How an LMS With Ecommerce Capabilities Benefits Your Bottom Line: 5 Tips for Implementation

For higher learning institutions and corporate organizations, a learning management system with ecommerce functionality can enhance profitability. This blog post details the benefits of using ecommerce tools in your LMS and how to promote your digital products.

It seems everybody has a side hustle these days. Individuals take on extra jobs or create passive income streams that safeguard their futures and help them reach financial goals. Organizations and higher learning institutions also benefit from creating additional revenue streams outside of their main products or services. If your organization or institution creates learning or training content, then repurposing those courses for learners outside of your primary audience is an excellent way to generate additional revenue.

The Key Benefit of Integrating Ecommerce Into Your LMS

Using an ecommerce suite embedded in your LMS increases revenue for your business or learning institution. If you already create training content for your students or employees, then an ecommerce suite makes it easy to repackage your existing courses and resell them to users outside of your organization.

For colleges and universities, that could mean offering your most popular courses to people who aren’t enrolled in your institution’s degree or certificate programs. If you offer courses about popular topics like marketing fundamentals, or niche topics like Harvard University’s class on Taylor Swift, repackaging the content as an eLearning module can help you reach an audience (and generate more revenue) that previously wasn’t accessible.

Organizations with established professional learning programs can similarly benefit by reselling their courses to other companies that don’t have in-house training. Individuals looking to level up their skills and progress in their careers are also likely to purchase training courses and are another potential source of revenue for your company. Reselling existing content is a low-cost method of generating secondary revenue to support your company’s or institution’s primary goals.

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1) Identify What You Can Offer Through Your Ecommerce LMS Suite

The most common products you can offer are courses, learning programs, and professional or academic certifications. These products require minimal effort if you’re repackaging your existing digital content. It’s also possible to adapt your in-person or hybrid course content to strictly digital modules that are easily accessible to your customer base.

An ecommerce suite in your LMS can also enable you to offer premium content options. In a premium content model, a portion of your learning programs are free to access, but your customers must purchase the course to receive its full features. For example, your customers can access videos or reading materials to start learning the content, but they have to buy the full course to take any exams or receive certificates for their skills certifications.

The ecommerce suite in some LMS platforms can push users’ newly earned certifications out to professional networking sites like LinkedIn, effectively sweetening the deal for your customers and encouraging them to purchase your products.

2) Use Ecommerce to Promote and Sell Products via Your LMS

A simple way to promote your digital products is to create a public catalog of your content offerings. When you use your LMS’s ecommerce features, you can design the catalog to be discovered by search engines, meaning that your course descriptions and catalog can be discovered by potential customers searching for products that you’re selling.

With a public course catalog, each learning or training program will have a unique URL. These URLs can be embedded into your website, promotional materials, and social media pages so you can help get your products in front of the right audience. Most LMS platforms with ecommerce functionality allow you to embed URLs that take your potential customers to a content landing page or account setup page.

A unique feature of Open LMS eCommerce is that you can embed direct course purchase links. This means that a customer who’s interested in signing up for a course you’re promoting on your social media page can click that link and be taken directly to a purchase page, reducing the number of clicks a customer goes through and giving them a cleaner user experience.

Public catalogs have a lot of flexibility and configuration options, so your organization or institution can have as little or as much control over the technical aspects of ecommerce as it wants. Often the default settings in your ecommerce suite will be sufficient enough for you to start selling courses right away. That said, your LMS provider can support you throughout your ecommerce implementation and offer customization guidance for your specific needs and goals.

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3) Ensure a Seamless User Experience

Your user experience should be at the forefront of your planning process. You need to consider the steps your target customers will go through when they’re browsing your course catalog and attempting to purchase your products. Websites with too many clicks or decisions for users to make often cause potential customers to abandon the purchase process in favor of more user-friendly options. Before you launch an ecommerce tool, carefully consider how your target customers will interact with your website and how you can make the purchase process easier.

Consider whether your purchasers and the intended learners are the same person. A small business owner might be interested in buying compliance training courses for their team of ten employees. That business owner’s buying experience will be different from that of someone who wants to purchase a course for themselves. The person buying their own learning content can create their LMS account upon purchase easily enough, but the same can’t be said for customers like that small business owner. If their employees don’t already have an account with your LMS, the buying process could be quite cumbersome. Test your ecommerce website with these and other buying scenarios in mind, and look for points of friction that can be minimized or eliminated to make the end-user experience as seamless as possible.

Your LMS support team can help you detect and eliminate user pain points during the implementation process for your ecommerce suite, making it easy for you to start selling your learning and training programs right away. If your organization or institution prefers to handle its own software implementations, your LMS support team can still provide resources and tips to make the launch go as smoothly as possible. Your company or learning institution retains control over the implementation and customization of the ecommerce suite while still receiving advice and support from your LMS provider about best practices, so your ideal users have a streamlined experience.

4) Consider These Security Measures

Selling your learning and training programs means collecting sensitive data from your customers, such as contact and payment information. As the content vendor for your clients and learners, you have a responsibility to ensure that data is secure and used appropriately. Ask your ecommerce suite provider how customers’ purchase data is managed. Some providers won’t store any of your users’ financial data. Instead, that data is handed over to the payment processor partnering with your LMS vendor. In these scenarios, it’s essential that your vendor actively monitors the payment processor for security-related announcements to ensure end-user data remains secure.

Your LMS vendor should also have security protocols in place outside of what the payment processor offers. Look for LMS providers with security certifications like ISO 27001. This internationally recognized certification indicates that the LMS provider understands the importance of data security and integrity. Organizations with the ISO 27001 certification have created controls and policies to support the protection of client data, and they’ve been assessed by a team of independent auditors.

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5) Assess the Effectiveness of Your Ecommerce Initiatives

After you launch your ecommerce suite, you’ll want to know whether it’s generating additional revenue. You can use the integrated reporting tools in your learning platform to assess the effectiveness of your ecommerce program. Robust reporting features allow you to pull very specific data to help you identify product purchase trends, course completion rates, and other useful information.

Your LMS reporting tool can help you see how many users are purchasing learning or training material on behalf of others. Use that information to assess how your products are performing with various audiences and make informed decisions for future content options that will resonate with your ideal buyers. You can also run reports to see how many of your LMS course enrollments are driven by your ecommerce suite, which gives you another opportunity to identify which programs are selling well.

Another helpful data point is the number of users who purchased your content but didn’t complete the course. This information can be especially useful for determining why learners aren’t finishing your programs so you can make adjustments to improve the user experience.

A Final Word on Leveraging the Benefits of an Ecommerce Suite

An ecommerce suite is a highly effective way to generate additional revenue and reach a wider audience. If you are already creating professional training and learning content, an ecommerce suite in your LMS lets you repackage and resell those courses with minimal effort from your learning designers. Your LMS provider will assist you with implementing your ecommerce initiatives and can support you every step of the way while you reap the benefits of your new ecommerce platform.