Membership Sites, Ecommerce and Moodle

Delivering quality content to your visitors can be made easier and more effective by packaging your paid or membership section in Moodle. Moodle is an open-source Course Management System, used by thousands of schools, organizations and businesses worldwide. The software is very flexible and can be integrated easily into your own membership and payment system.

Moodle was written for the needs of educators, not internet marketers. Most of the help you need to configure Moodle will come from their excellent forums, but if you are looking for e-commerce and affiliate marketing integration answers, you won’t find much help.

I have found one solution that has shown some promise - using Moodle with a hosted shopping carts like E-Junkie. E-Junkie allows you to put shopping cart buttons anywhere - including your Moodle site. Simply pass your Moodle course number and logged in user id in your E-Junkie cart buttons - then configure E-Junkie to IPN to a script that enrolls your user with his chosen course number in Moodle.

I’ve been testing this and it seems to be working well, but keep in mind that unless you want to learn to write modules for Moodle - this type of e-commerce setup is really just a hack, and won’t be trouble-free during upgrades, etc.

Stay tuned for more on this, I may release some detailed instructions as premium content - leave a comment if you are interested.