How to set up Multi-Pay option for customers [solution]

[italymadeeasy]

Hi there, we spent months trying to figure out how to allow customers to pay for courses over a period of time. The challenge was that using a Subscription approach would not work. The idea of a subscription is that it "ends" when the payments stop coming. Instead, we just wanted to customer to be able to spread out the payment of an expensive course into 3, 6, or 12 payments (months). Everyone said it was impossible to do this with WPLMS and WooCommerce. Even WPLMS themselves, and my two developers. But I got creative and this is a solution that works, and I thought I'd share it here. It works for this setup: WPLMS, WooCommerce, WooCommerce Subscriptions, WooCommerce Memberships, WPLMS WooCommerce Subscriptions addod, WPLMS WooCommerce Memberships addon. 1) Create a product as a simple subscription. Set up the type of payments you want to collect, trial etc. Anything you want! DO NOT associate any course to this product. We are only using this product to start the recurring Subscription. Link this Product with the Membership we are going to set up in the next next. This is done in the GRANT ACCESS section of the product. 2) Create a Membership and set the Duration to a huge number of years. Like 10 or 20! This is because, for whatever reason this approch does not work with "Unlimited Membership". Specify which product gives access to this Membership (not sure this step is essential). DO NOT associate any course to this membership (you will see that it's not possibile even if you tried!) 3) Go to the Course you want to sell with installments (the 3, 6, or 12 months, ot whatever period you chose in step 1) and find the setting for WooCommerce Membership. Enter the name of the membership from step 2. Done. Now a user can purchase one of your course. Pay the first installment today (or start a free trial) and they will be charged for all subsequent payments. At the end of the payment the Subscription will expire (nothig left to pay) but the Membership will remain for 20 years, thus leaving access to the course. The user has basically bought a course! Should the user not finish the payments, have failed payments etc, the Membership will be paused or cancelled and access to the course revoked. If the user manually cancels the Subscription, they will keep access to the course for the prepaid period (the current month, for example). Their membership will go into Pending Cancellation mode and, at the end of that period.. they will lose access to the course. This is the only set up that seems to work. That is, it's the only way to ensure the user does not keep the course if they stop paying! Good luck with this! Have fun!

[italymadeeasy]

Hello again, I have created a sort of tutorials for this solution so other WPLMS users can benefit and apply this system! https://wplms.io/support/forums/topic/how-to-set-up-multi-pay-option-for-customers-solution/

[italymadeeasy]

Testing this again to be sure. Will update when done!

[Diana]

@italymadeeasy Thank you for your efforts. Please post after checking:)

[italymadeeasy]

I can confirm that this works! You can now offer multi-pay option to your customers, allowing them to pay for a course oevr a period of time! Sure, issues remain in relation to, for example, some of the emails WooCommerce will send your customer. For example, at the end of the payment subscription (last payment made) the customer will receive an email invoice saying that "their subscription has expired" which will surely confuse them! You can mitigate this with your autoresponder, making sure everything is well communicated prior to these auto emails!

[Diana]

@italymadeeasy Thanks for confirming here and updating us. Closing this topic.

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