General plugins

Where did the $300 per year fees and $30 per month transaction fees come from?

Moodie has PayPal integration built in, so you can sell access to a course. You’d really only need merchant software if you want more complicated commercial stuff - subscriptions, group purchase, etc. But for basic e-commerce, PayPal enrolment works well.

See https://docs.moodle.org/38/en/PayPal_enrolment

There also an availability plugin for PayPal too - so you can have a free course but certain activities can be restricted until payment is made. See https://moodle.org/plugins/availability_paypal

Both work well and I use them in many production sites.

On your Wordpress site, you’d just link to the course on the Moodle site.

In addition to Jon's reply which should be all you need, there is also the Edwiser plugins which allow you to use Woocommerce on Wordpress to sell courses. However, if you are just selling a single course, then use the built in Paypal which will only cost a small percentage of sales for credit card processing which you will have to pay someone.

I’ve just launched a public demo of my Moodle based e-commerce platform:
https://examplesite.opensourcelearning.co.uk/local/commerce/browseproducts.php
The test credit card details are:
Card number: 4242 4242 4242 4242
All other fields you can set to anything and it should work.
There are a bunch of products on the site showing all the capabilities:
quiz attempts
seminar registration (with spaces held during transactions and released on time out etc.)
course enrolments
premium topic/activity access
Buying vouchers for team members to redeem (click buy for others on the catalog page, then look in ‘vouchers’ for the codes to share with your team)
The only one not set up is the whole site subscription as this would get in the way of people meeting the platform.
I’m hoping you can see how this goes a long way beyond any other LMS integrated commerce platform (certainly any that I’ve seen to date).
I’ve got clients using various bits of this but it’s the first time I’ve brought it together as a coherent product so I’m really keen to get feedback from as many people as possible.

How do you currently take payments for your coaching?

The Paypal plugin included with Moodle is a good start but it will only get you so far. Edwiser + Wordpress/WooCommerce will give you lots of flexibility but is not trivial to setup and manage.

I recently listed some other options at https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=421125#p1697284

There are other options if you are willing to pay someone to:

• host your Moodle course and process payments but I suspect you will need to build up some volume before it can start to be financially sustainable.
• simply hire a consultant to set it up for you on Moodle. In the long run, I think this could be a good option as you pay once to get it setup and then just use it with only the applicable service fees.

Depending on your content and how you want your course to work, there are non-Moodle hosted options available like Udemy and LinkedIn Learning (there are many others). They won't be as flexible or as powerful as Moodle but may still be suitable depending on your requirements. I sometimes recommend these to people just starting out. The down side is that you will be locked into the proprietary platform, won't have as much control over branding, may not be able to have interactive components, and will need to recreate your course if you ever decide to change service provider.

To have someone else manage something for you, you will need to pay them to do work for you.

Best regards,

Michael

Hi Karen Whittingham

You can integrate your WordPress site with your Moodle site to sell your Moodle courses from the WordPress site. The course front(Course-storefront) will be available on WordPress and Moodle will host your courses. WordPress can be used to market your courses through various marketing channels. 

Also, you can sell the courses through full-fledged e-commerce software - WooCommerce. It also, allows you to use a WooCommerce subscription with which you can charge monthly or yearly subscription fees for the courses. 

Edwiser Bridge PRO will help you sell your Moodle courses through WooCommerce and will also help your students have a seamless experience between WordPress and Moodle through Single Sign-On.

I hope this helps

The best is maybe to use a full shop plugin set dédicated to Moodle, without third party solution :

The shop set developped à few years ago, and used on Moodle. But not available on Moodle.org , but on
Valéry Frémaux Github. He is known as one of the best Moodle developer causer he is mastering the full Moodle architecture.