Tip #4: Simplify course registrations with flexible payment models

Tip #4: Simplify course registrations with flexible payment models



Hi everyone!
Welcome to another tips and tricks post from TrainerCentral. In today's article, we will learn how to leverage multiple payment model options and promote your online courses to a larger learner community.

How can you use pricing options effectively?

Your course fee is a major factor in determining the demand and how popular the course is. With TrainerCentral, you have the flexibility to price your courses using five different models.
You can configure more than one type of pricing model for the same course. This gives your learners the flexibility to choose what works best for them.



For instance, in the following image, the course "Advanced Leadership" has two types of active payment options. The learners can choose to enroll in the course by paying an one-time fee up front or select the subscription model to try out the course for a period of time.

Bonus: If you need to pay taxes on your course's income, you can easily calculate tax separately by including the percentage while configuring your course's pricing model. This information can also be used to calculate tax exemptions.

What different pricing models are available in TrainerCentral?

TrainerCentral offers five distinct payment options. Each one is explained in detail below.


Free
As the name implies, this plan gives users free access to the entire course. This is a good option to draw in new students.
If necessary, a payment option can be added to the course any time. While enabling this option would require new registrants to pay for the course, any existing learners who accessed the course when it was free will be allowed to continue in that model.

One-time payment
With the one-time payment option, your learners can pay the set price once to access the course. When you set up the one-time payment model, you can specify how long they will have access to the course. You can allow learners to have lifetime access to a course by not specifying "Enrollment duration access" while configuring the pricing model.

Example: Let's say you want to give your learners more payment options to choose from. You could create two different one-time payment options, one granting access for three months and another granting lifetime access, and charge different prices for each.

Subscription
As the name implies, the subscription model allows you to set a periodic fee for learners to pay for continued access. You can set the fee basis to weekly or monthly—whichever works better for your course content. Your learner will have the option to end their subscription at any time if they decide to not continue with the course.

Payment plan
This pricing model allows your learners to pay the course fee in a set number of installments spread over a period of time. You can customize the number and amount of the payments.
Payment plans and subscriptions differ in one way. In payment plan, the learner retains access to the course after the total fee is paid. The subscription, on the other hand, requires the learner to continue paying the periodic subscription amount to continue accessing the course.

Part payment
With this pricing model, you can let learners pay in parts or percentages of the total course fee. You can define the total course fee, the number of terms, the term cycle (days, weeks, months or years), and the percentage of fee to be paid every term. For example, you could require 30% of the total course fee in the first payment, and the remaining 70% in the second payment.
After completing their payments, learners can access the course until your specified access period ends.

Note: When using the Part Payment and Payment Plan models, we recommend also using the Drip Schedule feature to release your course lessons to learners at a controlled pace over a set period of time.

We hope you find these tips useful. If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments below.

Learn more about Pricing and Coupons.

You can find our previous Tips and Tricks posts here.

Stay tuned for more useful articles from TrainerCentral!