6 Best Payment Gateway Plugins for Moodle

Hey, Moodler!

Are you struggling to sell your Moodle courses due to payment gateway constraints? We’re here to help you! Read on.

Payment Restrictions in Moodle

While reading through some threads in Moodle forums, we came across a Moodler that talked about how PayPal and Stripe weren’t supported for online transactions in his country 🙁

If you are facing a similar issue or the question about the Moodle payment gateway plugins is giving you a hard time, this article will help you explore the best possible options.

Don’t worry if certain suggested payment gateway plugins don’t work in your favor or your country, we have fixed that problem too.

Before we proceed, here’s a tip for you to keep in mind. When it comes to payments, it is always better to provide multiple options to your students. Apart from convenience, another benefit is that you won’t be losing out on potential customers in the eLearning community. 

So, it’s advisable to have as many payment options as possible, be it net banking, credit card, debit card, e-wallets, bank transfers, gift cards, etc. 

Now, for starters let’s talk about the leading payment gateways for Moodle. These standalone payment gateways intend to fulfill your basic payment processing requirements. 

Best Moodle Payment Gateway Plugins

#1 PayPal

PayPal is the world’s most popular and preferred payment gateway available for transactions in most countries. Moodle does not provide a direct course selling option or a built-in payment gateway system to facilitate the selling/marketing of courses. But Moodle does offer integration for PayPal. You can easily sell your Moodle courses on WordPress by setting up PayPal. 

With the PayPal Availability Condition Plugin, you can assign prices within specific course sections and configure the cost and associated currency of course enrollments. The conversion rates are automatically calculated and applied by PayPal. An individual Moodle course cost can be set to zero or you can even allocate a default cost across your Moodle site. Once the enrollment method is set and activated as PayPal, your students will be able to buy your Moodle courses directly via PayPal. In order to use PayPal in Moodle, make sure you have a PayPal account first. 

REMEMBER: In general, PayPal enrollment involves manual enrolling of students. Students can end up having free access to your courses if they are automatically enrolled via self-registration or email-based registration in Moodle. So, make sure to use the Enrollment key option to control access to your free or paid Moodle courses. Moreover, PayPal is fully compatible with other enrollment methods such as SSO, third-party login, etc.

PRO TIP: You can even accept payments through WordPress and link it to Moodle for enrolments with the Edwiser Bridge plugin. This plugin enables you to integrate Moodle and WordPress for simplified course selling and payment management via PayPal.

What if PayPal is not supported in your country? No worries! You can easily extend Edwiser Bridge to support approximately 160+ payment gateways. 

#2 Stripe

Stripe is the next favorite payment gateway of several Moodlers. 

It works the same as PayPal but it offers Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) for additional security for selling your Moodle courses. Thanks to SCA, Stripe definitely has an upper hand over PayPal. It’s not just about SCA, Stripe always ensures that the credit card information is never stored on your server. This makes Stripe a really credible payment processor for your Moodle courses.

With Stripe, your servers are at minimum risk as they are no longer dabbling with sensitive credit card data. You can also effectively regulate offers and price discounts on your Moodle courses with this plugin. The configuration remains the same as PayPal wherein you set Stripe as the enrollment method.

From the point of view of data migration of sensitive payment data, Stripe can be a great option. In case you want to switch to another payment gateway, Stripe is flexible enough to help you securely transfer all the confidential credit card details to your new choice of payment gateway.

#3 Authorize.net

Authorize.net  is another commonly used payment gateway for Moodle and offers several features unsupported by Paypal. It has reliable security and anti-fraud features making it a credible plugin for international transactions. 

They provide a ton of free add-on features, including fraud prevention filters, a simple checkout system, subscription or recurring billing and customer information storage for shipping addresses and payment info so your customers won’t have to reenter it every time. It also provides e-Check processing for an additional charge. It offers several additional features that make it more than just a way to accept credit cards over the internet.

Authorize.Net is available to merchants in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia.

Depending on your e-Learning business, if you want to go beyond payments or the regular course selling and have granular control over the entire process, it is recommended that you invest in a holistic e-commerce platform. 

Here are some of your go-to solutions:

Advanced Ecommerce payment solutions

#1 WooCommerce

 WooCommerce is a hugely popular free WordPress-based e-commerce plugin and has serious e-commerce capabilities. WooCommerce supports a wide range of payment gateways – you name it, it has it. And you use these payment gateways right out of the box. WooCommerce has readily available plugins that can save you development effort and expense. These plugins can fulfill all your e-commerce needs and even automate complex e-commerce tasks. You can easily expand your selling potential with WooCommerce. It gives you immense flexibility to sell physical goods such as Books, Course Reference Material (like PDFs or Docs), DVDs, and so on, along with your Moodle Courses. 

It’s not just limited to the management of the two dynamic platforms. This integration even allows you to sell courses the way you want on WordPress (as course bundles, subscriptions, memberships or variable products), process easy payments and refunds, control pricing plans, discounts, coupons and offers, manage huge amounts of user data, provide multiple payment options, have advanced order and revenue reporting, manage users and orders, handle the marketing of courses through cross-selling and upselling and much more. You can always easily extend the basic functionality to automate more e-commerce activities with the help of various add-ons from the plugin ecosystem.

Apart from digital products and virtual courses, WooCommerce supports selling a wide range of products (digital, variable, grouped, bookable, composite, and more – via extensions) to help you sell any type of product available. 

PRO TIP: Since WooCommerce is a WordPress-based e-commerce plugin, needless to say, you’ll have to go through the pain of maintaining two entirely different systems – Moodle and WordPress. But we have fixed this problem.

This is when Edwiser Bridge comes to your rescue. Connecting your Moodle with WordPress to sell courses via PayPal is the easiest way to go about the course selling process. And Edwiser Bridge is the simplest Moodle WordPress integration solution. You can easily integrate WooCommerce with Moodle via Edwiser Bridge using the Edwiser Bridge PRO

Edwiser Bridge is 100% compatible with WooCommerce and enables seamless integration of Moodle with WordPress. The integration has the ability to automate a variety of complex e-commerce tasks for you such as bulk selling of course copies, bulk enrollments on course purchases, single sign-on, synchronizing Moodle users, courses, and course categories with WordPress, etc. 

#2 Course Merchant

Course Merchant is a decent e-commerce platform that is built to specifically integrate with a wide range of LMSs including Moodle. The platform allows the sale of online as well as offline courses, and shippable products. The best part about Course Merchant is its detailed documentation and a lot of video tutorials that help you get through technical difficulties in case you’re stuck while setting it up or while using the platform.

You can instantly enroll students into your Moodle LMS with the single sign-on functionality. Apart from, great control over course enrollment, it offers a multi-seat selection for offline courses, enrolment to multiple courses at once, delayed enrollment on course purchase, etc. The waiting list feature even lets you set seat limitations on courses and enable a waiting list when they are full.

Unlike WooCommerce, it’s a premium solution with a private API. Therefore, the complete setup and customization come at a cost. If you’re looking to build a premium online store of your Moodle courses and don’t mind spending a few extra bucks, you could opt for this platform. 

#3 2Checkout

2Checkout is a third-party payment module that easily integrates with Moodle. It is a great payment solution for e-commerce merchants. Availability of 2Checkout in most countries gives this plugin an edge over regular payment gateways. 2Checkout offers much more than a basic payment gateway such as recurring billing and an online store builder. It facilitates transactions in over 200 countries and supports around 100 currencies along with multiple languages.

Another good feature is the advanced fraud protection for an added layer of security. They have a 3-tier dynamic fraud detection system for catching fraud in real-time. This way, the fraudulent activity is tracked and highlighted way before it happens. It can seamlessly integrate with over 100 shopping carts. Some of the integrations include Shopify, Bigcommerce, and WooCommerce. It also supports several other integrations for booking and other e-commerce needs.

Last but not least, here’s a little tip to ace your e-commerce venture. 

Going all out

If you’re on the lookout for a full-fledged e-commerce solution that takes care of all your e-Learning needs in Moodle from setup to customization to management to automated e-commerce, the Edwiser Bridge PRO is an ideal pick. It lets you easily manage multiple WordPress sites connected to a single Moodle site.

With this, you can even distribute your Moodle courses on multiple WordPress sites. Not to forget the plethora of powerful integrations and extensions it supports. 

You get the benefits of WordPress, Moodle, and WooCommerce all packaged in a single wholesome e-commerce plugin with support for almost 160+ payment gateways. Great isn’t it! Simply put, it opens a pandora’s box of interesting revenue-driving possibilities. 

But first things first! You need to figure out your business needs to be able to pick the right Moodle payment gateway plugin. Hope we have made the decision making slightly easier for you 🙂

In Conclusion

Be sure to try out these payment solutions on your Moodle LMS and let us know if this article helped.

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below. In case of any questions or feedback, you could write to us at [email protected] 

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