How to Activate Subscriptions Using Stripe.
In another article, how to Activate Stripe, we discussed how to activate your Stripe on Onlinecoursehost.com.
In this article, we will discuss the following:
- Types of Subscription Plans.
- Activating the subscription plans.
- What if my country does not support stripe?
Types of Subscription Plans
There are four kinds of subscription plans on Onlinecoursehost.com, they are:
1. Monthly Plan: This plan gives your subscribers access to all your content and is charged on a monthly basis. The access to your content is revoked if your user does not renew their subscription plan after one month.
2. Yearly Plan: Just like the monthly plan, this plan gives your subscribers access to all your courses and is charged on a yearly basis. The access to your content is revoked if your user does not renew their subscription plan after one year.
3. Lifetime Plan: With lifetime access, your users get access, to all your content, forever, with no subscriptions involved.
The Lifetime plan is shown next to the monthly and yearly plans, and it's mostly meant for making the yearly subscription price look smaller next to it.
Lifetime prices make sense because every customer that uses subscriptions has an expected average lifetime value, so if you set your lifetime value way above the expected lifetime value, it is still considered okay.
4. Team Plan: The team plan is exactly like monthly and lifetime plans, except they are for a group of persons and not just for individuals.
You can also enter the number of individuals who are purchasing the team plan in the field 'enter team size' and this will automatically calculate the price of the plan as shown below.
You can also edit the team plan by using the Edit Plans button in the top right corner of the page.
Activating the subscription plans
Subscriptions can only be done using Stripe, as PayPal is only for one-time payments. Therefore, the first step would be to activate Stripe.
Now that Stripe is active, you can go ahead and activate subscriptions, also known as memberships.
- In order to get started, click on the Subscriptions tab, fill in the price for your plans, and click Activate Plans.
- Then go ahead and select either the monthly, yearly, or lifetime plan, and edit your plans one after the other.
- Proceed to fill in the Title of the plan, the price of the plan, and the plan features.
- Next, you want to input the price for your monthly subscription. The price will be displayed in the currency you have chosen for your website under Admin => Settings => General => Currency. On this screen, you will also see all the currencies supported by Stripe.
- Then you may want to add features your student will get when they subscribe to this particular plan. You can also arrange the order of the plan features by clicking and dragging the sandwich menu button.
Once you are done editing your plan, go ahead and click the Save Plan button.
You can repeat this for the yearly and lifetime plans.
Once Subscriptions are active, your students will see this page below when they click on subscriptions:
When your students click the take this course button, they are redirected to the Stripe checkout page and are expected to follow the process.
When they click the subscribe now button, they get redirected to your Stripe subscriptions page.
Note: You can remove the subscriptions screen from your landing page by simply using the Admin screen => Settings => General => School Details, then toggle the 'Disable Subscription screen' slider.
When it comes to subscriptions, Stripe is the best option, and it's also the only gateway available for subscriptions on the platform.
Please see our related article on how to create subscription coupons here.
What if my country does not support Stripe?
If your country does not support Stripe yet, you can either take payments externally from the platform and follow the steps in this link to manually enroll students for your courses; or you can simply use the credit card option or other options available with PayPal in your country.
Please see the list of countries supported by Stripe here.
With this simple guide, you are ready to set up subscriptions for your students and start taking payments for your courses via Stripe.