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Subscriptions advice for first time implementation

  • 2 July 2024
  • 6 replies
  • 101 views

We are implementing Docebo as our first LMS, and are excited to launch it to our external customers in the coming months. 

We will have two categories of classes:

  1. Free
  2. All others will require a subscription.

It should not be possible to buy an individual class. It seems that Docebo doesn’t support this use case very well without some less-than-ideal workarounds. I’m hopeful somebody in this community has some creative ideas or can help us see that we’re overlooking a clean solution.

Here are the limitations as we understand them now. In order for any class to appear in the subscription, it has to be on-sale and therefore the class must have an associated price. However, we don’t want to sell individual classes, so the price for the individual class is misleading. We would like the price shown in the catalog to either show “Free” or “Requires Subscription” (or similar text). We know that AWS is doing this https://explore.skillbuilder.aws/learn/external-ecommerce but it requires considerable customization via CSS and javascript as we understand.

From what I’ve seen this community is strong and creative and would love to learn of any ideas or experience you have.

 

6 replies

anne.bucci
Rank
Userlevel 3

@harnish17 Congratulations on implementing your first LMS! Add external users and ecommerce is very exciting and adopting the subscription model will provide options for your learners.

A course needs to have e-commerce associated with it mainly due to catalog visibility.  If a user has access to the catalog, they can enroll in the courses or learning plans freely if there is no associated cost. One option that you could do will utilize some CSS but works well so that you do not need to add a price to each of your courses or learning plans.

First, you must ensure that none of the courses or learning plans are in a catalog that the user would have visibility to. When the user is on the Subscriptions page and they click on What’s Included they will see the courses and learning plans and be able to enroll in them if they click on the cards. 

You can use the below CSS to make those cards non-clickable.  This would ensure they cannot enroll in the courses or learning plans.  However, this will also prevent them from accessing the Description so you will need to decide if the option will work in your scenario.  

The CSS code to make the cards not clickable (reminder use CSS at your own discretion and future updates could change the effect) - 

#bundle-courses .ui-cards-grid-slot {
    pointer-events: none !important;
}

As you mentioned, the AWS pages are heavily customized and that is how they achieved the Requires Subscription to appear on the cards.

harnish17
Rank

Thanks @anne.bucci for the suggestion. Unfortunately, I don’t think this will work for us. We want all the subscription classes to be visible. We will have many free courses also available, and I believe it is unintuitive that they would need to go to subscriptions to be able to see that we have many more courses available than just the ones that are free. Also, our subscription is over $1000 per user per year so I think it will hurt sales of the subscription if customers cannot see the details of the classes they’re paying for. 

Are there any development plans to be able to support a use case like ours? It doesn’t seem like this would be rare. 

anne.bucci
Rank
Userlevel 3

A couple of options that I have seen implemented:

  1.  Make all courses $1000 and add information that a subscription can be purchased instead of a single course (I know you said single courses can’t be purchased, but if the price is high enough perhaps it would dissuade them from purchasing). 
  2. Purchase the course at $1000 then create a manual transaction (or use APIs) to assign a subscription license. 
  3. Create an HTML page that lists course titles and descriptions of included subscriptions and link to the subscription plan page for purchase.

I am not aware of any plans to add this functionality, but you can contact your Account Manager if you would like to look into paid customization possibilities.

harnish17
Rank

Hi Anne, we’ve been exploring some additional ideas that get closer to our ideal solution. I see there are just 2 things we need for a minimum viable solution:

1) Prevent a learner from buying a single course. We accomplished this with css by hiding the panel in the course description that allows paying for a single class. (done!)

2) On the card for each course with a price, replace the price “$1234” with “Requires Subscription”. We’ve been told this can be done with Javascript, but don’t see a way to use javascript with Docebo. Any suggestions? 

anne.bucci
Rank
Userlevel 3

@harnish17 Injecting Javascript into your platform requires Docebo approval.  You can reach out to your AM for more information on that process.

Here is CSS that might work for you.  You can place the subscription courses in a specific catalog and replace “16” in this code with that catalog ID.

/* Adds "Requires Subscription" before the price */

.ui-carousel:has(a[href*="16"]) .ui-card-price-enrollment-status .ui-card-flex-slot span:before { visibility: visible; content: "REQUIRES SUBSCRIPTION"; }

/* Hides the price */ .ui-carousel:has(a[href*="16"]) .ui-card-price-enrollment-status .ui-card-flex-slot span { visibility: hidden; }

 

 

harnish17
Rank

Thank you @anne.bucci! I tested this and it seems to work well for the public facing catalog as a short term solution. The only reason it will not be a long term solution is that eventually we will mix free and subscription classes in a single catalog. For now, though each catalog contains only free or only subscription classes so this works well.

It doesn’t seem to work on the pages a learner sees after they login or in the subscription pages “what’s included” view. Is there a way to do this with CSS as well?

For those who may see this in the future, it wasn’t immediately clear to me how to get the catalog ID. This page explains how: 

 

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