5 Reasons Why Moodle WordPress Integration is the Best Solution to Sell Courses

Hey Moodle folks! 

Your valuable course content in Moodle can help you earn a handsome profit. 

Have you ever thought about it? If yes, great! You’re probably on it by now! 

If no, why not? To help you understand better, let’s see how Mike, a Seattle-based course instructor goes about it.

Selling Courses Online 

Case in Point – Mike from Seattle is an ambitious teacher. In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, he has moved all his learning modules online on Moodle. Mike is passionate about what he does and he is putting consistent efforts to provide the best possible learning content to his students. Things are good so far. 

But there’s a change of plan! 

Mike sees a huge business opportunity here and wants to tap into it. Honestly, who does not like extra revenue coming in? Also, the current pandemic is not a great time to be jobless. So, Mike’s idea to earn some extra money during the crisis makes sense. In such difficult times, he figured it’s a great way to earn part-time or full-time income from his unique course content

Reason – The worldwide e-learning market is flourishing and is projected to be worth $325 Billion in 2025. Mike analyzed multiple e-Learning statistics to understand how the pandemic is propelling different trends. And finally decided to sell his Moodle courses online. Given that 30.3% of the top 1000 websites are run on WordPress. Mike’s obvious choice of platform for selling his Moodle courses was WordPress. After setting up both platforms, all Mike has to do is integrate them for selling his Moodle courses online. 

Moodle-WordPress Integration! Is it a Viable Option?

But the question arises! Why integrate Moodle with WordPress? Take a look at these reasons and we’re sure you’ll never go back to handling Moodle and WordPress separately. 

Now, why is that? Firstly, managing both platforms is a massive overhead and secondly, the benefits you get out of the integration are awesome. 

Here are 5 reasons why you should integrate Moodle and WordPress to sell your courses online.

Why go for Moodle-WordPress Integration?

#1 The best of both worlds

There are 158,000 Moodle sites set up across 241 countries around the world. Moreover, the user count of MoodleCloud has shot up to 1.63 Million this year on account of the coronavirus lockdown. These stats are a testimony to how sublime, scalable and feature-rich Moodle is.

Moodle is the most preferred choice of LMS not only for schools, colleges and universities but also for the government, healthcare and corporate sectors. But Moodle does not offer e-commerce or course selling capabilities. Therefore, integrating it with a top-class CMS such as WordPress can bridge the gap between course delivery and course selling.

Now you as Moodler, you might be thinking “I am happy selling courses with PayPal on Moodle. Why should I go for WordPress?” It’s a fair question. We’ll answer it for you. 

Well, Moodle is great for learning but when it comes to monetizing your passion for teaching into a lucrative e-Learning business, adding WordPress to the mix can make a world of difference.  Right now, WordPress is a leading CMS with a market share of 61.8%. It is even more visited than Twitter! Pretty amazing, isn’t it?

If integrated, just imagine the amount of power these two platforms will lend to your course selling business. Nearly 28% of global e-commerce runs on WordPress and WooCommerce (WordPress-based free e-commerce plugin). Also, if you are on the lookout for unlimited customization with superior scalability, without investing in a dedicated developer, there can be nothing better than WordPress. 

So, WordPress gets most of the work done with effortless ease as there is no dearth of plugin customization options. You can also monitor your sales or capture leads directly from WordPress. It’s also a great platform for those who are looking to cut down on their monthly website maintenance costs.

The premium themes, plugins and services you opt for, will surely incur some costs. But if you intend to stick to basic course selling and marketing, WordPress is an ideal solution to keep your monthly costs well within your budget.  

The best part is, WordPress provides a level-playing field to all businesses, no matter what their turnover or budget is. All companies irrespective of their budget or popularity get a fair chance to compete and perform on this hugely dynamic platform.

#2 Smooth and error-free payments

Payment options have evolved and come a long way in the virtual learning environment. Students expect multiple payment options and want to be able to transact with the payment method of their choice. Talking about payment gateways, some times, having limited payment gateways can cause major inconvenience to your students. It is important for your e-learning business to offer flexibility in payments. Moodle offers limited e-commerce capabilities. The only payment gateway it supports is PayPal. 

Another crucial aspect is security. Won’t you skip a beat if you lose your hard-earned money in a transaction on the virtual space of the internet? Here’s where the integration of Moodle with WordPress will come to your rescue. Because WordPress keeps all your payment information super-secure and supports multiple payment methods and gateways via WooCommerce. 

The specific requirements especially concerning payments are on the rise with changing times. Some are looking to sell their Moodle courses via RazorPay, some want to use UPI or some other payment gateway depending on where they live. And why not! You are likely to limit your course sale opportunities if you don’t offer flexible payment methods as well as different payment gateways catering to transactions in different regions/countries. 

Moodle-WooCommerce integration offers support for a wide range of payment gateways around the world. Your course selling is made simple with WooCommerce. WooCommerce as a WordPress-based e-commerce solution is great because of its support for multiple payment gateways, a big community, various powerful plugins, and add-on features.

Moodle, on the other hand, makes setting up a learning management system very easy. So, their integration essentially combines the high functionality of Moodle with the diverse e-commerce plugin ecosystem of WooCommerce on WordPress.  

There are many plugins available to integrate Moodle with WordPress. Edwiser Bridge is one of these plugins. With Edwiser Bridge, you can easily sell your courses without any geographical barriers with the support of over 160 payment gateways. It’s not just limited to payment gateways, you can also effectively market your products in different ways to increase your revenue as an “Edupreneur” 

#3 A plethora of integrations

WordPress currently lists over 54,000 plugins with 1.5 billion total downloads. If you ever run into a problem while selling your courses, you’re sure to find a suitable plugin that serves the purpose. 

Also, high-level customizations are made much simpler with the support of over 3,500 GPL-licensed themes in WordPress. The ecosystem offers both free and paid themes to choose from, depending on your budget and business needs.

The free themes are built keeping in mind the category of users who are either beginners or are looking to experiment. If you need advanced features, better functionality, unique look and customization capabilities, you could look beyond and opt for a paid WordPress theme if you don’t mind shelling out extra money.

You could follow this guide to help you pick the right WordPress theme once you get started.  

In order to commercialize your Moodle courses, integrating your Moodle LMS with WordPress is an ideal solution as it could offer you a smart gateway to these powerful plugins.

Pro-Tip -: If you integrate your Moodle LMS with WordPress via Edwiser Bridge using the Edwiser Bridge PRO, you get a bunch of cool extensions for automating several e-commerce activities involved in the course selling process. This plugin automatically imports Moodle courses onto your WordPress website. The courses are imported as products, which are sold from your WordPress+WooCommerce store.

Here’s what the Edwiser Bridge PRO offers:

  • The Bulk Purchase plugin lets you sell multiple copies of the same course or bundles of different courses and even sell more than one course at a time for a single site
  • Single Sign-On will let you log into WordPress from a single profile and then be directly connected to your Moodle site or vice versa, eliminating the need to remember two sets of credentials at once
  • Selective Synchronisation gives you the power to manually select which courses you want to sync with your WordPress site
  • WooCommerce Integration plugin lets you build a holistic e-commerce store of courses, allowing for efficient marketing, cross-selling and upselling of courses. 

#4 Social sharing and SEO

WordPress is a front-runner when it comes to social sharing. It has plenty of social sharing plugins to popularize your content. Also, you could leverage your e-Learning events on Moodle LMS with the help of several event management plugins of WordPress. These can help you manage any e-learning events you plan to host. You could even maintain an active blog to talk about your courses, and provide interested students with means of finding what they are searching for.

The best part is WordPress is SEO-friendly. WordPress-based sites rank higher in Google SERPs as WordPress takes care of 80-90% of crawling issues. So, apart from selling your courses easily (using WooCommerce and the WooCommerce Integration plugin for Edwiser Bridge), you can optimize your content for search engines, and drive traffic to the website, using an active blog. The possibilities are infinite.

#5 Selling made more profitable

WooCommerce not only makes your course selling process simpler, but also diversifies your course selling alternatives. Moodle-WordPress integration allows the use of several WooCommerce extensions that you can easily use in your Moodle LMS.

You can experiment with different course selling options by selling your courses as subscriptions, memberships or variable products to expand your earning potential. WooCommerce can help you sell e-courses, and physical goods like books, DVDs, course material too. It’s not just limited to selling, you could even schedule sales, or offer discounts.

Apart from earning more from different course/product selling combinations, you can also efficiently manage discounts, coupons and offers for your customers.

Ready for Woodle (WordPress + Moodle)?

Now let’s give you a head start! 

You could adopt the same strategy as Mike.

For starters, you could offer a few of your best-performing free courses to your students to pique their interest and gradually make them work their way up to your premium e-Learning content. This can help you generate leads for your paid courses. Moreover, the integration helps you sell your courses for an unlimited number of times. No limits, no shipping costs involved! That’s how you scale up and showcase your expertise. 

So, get started with it right away! You get the goodness of Moodle, WordPress, and WooCommerce in a single bundle of joy. The Edwiser Bridge PRO can work wonders for your course selling business. 

Conclusion

So are you convinced? Need help convincing someone else that Moodle-WordPress integration is the ultimate solution to sell courses? You know what to do! Make sure to help them by sharing these reasons with them.

Now we have detailed the reasons why Moodle WordPress integration will make a difference to your e-Learning business strategy. To make it a bit easier, we have the below infographic to give you more clarity.

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Also, if you’re looking for a simple plugin to achieve this. The Edwiser Bridge plugin can help you with an easy one-click integration of Moodle with WordPress for free.  

If you like this article or have anything to add to it, let us know in the comments below. Your thoughts are highly regarded.

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