Choosing an e-Learning e-Commerce Platform (and How to Create Courses That Sell)

 

Businesses and corporate entities are taking a big cue from the education industry and realizing the impact e-Learning and online training can have for their employees and their level of competitiveness, but even newer on the corporate e-Learning landscape is the concept of selling training and development content.

Many learning management platforms, like eLeaP, offer e-Commerce options that let people actually pay you for your content.

So how do you know which platform is going to be best for your needs?

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Consider some of the following features, which are a necessity when it comes to selling your online courses:

  • Versatility, flexibility and scalability. When you’re shopping around for an e-Learning platform that’s also going to provide e-Commerce opportunities look for an option that provides lots of room for scalability and flexibility. You want your platform to be able to grow with your organization easily, and you don’t want to be limited in your capabilities. For example, let’s say you find a great platform that caters to very small businesses, but then over time your business grows and your platform simply isn’t able to support this growth. Rather than starting small go ahead and look for an option that can be scaled to meet any needs you may have, both presently and in the future.
  • This is a feature that ties in a bit with what’s mentioned above, but in addition to overall scalability your platform should be customizable in a variety of ways so that you can brand your e-Learning content to your business. You need to find a platform that offers ease-of-use in the design customization process so that you can present a streamlined image to your customers.
  • Customer service. This is a big one—if you’re going to be selling your content you need to have a strong support system standing behind you. Look for an LMS platform that delivers not only strong products but also strong service so that both your employees and your customers will have access to the information and troubleshooting that may be needed.
  • Ease-of-use. No matter how great your overall concept and content might be if it’s not easy for your customers to use your e-Learning they’re not going to be satisfied. Your platform provider may offer advanced design tools but ultimately it still needs to be intuitive and user-friendly with a simple-but-effective interface.

How to Maximize Your e-Commerce Profitability

Once you’ve selected your ideal LMS platform you may be wondering how you can go on to sell your content and build a customer base.

Consider these tips:

  • Don’t just create random content in the hopes that it will sell—be strategic as you would with any other business endeavor. Before you start designing your e-Commerce products take a long, hard look at the needs that you see around you. You want to create content that solves a problem, so think about people you’ve spoken with—your customers, employees, competitors—what are the problems they most frequently face and how can you provide them with online training that will help them solve these problems?
  • While you want to appeal to a broad range of people at the same time you don’t want to try to create e-Learning on topics that are already oversaturated. Selling your online training is really about finding that balance between a niche market and something that will have broad appeal. You can’t go too far in either direction.
  • Always put your potential customers first during the design process. Don’t think about what you would buy—think about what your customers will buy and the think about how you can make the process easiest for them. If you’re designing e-Commerce content for a low-technology audience your approach is obviously going to be different as compared to designing a course aimed at IT professionals.
  • Don’t create it and forget it. As with other products you have to market your e-Learning content if you expect to do well. Some LMS platforms including eLeaP will provide you with tools that will help you with marketing your products, so this may be something to consider in the platform selection process.

Have you created content for e-Commerce purposes? If so we’d love to hear what your customers respond most favorably to and what mistakes you’ve made along the way. Share your thoughts!

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