
2. Set up a product in WooCoomerce to sell the certificate
3. Add the product link to the Course page and make the link available on course completion
4. Create an Uncanny Automator recipe to send the certificate to only those who have completed the course and purchased the certificate product

For those who are unaware, Uncanny Automator is a no-code automation plugin for WordPress. With it, you can connect WordPress plugins, WordPress sites, and third-party web apps to automate repetitive tasks.

Without further ado, let’s get started with the tutorial.

Step 1: Create a LearnDash Certificate

The first step is to create a certificate in LearnDash. Head over to LearnDash LMS -> Certificates from the left sidebar of your WordPress dashboard. Next, you need to click on the Add New button to create a new certificate.

Now, you need to design the certificate as per your requirements. You can check out this article on how to create a certificate in LearnDash if you need any help. Once you’re done, you should publish the certificate.

Note that you should not link this certificate to your course in LearnDash. The only way to get the certificate should be after purchasing it.

Step 2: Set Up the Certificate Product

It’s time to set up our certificate product on WooCommerce. Users will have to buy this product to get access to the course certificate.

To get started, you need to go to Products -> Add New from the left sidebar of your admin panel. On the Add new product page, you should add a product name for future reference.

Next, you should select Virtual in the Product Data box. You should also set a regular price that you want to charge from your students.

Now, we want the product to be accessed on course completion only. So you need to set the Catalog visibility to Hidden. This way, the product will be hidden from the shop page and search results.

Step 3: Add the Certificate Product to the Course Page

The next step is to add the certificate product link to the course page or any other page where users can buy the certificate from.

However, we want the user to get access to the certificate purchase link on course completion only. So you can use the [course_complete] shortcode, along with parameters like course_id, for this purpose. Then, inside that shortcode, you can put a purchase link as follows:

[course_complete course_id=XXX]<a href=”https://example.com/cart?add-to-cart=YYY&quantity=1″>Buy ABC Certificate</a>[/course_complete]

Just replace XXX with the LearnDash course ID, YYY with the WooCommerce product ID, and example.com with the link to your website in the above code. You should also change the “Buy ABC Certificate” text with your own CTA (call to action) text.

Basically, when you add the code to the course page, the user will only see the purchase link on course completion. Also, clicking on that link will take them to the cart page directly. You can learn more on WooCommerce custom links here.

Step 4: Send Course Certificate to the User Automatically

The last step is pretty simple. Here we’ll be creating an Uncanny Automator recipe to send the certificate to anyone who has completed the course and purchased the certificate product.

To get started, you need to head over to Automator -> Add new from the left sidebar of your admin panel. Next, you need to choose Logged-in users as the recipe type and click on Confirm.

Let’s also name our recipe Selling ABC Certificate for future reference.

Set Up the Triggers

Here we’ll be setting up the following triggers for our recipe:

• A user completes a course via LearnDash
• The user purchases the certificate product in WooCommerce

Let’s start with the LearnDash trigger. Go ahead to select LearnDash under Select an integration:

Next, you need to select “A user completes a course” from the list of trigger options.

Uncanny Automator will come up with the Course dropdown field now. Here you should select the specific course from the dropdown. Then click on Save to make your trigger live.

To add a new trigger, you need to click on the Add another trigger button. Then, you need to select WooCommerce for our second trigger.

You’ll now see a list of options. Here you need to select “A user completes, pays for, lands on a thank you page for an order with a product”:

Next, you should select pays for from the Trigger condition dropdown. Then, click on Save to continue.

Finally, you need to select our certificate product from the Product dropdown. Once done, you need to click on Save to make the second trigger live.

Configure the Action

It’s time to set up the action for our recipe. To do that, first, you need to click on the Add action button. Next, you need to select LearnDash from the list of available integrations.

This will open up a list of options to choose from. Here you need to select Send a certificate to proceed. (Note that this option is only available for Uncanny Automator Pro users)

Uncanny Automator will come up with a number of fields now. Let’s configure the important ones here.

First, you need to select the course certificate from the Certificate dropdown:

In the To field, you need to add the email address of the student. So click on the Asterisk icon and add the Billing email token to that field. (Tokens are variables that can retrieve data from the WordPress database.) You can keep the From field as it is.

Next, you can add static text, dynamic tokens, or both to the Subject field. For example, you can add the User first name token along with static text like here is your certificate.

Similarly, you can add tokens like User first name and Course title to the Email body field (along with some static text):

Finally, you need to click on Save to make the action live.

Publish Your Recipe

The final step is to make the recipe live. To do that, you need to change the toggle option, present in the Recipe box, from Draft to Live.

That’s it! From now on, whenever someone completes the course and purchases the certificate, Uncanny Automator will automatically send the certificate to that person.

Endnote

Uncanny Automator makes it really easy to sell certificates for WordPress eLearning courses. You can create a recipe to connect LearnDash and WooCoomerce to get the job done.

However, this was just a starting point. You can do much more with the above recipe by adding multiple triggers and actions.

For example, you can share the accomplishment of your students on Twitter and Facebook. You can also award credits to the students for their achievements. You can even get a notification on Slack when someone completes the course and purchases the certificate.

If you’ve any questions, please feel free to comment below! Also, don’t forget to share this article with your friends and followers.