Subscription plans offer cost predictability and convenience for consumers, providing access to desired services or products regularly at a fixed, manageable price. Additionally, they often come with added benefits such as exclusive content, discounts, or upgrades, enhancing overall value and customer satisfaction.
In this article, you will find further guidance on creating and showcasing subscription plans for your courses, ultimately boosting your revenue opportunities for the long term.
- Stripe, as your payment gateway, is a prerequisite in offering Subscription plans.
Create a Subscription Plan
1. Navigate to Marketing → Subscriptions.
2. Click on Create subscription plan.
3. Set up your Subscription plan:
a) Fill in the Subscription name (only Latin characters are supported), provide a Subscription description, and add a Thumbnail Image.
b) Set the price and time interval between billing occurrences.
- The subscription plan's price cannot be set to $0.
c) Select which courses will be included in this subscription and click on the Add course button.
- Free courses cannot be included in a subscription plan.
- A subscription can also contain private courses which will not be shown to those who have not bought the plan.
d) A subscription can also have a free trial period. You can also disable or enable requesting credit card details when you offer trial days, by navigating to Settings → Financial → Payment Gateway → Stripe → Trial with a credit card.
e) You can either keep this subscription as a draft to edit it at your own pace (not accessible to students) or make it public.
- If you proceed in publishing a subscription and then decide to convert it back to a draft, enrolled users will still have access to the subscription plan.
f) Specify the order in which your subscription plans will appear in your Subscription sections.
g) Set the After Purchase navigation. You can decide where a user would get directed after purchasing your subscription product. You also have the possibility to apply the after-purchase navigation setting to all your Subscription plans by clicking on Apply to All.
h) Enable or disable the email notifications sent for an individual subscription plan or apply general rules.
i) Click on Save to finalize the process.
- If you decide to add more courses to the plan while users are subscribed, they will automatically gain access/synced to them.
- If you change the number of trial days of a subscription, this will not affect the remaining trial days of the registered users.
Edit the Subscription Layout Page
Each subscription plan has its own Subscription layout page. You can edit the layout page of each subscription plan, like any other page of your school, by clicking on Edit subscription page.
Subscription Layout Templates
Once you have created your subscriptions, the next step is to make them accessible for purchase. You can incorporate a Subscriptions section on any page of your school where you want to showcase the available subscription plans.
Important Notes
- Users are not able to subscribe to more than one subscription plan.
- When an admin creates a subscription plan in LearnWorlds, then it will be synced to Stripe. The other way around, creating a subscription plan in Stripe, will not sync it to LearnWorlds.
- Once you connect your Stripe account and create your subscriptions and installments, you should not connect to a different Stripe account; otherwise, you will not be able to receive payments from the users who purchased a subscription or installment while you had connected the first account.
- If your users have already activated their subscriptions, you should not change the currency since your existing customers will not be able to pay in the new currency.
- Deleting a product that was purchased with a recurring payment does not mean that the recurring payment will stop automatically. The recurring payment (either payment or subscription) should first be canceled prior to deleting the product itself.
- Users can be manually enrolled and unenrolled to subscriptions and the admin defines the duration of subscription access or trial days (the relevant fees are being charged).
- When a user is enrolled in a subscription with trial days (and while they are still in their trial period), if they decide to change their subscription plan to a different one, the remaining trial period is not extended, as, systemically in Stripe, it shows that the user has already benefitted from the free trial offer, for the current activation, regardless of the plan.
- If a user cancels their subscription's free trial with leftover trial days, they can still reactivate the same plan and be able to use the remaining free trial period.
- Users can also be manually enrolled in subscriptions for free.
- If you manually enroll a user in a subscription through your school, this will not synchronize with Stripe, and no payments will be processed. To ensure the user is charged, you also need to manually add the user to the subscription through Stripe.
- If a user downgrades their subscription plan, the price difference between the 2 plans will remain as credits in the user's account and will be applied to the subscription price for the next billing cycle/renewal. If you wish, you can refund this amount to the user via your Stripe account.
- When purchasing a subscription, the card of the user needs to be stored in your Stripe account for upcoming recurring payments. Since this part of the process is not a transaction, the amount displayed in the card authentication and 3D secure will be 0. If the user's bank approves this procedure, then the card will be charged the actual amount of the subscription.
- If you plan to sell only subscriptions, according to this article, courses still need exemplary pricing while creating them. Alternatively, they cannot be added to a subscription plan while their price is still 0. This will not affect in any way the final pricing, which will be available via the Subscription payment page.
- According to Stripe policy, when you start processing live payments from your customers with Stripe, you won’t receive your first payout until 7–14 days after receiving your first successful payment. You can find out more, here.
You can find out more on how to manage your created subscription plans, in our respective article. |