How to Sell LifterLMS Courses And Groups With SureCart vs WooCommerce
Sell LifterLMS courses and groups effortlessly. Discover how SureCart compares to WooCommerce for your online education needs.
Are you torn between SureCart and WooCommerce when selling LifterLMS courses? This show comprehensively analyzes both platforms explicitly tailored for online educators like you.
We dive into critical functionalities, including payment processing options and customer management tools that can enhance your course offerings. Empower yourself with insights that could transform your business.
This Week Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
Omnisend: Omnisend
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:00.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 92. In this episode, we will discuss one of WordPress’s leading learning management membership platforms, Lifter LMS. And how do you sell your courses if you want to add digital or physical products to your Lifter LMS setup? Like I said before, Lifter is powerful. It has a built-in course selling system. But, as I said, if you want to sell digital or physical products on top of your courses, you will need something else to work with Lifter. The two that we like are Surecart and WooCommerce. We will be going into what these two platforms offer and their strengths and weaknesses so that you can make an educated choice. So, Kirek, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers quickly?
[00:01:45.540] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I would love to—my name’s Kurt von Ahnen. I own an agency called Mañana No Mas. We focus mainly on membership and learning-style websites. I work directly with Jonathan at WP-Tonic and the good folks at Lifter LMS.
[00:01:58.930] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Before we go into the meat and potatoes of this show, I’ve got a couple of messages from our major sponsors. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. I’m coming back, folks. I want to point out we’ve got some fantastic free resources for you looking to build your membership website. Where do you go to get these resources? Well, you go to wp-tonic. Com/deals, wp-tonic. Com/deals. You can get remarkable offers from our major sponsors and a curated list of the best WordPress plugins and services to help you build your membership website. Plus, we got a great course done by Kurt that shows you how to build your membership website from beginning to end, utilizing Lifter LMS and Cadence. It’s a great course. So you have all these free resources on that page. So, Kirek, If you were talking to somebody and trying to explain your car or Woocommas or the whole issue of taking payments through digital products or physical products through Lifter, How would you try to do the intro to that person?
[00:03:35.450] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, Jonathan, and this is where I may ruffle some feathers, I do everything, absolutely everything in my power, working with my clients to figure out there is a workaround or a process where I can use the standard native payment gateway and Lifter LMS and leverage that thing without having to use these monolith shopping cart products? But sometimes it happens. So when that happens, it is based on the use case. What are you selling? How are you selling it? Who are you selling it to? And what are your plans for growth over time? And then I’m going to say, unfortunately, sometimes I have to integrate Woocommerce and play in that field. But I’ve had some tremendous success with ShortCard as well. So it comes down to the customer, the client, their comfort level, and what it is they’re trying to do.
[00:04:33.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think the whole thing is that we work with Lifter LMS, we also work with LearnDash, and we work with BuddyBoss. Now with LearnDash, it’s a different scenario to Lifter LMS, folks, because LearnDash doesn’t have content restriction really built into it. You can do it through the group functionality. You’re probably thinking this is supposed to be about Lifter LMS, and he’s talking about LearnDash, folks. I just think you need to know this, folks, to make this compensation and to understand Kirk’s initial statement. So you don’t have that with Learndash, but you do have that with Lifter. Lifter has an inbuilt permission content-based system in built into it. With LearnDash, it doesn’t. So you need to utilize some form of membership or woocommas to get that. Because we’re talking about Lifter, it has that. So the case for having to use a membership functionality is less all-embracing with Lyft Lifter LMS. And if you’re just selling the courses, it also has the payment functionality also being built into it. And with the purchase of the Stripe add-on, which will cost you around $150 for that particular add-on, you’ve got everything you need to sell your courses, organize them with Lifter LMS.
[00:06:30.070] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, and to be honest, it goes deeper than that, Jonathan, because if we’re talking about digital product, you can set Lifter LMS up through membership access to access digital products. In In more of a world where you might say, Oh, I need to be able to sell this e-book. I need a shopping cart to sell this e-book. You can sell the e-book through Lifter LMS and get creative with the native payment gateway and keep things simple. The thing where I run into use case with customers is I’ll Okay, so you’re a coach, you’re an author, you’re a whatever. Are you selling hardback books? Are you selling coffee mugs, tapestries, notebooks? Are you selling tangible items that need to be shipped? Well, then that’s where I go, Okay, now we need We need a shopping cart. We need to factor in tax and shipping and all of those things. That’s where these really great tools like Woocommerce and SureCart come into play. But if it’s digital product, I do everything I can to just stay in the native payment gateway with Lifter. Then if it’s hard product, then obviously we have to go the cart direction and work some other details out.
[00:07:37.110] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, in my opinion, Kurt, it’s even a little bit more complicated because fundamentally, if you don’t use, what you get with Lifter LMS is great. If you are starting out, I would strongly advise you, if you can, keep in the world of Lifter LMS. But there’s a proviso here, folks. There’s always a proviso. And that’s because Lifter doesn’t give you the ability to do a modern shopping car environment where you It’s got upsells, downsells, bumps. It’s called sales bumps. It’s giving you options in the shopping car. And also It can’t trigger on its own marketing email sequences, blah, blah, blah. But let’s just focus on the modern shopping cart environment environment that you get a lot with e-commerce, where you do have additional digital products and you do have maybe some physical products. You can’t, with the lifter set up, you can’t get that modern shopping car, where it’s offering at checkout these options. Now, with Woo These two that we’re looking at, which is ShortCart and Woocommers with cart flows, they can offer you this modern shopping cart, checkout experience. How would you respond to what I’ve just said, Kurt?
[00:09:56.060] – Kurt von Ahnen
I agree. I agree 100%. The other thing to remember is, even though you and I are both speaking English and coming from the United States, there’s a lot of users globally that maybe can’t use the same payment gateways as a Stripe or a PayPal, and they require something else. And in those situations, Woocommerce generally connects to just about everything out there, right? So we’ll see that as being a reason sometimes why people jump off of the native payment gateways and go into Woocommerce so they can use those other avenues of payment.
[00:10:30.710] – Jonathan Denwood
Right, so I think we’ve done a good introduction here, a big view about why we’re talking about these two options and why you might consider them, folks, like I said. So let’s look at the Pacific’s shorecart. So what do you see as shore Cart’s strengths and also its weaknesses has its weaknesses, Kurt? Because every solution, folks, has its strengths and has its weaknesses. Nothing is totally perfect, nothing is totally rubbish. Well, not always, something are rubbish. But these two products, they’re not. They have specific strengths and they have some weaknesses. How would you explain SureCart to somebody?
[00:11:29.960] – Kurt von Ahnen
From a preference standpoint, I think SureCart is easier to set up. I think the pathway to success with SureCart is more clear to the end user. And I know that that sounds like a word salad to some, but maybe it’s the user interface, maybe it’s the layout of the menu, maybe it’s the simple process of start your store or import store. And then it just goes next, next, next. And next thing you know, you’re on a screen with settings and you fill in a couple of blanks and your store is ready to go. And it pre-populates with sample stuff. So it gives you an idea of what to do. And then I think it’s also fair to note that ShortCart is in the middle of releasing ShortCart 3.0, which has more styling cues and more design options than it had before. For instance, it integrates directly with bricks now, things like that. So ShortCart for me, when you say, what are the benefits? The benefits are I don’t have to buy an extra add-on to do subscriptions. It handles subscriptions. It handles, as you said, bumps upsells and downsells, and that seems to work pretty well.
[00:12:51.340] – Kurt von Ahnen
We’ve got a couple of clients ourselves that have ShortCart with Lifter LMS, and they’ve been able to bump people from this membership to this membership or this membership to this membership, and you can set it up to say, execute that bump on the start of the next billing cycle or make it happen immediately, or it gives you those choices. And so it seems really intuitive in the way that it operates. And like I said, that user interface, the user experience for our clients, seems to be much clearer in the shortcut environment than in the Woocommerce environment. With Woocommerce, I seem to do a lot more Zoom?
[00:13:31.030] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, let’s keep with the SureCart. Yeah. All right. Yeah, I think you did well. Effective summary there. So fundamentally, it’s easier to set up than word commerce. It offers… It is a plugin, but basically it’s a hybrid. It’s a plugin, SaaS-based software as a service model, where they do offer a Tractive free level that isn’t too crippled, that with a lot of cases, will meet your requirements for quite a while. And then they have paid options that you pay monthly or yearly. But it’s not ridiculously priced. The growth, if If you pay monthly, is $39 a month. But if you pay yearly, it goes down to $19. So they really want you to pay yearly. And at $19, I think. But you can do a lot with the free level, and it’s just really easy. It’s It didn’t have a lot of styling or layout, customization. If you wanted all that, you had to go to WU commerce. With their upcoming version 3, I think they’re trying to address that to some extent. Hopefully, it’s a fine choice, really, because they could take it, too. The more options, the more complicated it will get. And Pararisys could set in that you spend too much time about the layout.
[00:15:41.420] – Jonathan Denwood
But if you’re looking for that type of functionality, of upsells with digital products, with physical products, and you’re looking for a free initial setup, which you get with ShortCart’s launch. I think it’s a really attractive option if it fits into what you’re looking for. Then the growth price level at $19 if you pay for the year, which is around…
[00:16:23.200] – Kurt von Ahnen
About $240.
[00:16:24.450] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, thanks. That’s been a long morning already. It offers a lot of value. How would you respond to what I’ve just said, Kurt?
[00:16:40.970] – Kurt von Ahnen
When it comes to the pricing, a lot of people will go, But Woocommerce is free and look at all the stuff it does. And then I go, But the main thing you need with the Lifter LMS website is the ability to have recurring payments. And now you’re out almost $300 for the subscriptions add-on. And that’s hard to stomach, I think, when I can go and say, okay, I can get started and have subscriptions included with SureCart. And as my business grows and as I might want to do some other options, jump in for that other option you mentioned at $240 a year, I’m still lower than Woocommerce. And like I said, I’m enjoying the screen experience better in SureCart. It just seems like… One reason why I would Why ShortCart versus Woocommerce, why Woocommerce would win in the argument, is the ubiquity of use for Woocommerce. It’s so common, so many people use it. If someone left my agency, went to another agency, chances are they’d find a Woocommerce expert at that agency. It’s just that common. Surecart doesn’t exactly, I don’t think, have that pull, that weight yet.
[00:17:55.420] – Jonathan Denwood
How effective, based on your experience, how effective does it work with with the LMS?
[00:18:01.470] – Kurt von Ahnen
It works great. I’m going to sound like a commercial for SureCart, right? But with Woocommerce, the integration comes from the Lifter LMS side because Lifter LMS has the add-on for Woocommerce integration. But the integration for Lifter LMS with SureCart comes from the SureCart side. And it’s almost like using that example we had with Fluent CRM Pro. You have Fluent CRM Pro, you have Lifter LMS, they work together. You put in SureCart, you have Lifter LMS, they work together. Someone buys the product in the shop and it activates the access plan in Lifter LMS. And most of the integrations that SureCart has, whether it be LearnDash, Lifter LMS, Tudor LMS, operate in a very similar fashion. It’s very consistent. Right.
[00:18:51.650] – Jonathan Denwood
Before we go for our break, folks, and then in the second half, we’ll be looking at WU commerce quite a bit. Another option is from ZO. Zo offers a lot of SaaS-based products. They offer something that was called subscription, but it’s been rolled into their product, which I think is called invoices. If you’re looking to do invoices and subscription payments, their free product is quite attractive. It works. The thing with Surecar, it integrates more into your WordPress setup, you can, where the payment area, if you use Zola, you’re going to be taken to something that looks very different in style, and that can result in people deciding at the last minute not to purchase. But it is option, and it’s something I’ve used with clients and that. But I think shortcut is the nice medium. It’s the nice middle point where you’re looking to get something set up and do the subscriptions, do the bumps, the upsells, and it works really well. We’re going to go for our break now. When we come back, we’re going to be delving in the world of WU commerce and then any other things that we think you need to know.
[00:20:49.840] – Jonathan Denwood
We’ll be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a feast, a A feast of shortcut. Some of the things you need to know if you want to do upsells, bumps, sell physical products, digital one-off products with your WordPress Lifter NMS or LearnDash website. Now, before we go into word commas, I want to point out that we’ve got a great free resource For you, if you’re looking to build your membership website on WordPress, that’s the Membership Machine Shows Facebook Group. It’s totally open to you, the listener. If you’re looking for a great community, why don’t you look to join that group? Like I say, it’s totally free. It’s a mixture of WordPress professionals and people looking to build their membership website. It’s totally free. I’m always posting content there every week, which I think you will find useful. Please have a look at it and sign up for it. Let’s delve into the world of Woocommers. I’m going to do the introduction because you did the introduction with shortcut. That’s okay. It is a beast, and a lot of people… If you got the right hosting set up, it won’t make an enormous difference to performance, which like you get with WP tonic.
[00:22:39.730] – Jonathan Denwood
Also the updating of it, you’re not going to be utilizing a lot of the e-commerce functionality that’s built into WU commerce. So you set it up. But the thing is, there’s a couple of loops to to jump through. You’re going to have to buy a WU commerce add-on, and it’s called WU commerce Subscription, and that’s going to cost you $270 a year. You get that for free with WP Tonic hosting. So you’re going to need that. But the other thing you’re going to need for you to have a modern membership shopping cart environment, you’re going to need Cart Flows, which is made from the same people that do SureCart, but it’s their plugin that manipulates the WUCOM as standard shopping cart, which works fine, but it was never really designed to work with memberships. Like I said, you got to buy this add-on that links the internal setup of Lifter LMS with what WUCOM is expecting as a product, and it’s not that It’s not very difficult to actually do. But the problem is the normal shopping cart. It is not that attractive, and it doesn’t work in the way that a modern subscription-based in 2024, your users are going to expect.
[00:24:34.730] – Jonathan Denwood
But with CART flows, you can get that. It gives you everything like upsells, downsells, adding options, everything you can build in CART flows. What do you reckon about what I’ve just said, actually?
[00:24:54.470] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m tracking most of what you were saying there, Jonathan. The You are right in that the setup can be intimidating, but where you were saying that connecting-It’s not that bad when you get your head around it a little bit, is it? It’s not that bad. Once you understand that, Hey, these are my products. I’m running a department store, and Woocommerce is my cash register. Once you make those associations, you go, Okay, that makes sense. But where people get lost, especially in the Lifter LMS world or in the digital products world, is in Woocommerce, when you are selling a virtual product or a downloadable product or a course, there’s some tick boxes that you need to go through in order to make sure that your sale actually processes. And it’s one of the details that many users miss, and it lights up my support channel like crazy because someone will say, I’ve got these orders and they’re just pending. What’s going on? And then I go in, I look at the setup, and I’m like, Well, you checked virtual, but you didn’t click Downloadable. And they’ll go, Well, Downloadable? I’m selling a course. There’s nothing to download.
[00:26:04.100] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m like, Just click Downloadable. And then when you go to the integration Lifter LMS side of it, you want to make sure that you have it going to the proper order status after it’s been processed through the access plan, which would be completed. These are just details. They’re details that you need with Woocommerce that add to the level of complication.
[00:26:27.880] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s just little things like what Kirk just pointed out.
[00:26:33.830] – Kurt von Ahnen
But once it’s set up, it works great.
[00:26:36.350] – Jonathan Denwood
But would you agree that if you’re looking for a nice-looking one-page checkout subscription page, you’re going to have to use Cartflows with WU commerce as well?
[00:26:51.170] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I’ve used Cartflows. I also have a client that had a divvy website, and we ended up using Poodlepress’s product, Blocks for WU commerce, to go in and customize pages. But to your point, that’s because the customer doesn’t like the cart. The cart’s clunky. I don’t want to say bare bones, it’s just ugly. And so people will generally want to style that up, which means they’re going to be adding more tools to add style options.
[00:27:22.730] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, also with cart flows, you can build a flow where you also get a fine queue They’re taken to a thank you page. They take into a thank you page, they provide some templates for that. It works with most themes, most cadence.
[00:27:41.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
Now that you mentioned it, Jonathan, one of the number one complaints I get from clients is the order confirmation notification email and the thank you notification email. Customers hate the way those are styled. You got to jump through a little bit of a hoop to make that improvement.
[00:28:02.080] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, you’re touching another subject there now, which I was going to… You must have read my mind. The other benefit, and with shortcut, I’m sure it will send out a thank you, but you don’t have the level of customisability, if there is such as you get with the WooCommerce set up, folks. But the other great attraction of WooCommerce is you then get access to the vast library of add-ons that have been built. I think there’s over 900 plus add-ons in the official WooCommerce add-on library. Some of them are free, most aren’t. You have to pay. There’s There’s an enormous, and I mean an enormous amount of integrations offered. If you’re using the WooCommerce platform, you do not get access to that with SureCart. One of the areas is that if you’re looking to trigger off a lot of email sequences and do a big dive, you’re really going to have to look at Woocommerce because then the Woocomers add-on that works with Fluent CRM. You’re getting some real marketing power up to the level above of something like active campaign or keep. If you don’t want to use Fluent, you can use Groundhog. They’re the two leaders.
[00:29:54.140] – Jonathan Denwood
I prefer Fluent, but if you like Groundhog, you can use that. But if you’re really looking for this heavy-duty, hard core marketing optimization, and if you’re looking in the world of SaaS, you’ll be looking at active campaign or Keep, or even HubSpot, or even enterprise-level CRM, marketing optimization platforms, which active campaign touches, but it is especially dependent on the size of your list, can get quite expensive quite quickly active. But compared to some of the enterprise or quasi-enterprise-level solutions like HubSpot or some of the others, it’s seen as good value. But you’re getting that with Fluent CRM with word commerce, but you really got to make the decision. If this is your early days of building your marketing, building your membership website and the marketing, I would not go down that route. I think it could be a real waste of time for you. But if you’re starting to really grow your membership and you really want to really reduce reduce churn, reduce, get more people, sign up and keep in the course, you are going to have to look at these marketing optimizations. What do you reckon about what I’ve just outlined there?
[00:31:51.780] – Kurt von Ahnen
You touched on in your description there, and I go back to this a lot. I go back to use case. Where is the Where’s the course creator or the membership creator at in their journey? So many people will see something, the shiny object syndrome, and they’ll go, Oh, I got to have it. I got to have that. And in reality, if they’re just getting started, if they don’t have any paying members yet, a simple, fluent add-in, some basic CRM automations, just something to get started. But as the audience grows and And as the demand and the community grows within your project, then you definitely want to have more automations, more segmentation, more messaging. And then, yeah, we’re walking right down the pathway that you described. I, like yourself, have become a complete fluent CRM convert. I mean, the platform just works. I mean, there’s a reason why WP Fusion switched to using fluent for their projects, because it just works even with a business their size. It’s a great option and it’s very affordable.
[00:33:07.800] – Jonathan Denwood
If you listened to last week’s show, and if you didn’t, you really want to, folks, we talked about Podio and Kajabi and comparing them to WordPress, i. E. Lifter LMS. I want to say there is There is a slight problem here, folks, but we at WP Tonic are trying to build a solution. It’s in beta, and we’ll be talking more about it in upcoming shows. Is that Podio If you listen to last week’s show, folks, Podio had some great strengths, and Podio has… It’s much easier to set up and get going than Kajabi, but it doesn’t have anything like the power of Kajabi. It’s easier. I would say that both, Kajabi less, definitely with Podio, doesn’t have a great website builder. But the main thing is, if you want to do marketing, optimization, email sequence. What it provides, if you’re a newbie, you’re going to be satisfied. But as you move on into the next stage, You’re going to get frustrated with Podio, and then you’re going to get very frustrated, and then you’re going to have to attempt to move to something like Kajabi. That’s not easy when you’re trying to run your business moving platforms.
[00:34:52.030] – Jonathan Denwood
Now, with WordPress, you got fluent, but I see fluent as this competitor or offers even more customization and power than Kajabi. It’s the next step up from Kajabi. It’s Kajabi on steroids that gets you the active campaign functionality. But if you’re in that beginner or low intermediate level, having to work with Fluent is a little bit overkill. Well, what we are building at WP tonic, we’re not offering it to the public at the present moment, is we’ve built a podio alternative, a interface and functionality that’s easier to use than having to go and work with Fluent that enables you to do a newsletter plus the marketing optimization. There are plugin solutions in WordPress that that allows you to build a newsletter, but they don’t allow you to do the marketing optimization side. There are other alternatives to Fluent that you can use that we also provide, but they’re also pretty complicated. We’re testing a solution that has the benefits of Podio. There’s definitely, in my mind, and hopefully, Kirek, there’s a need for a middle space that enables you to do SMS, text, landing page, but it’s also a little bit easier than something that influence CRM.
[00:36:48.950] – Jonathan Denwood
What’s your thoughts about what I’ve just outlined?
[00:36:51.770] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, but the sweet spot is so hard to find, and I empathize with you in the development on this a great deal because no matter what you provide, there’s a certain element of people that are going to be like, Oh, I wish it did this, I wish it did that, I wish it did this. It’s like every time you say, I wish, you add complexity and confusion to the offer. There’s a real sweet spot to be found. Yeah, that middle ground is, I wanted to do everything.
[00:37:20.530] – Jonathan Denwood
It can’t, but you can’t. But what I thought is what we’re building at WP tonic could be the podium. But instead of having to ditch a platform, to actually move your whole membership website, the people that outgrow our podio offering-They can just expand. We just offer them Fluent CRM.
[00:37:42.490] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, they just expand.
[00:37:43.870] – Jonathan Denwood
They just go off to Fluent, and they don’t have to move their whole platform, which you know and I know is a nightmare, isn’t it?
[00:37:52.740] – Kurt von Ahnen
At times.
[00:37:55.550] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, it is, isn’t it? You’re trying to grow your… You got to the stage where it’s starting to really kick off, and then you’re getting frustrated with the limitations of something like Prodeo, which was great at the beginning because you wanted something that was just that to get on with it, folks. Then you have to jump ship in the same time when you really should be focussing even more, getting even more students, and you But your focus is going off to semi-manage the movement of your whole business to another platform. It ain’t great, is it, Kurt?
[00:38:41.510] – Kurt von Ahnen
No. Then a lot of these platforms make it very difficult to get your data out of them. It’s not as simple as just a WP all import, blah, blah, blah. You’ve got to get your data and then you’ve got to figure out how to add it to your WordPress upgrade. There’s challenges, absolutely. There’s some It’s agro, as you would say.
[00:39:02.060] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, but the way I see it, folks, it’s a bit like if you’re trying to learn to ride a bike. You could buy a bike that’s a three-wheeler. And you learn quick on the three-wheeler. But any child that learns on a three-wheeler, they want to junk it as quickly as possible because it’s not seen as the real bike. You want to go on a two. So the three-wheeler does the job. It gets you learning how to ride the bike. But you want to move on a real bike, just two wheels. Or you can buy stabilizers, but as soon as you learn to ride the bike, you want to take the stabilizers off as quick as possible. So you’re in that scenario. But like I say, that’s the thing you want to consider because When you’re using one of these powerful tools like Fluent CRM or the SAS equivalent, Active Campaign, they are enormously powerful. But where power comes, complexity comes. It can’t be avoided because their audience, the customers that they’re trying to fulfill, are the intermediate and advanced user base. Their focus is not on the beginner of marketing. Am I waffling now? Did that make some sense, actually, Kurt?
[00:40:42.320] – Kurt von Ahnen
That’s a little bit of Waffle, but that’s all right. The main focus is, how are we going to sell some Lifter LMS stuff, and do we need shopping carts to do it?
[00:40:51.000] – Jonathan Denwood
The other thing was landing pages. But if you’re utilizing something like Cadence, it comes with a whole library, and the system we’re building utilizes the power of cadence, and you have access to patterns and a library of landing pages, and you’ll be able to build your own as well, but you have access. You’ll be able to mix and move around. And the newsletter, it’s It’s still surprising in 2024, folks, that there’s still a lot of flex, as I call it, in this area. And there’s a lot of overlap with email marketing platforms that I’ve discussed, and with shopping carts and marketing automers, there’s so much overlap, and you can get really confused really quick. And it’s got nothing to do with WordPress. You get confused If you’re in the world, if you don’t want to use WordPress, if you want to use something like Wix or Squarespace, and you bolt on these third-party SaaS systems, it can get equally as confusing really quickly as well, can’t it?
[00:42:16.050] – Kurt von Ahnen
Absolutely.
[00:42:17.930] – Jonathan Denwood
I think that’s enough. Is there anything that we’ve not covered that you’d like to add?
[00:42:24.110] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I was just thinking about if we go back to the original subject of selling in Lifter LMS, there’s things that are going to come up as your project grows. It’s going to be maybe I have a group of people that are doing training on a course at the same time, and we would call that a cohort, right? And so Lifter LMS has cohorts built in so that you can copy, you can clone a course, assign it to a certain group of people at a certain time, and that is just for them. And then you can do that over and over. So there’s that cohort option and then groups. And I think it’s interesting that we’re talking about shopping carts today and Lifter LMS, because some people that really leverage the groups function with Lifter, the groups was a very manual process with Lifter. So somebody would say, I need to buy 50 seats for my company for this course. And you would say, okay, give me $10,000 and I’ll give you access to your own group with 50 seats in it. And you would We have to manually build that. Well, Chris at Lifter LMS gave up the ghost last week, and he put up a post on the Facebook page that said that he had used or seen a beta version of groups 2.0, and that’s supposed to include some type of central pay platform where somebody would say, Oh, I need 50 seats to this course, and it would automatically launch that course.
[00:43:53.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
I haven’t seen this work yet, but this is one of the things that people will leverage a shopping cart for frequently in selling courses.
[00:44:02.900] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t think you made it totally clear to me this is something that Lifter LMS is building.
[00:44:07.780] – Kurt von Ahnen
They’re building, yeah. Lifter LMS is developing a way to monetize the group and automate the group process. I’m very excited to see how that turns out, and I would never mention it on a podcast, except that Chris blew the whistle on himself this week and posted it on Facebook. I know it’s coming soon, and it’s one of the reasons I ended up having to add a short card or a woo-commerce so that people could pay for multiple seats for a course in one transaction. It’s interesting to see this take light. I don’t want to say anxious; I’m more excited. I’m excited to see how it turns out.
[00:44:45.100] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, it’s great news because I think that will make it much more powerful and a great tool. To summarize, if you’re not looking to do sophisticated marketing optimizations and have quite a large membership website, I think if you want to do upsells. You do have a physical or a digital product that’s outside the typical core structure, I think you’re going to be happy with SureCart, and that’s the route I would go down, folks, with Lifter LMS, and I would go down that route with LearnDash as well. But if you need the content protection side, the great news is that SureCart has a membership plugin called SureMember. Member, and we provide that as part of our hosting package, which deals with the LearnDash people. It’s a great mixture of using LearnDash with Sure members and SureCart. Because a lot of people don’t… They’re not in that need. They’re not in that position where they need wu commas. But if you’re the lifter person, you have much more that’s being built anyway. But if you’re looking to sell one-off digital products and that shortcut, either the free product, which works well, and the gross the grow at $19, you’ll be covered for quite a long time, a while.
[00:46:38.390] – Jonathan Denwood
It depends on the growth of your course and your business. But then, if you get to that stage, you can look at WooCommerce. You’re not on track. You could look at WooCommerce with Cartflows, who are the same company. You’ve got a lot of choices, a lot of options, haven’t you, Kurt? Yeah.
[00:47:01.230] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think the critical thing to note, Jonathan, is that deciding which way you generate revenue through your site is a somewhat important decision because changing your payment gateway case and shopping cards, especially if you have recurring payments in the mix, is very difficult. You can’t just take somebody with a recurring payment set up in Lifter LMS and swap that recurring payment into Woocommerce. That customer has to re-up. And there’s always a certain amount of attrition when you ask customers to re-up a recurring fee. So, could you take a moment to think it through? What do you want to do? What are your goals? Who’s your target audience today? Who’s your target audience a year, five years from now? And five years is an eternity on the internet, so maybe not that far. But try to make an educated decision up front because if you change your mind six months or a year in, some aggravation comes with that, and some of it is lost revenue. You want to think it through before you execute.
[00:48:04.960] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, that’s a great thing. I think that’s well put. So, Kurt, what’s the best way for people to learn more about you and get your advice?
[00:48:15.480] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, if it’s business, Manana Nomas leads to me. Manananomas. Com, Manana Nomas on X, Manana Nomas on Facebook. But if it’s to reach out personally, business to business professional, LinkedIn. LinkedIn is my jam. I’m the only Kurt von Ahnen on LinkedIn, which makes it easy to find. You know you got the right guy. Connect on LinkedIn, and I’ll get back to you.
[00:48:38.590] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s great. If you want to learn more about the Membership Machine show, like I said, join the Membership Machine Facebook group. It’s a great free resource. Or you could go over to the WP-Tonic website. You can book a total free consultation with me. If you’ve any questions or want any advice, I’ll be more than happy to chat with you. We will return with either Kirk or Harun or a guest next week. You’ll get some knowledge. I think it’s been a great show. Hopefully, I haven’t bored you or lost you. I think it’s been some great advice. We’ll see you next week, folks. Bye.
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