Hi all,
having successfully installed and set up my first Moodle site for my students, I am now on the verge of trying to also set up a few paid courses. I did some reading and googling and It now seems to me (please correct me, if I'm wrong) that out of the box there's no way to set up a shopping cart, invoicing, VAT calculations and so on... so, most often, people just delegate these functionalities to, say, PayPal (via a plugin).
Am I assuming correctly?
Anyway, personally, I'd like to set up more than just one payment gateway and would therefore handle all the commerce stuff directly on the platform. I have been using Drupal a lot in recent years, so I was happy to find that it seems possible to "integrate" Drupal Commerce with Moodle...
However, I have no idea what this actually means. I found all kinds of websites mentioning Single Sign On and automatically being enrolled and so on... But does that really mean that users will need to leave my Moodle site, where they found the course in the first place, then order and pay at my separate Drupal site (that should look somewhat identical to the Moodle site) and finally return back to Moodle to begin the course? If so, is there a way to create a more seamless user experience? Like a shopping cart in Moodle, maybe integrated (in some way?) to Drupal Commerce (or Ubercart or whatever), so that the users can just stay where they are? And what if I have an activity that requires separate payment (like a certificate)? There's a great plugin for that, but will that also integrate with Drupal Commerce?
Or am I misunderstanding something? How are others handling this? Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
I'm not sure about Drupal but lot's of people use Wordpress and WooCommerce to do this.
If you do a search there are integrations for this. Typically, you have to add plugins both to Wordpress and Moodle. It should be reasonably straightforward. They then share users and information about purchases.
Thank you very much for your help.
Yes, I do know that it's possible to "integrate" Moodle with another (external) platform, be it Drupal or Wordpress. What I'm wondering is... Does that really mean that people will have to leave the Moodle site, order and pay in a totally different system and then return back to Moodle to access the course?
That, to me, seems like a pretty awkward (and not exactly confidence-inspiring) user experience. Or am I misunderstanding something? Can the external system (say, Wordpress) be integrated in a way so that the user never even knows that another system is handling the ordering and invoicing process? If so, how?
I would really like to keep the user in one place. Am I the only one concerned about this?
The point of all this is that it should appear (to the user) to be seamless. For example, they create a user in Wordpress and this automatically creates the account (and logs them in) in Moodle. They purchase a course in the eCommerce site and this automatically enrols them in the Moodle course.
It's still a (relatively) complex configuration and you do need to try/test to see if it provides the functionality you need.
It should not be awkward to the users, however.
I have run into this on several occasions and I personally have found that trying to pretend the Moodle and Drupal/Wordpress/Joomla/xx are the same place, just leads to pain down the line.
My advice is to either:
i) Do the whole thing in Moodle.
OR
ii) Have a school site and a support/marketing site and make it really clear that the two are distinct. e.g have a big link on the menu saying "go to school site"
The Stripe payment plugin is pretty good if you take route i). We customized it quite a bit for an organisation I worked for. I have been looking at making a payment plugin for fastspring.com.
Hmm, yes, that's kinda what I was expecting. And, actually, it sounds reasonable. Thanks for the suggestions.
So, if I understood you correctly, you would suggest to have users browse the Moodle site for the courses... and then have a button, directing them over to the support/marketing site, where they can order and pay. Correct? Or would you rather set it up so that users are browsing for courses on the external marketing site and only go to Moodle to access the course? Do you happen to know a public website that I could look at as an example?
Living in Europe, I will need to set up a professional order handling, including correct invoicing and different VAT rates for different countries. I'm not sure, if Moodle is prepared to handle this... or if there are any plugins that allow me to do this in Moodle? I know that Drupal can handle this pretty well, which is why I thought of integrating Drupal in the first place. Still not sure, though. I really want to make this easy for the users.
It is safest to assume that Moodle concentrates on the education side of things and order processing,VAT etc should be handled in some other tool.
Will they pay you online and then expect immediate access? Or you will run your courses X times a year? In the latter case you can handle enrolments manually, and get to market faster. It also allows you to run sales campaigns with 'closing soon' messages. And the students will roughly be at the same place at the same time in your course, which opens up support and pedagogical opportunities. It also makes it possible to have a course maintenance window, where you fix up stuff and move it around before the next running of the course.
If you want to do the fully automated immediate access route, the user will need to :
i) have an account on Moodle
ii) be enroled in the Moodle course
(in that order)
That will involve some coding to set that all up once they have paid on your marketing site. Or you could use one of the Joomla or wordpress Moodle integrations for that, which would dictate the choice of marketing site.
The alternate option, if you want immediate access, is to set up trial courses on Moodle which just require a Moodle account to access. That gets their account set up. Then when they hit the buy buttons strategically placed throughout the trial course, they go to the full course enrolment page with the Stripe (or paypal) plugin activated. The marketing site's role in this scenario is to provide all the information and sales talk to get them to register an account on Moodle.
Thanks for the detailed suggestions. Much appreciated.
Actually, the plan is to go what you called the "fully automated immediate access route". Currently, the Moodle site is catering content only to a few students (about 200 or 300): There's no payment yet, I know them personally, thus I can easily handle enrollments manually.
In the course of the next few months I would like to extend the site. This will be a very small SkillShare kind of site, with a small number of teachers and specific paid content for a niche audience. So, I would really like to create a pleasurable user experience without any manual intervention: Easy ordering and payment, quick automatic enrollment. At first, I thought that a single (Moodle?) site would be the best way to go, but the more I think of it, the more I like the idea of separating the marketing part from the "school" part.
I especially like the idea of setting up trial courses, but I'm not sure, if everybody will first create an account in the school site, before paying over at the marketing site. Is that a necessity for creating the Moodle accounts so that they can later be synchronized?
(Finally, I'm now wondering how to create a more uniform look-and-feel... but I guess I'll post this as another question in another forum... )
RE: "(Finally, I'm now wondering how to create a more uniform look-and-feel... but I guess I'll post this as another question in another forum... )"
The new thread is https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=361304 - so please post replies there pertaining to that question.