How to Integrate Website, Payment Gateway and LMS?

If you are planning to initiate an online training service, you may feel confused about where to start and how to set it up as soon as possible. You may not know what your website should contain due to lack of technical knowledge. How does the payment gateway work? How are the courses hosted on LMS? Above all, how do these applications get integrated for automated transactions?

The first thing you may need to do is to define and freeze your requirements without thinking whether it is possible or not. You need to share your requirements with the selected vendor and ask for a feasible report where they should mention what is possible and what is technically not possible to do. They should provide you with some alternative plans for achieving your ultimate requirements.

Website: 

You don’t need to create a separate website for online trainings. You can use an existing website; you can add additional pages regarding the online training. Your website should contain the overview of the training courses, which should be powerfully written in order to attract learners to buy the courses. You may include the following information on the website:

1. A brief description about the course.
2. Learning objectives
3. A promotional/demo video
4. Learners comments or testimonials on the course
5. Course duration and fees
6. Enrollment details
7. The profile of the trainer who developed the course content
8. Finally, you need to have the “Buy Now” button to enable the viewer to purchase the course online.

Payment Gateway:

Payment gateway is the third-party application, which will help you to create an online store to sell courses. They will take care of all the payment transactions securely in the background and transfer the payments to your registered bank account. They will also provide a refund option. You need to select a highly secure and trusted payment gateway service provider. There will be some difficulties in setting up an account because they will approve the account only if you are a valid customer. Before creating an account in payment gateway, first create the website pages and get ready with all the required documents. Payment gateway provides a very detailed document checklist. Your vendor should guide you in creating the account. You may select PayPal, CCAvenue, 2Checkout, and so on. Each service provider has their unique features and various costs. Select the one that meets your requirements. For example, PayPal does not accept credit card payment from certain countries or it does not have net banking facilities, whereas CCAvenue has.

Learning Management System (LMS):

You may go with Open-source or Commercial LMS for training delivery, based on your requirements and budget. You need to upload all the courses on the LMS and make it available for sale. This LMS will help you manage the users, courses and reports online. LMS design should match with the website design, so that learner will not get confused or feel insecure to purchase the course.

Integration of three applications: 

The website can be a standalone application, which will have only course details and respective “Buy Now” buttons to enable purchase. These “Buy now” buttons will be provided by the payment gateway. Learning management system should be integrated closely with the payment gateway so that all the transactions can be done automatically. The website is not required to get integrated with payment gateway or LMS.

The workflow of learners taking the course.

1. A learner comes to the website and reads the information of the course.
2. The interested learner clicks on the “Buy Now” button to purchase the course.
3. “Buy now” will take him to the LMS and for account registration if not a registered user. If already a registered user, the buyer will be directed to the payment gateway page.
4. Payment can be made using a credit card, debit card, net banking or using other methods.
5. Once the payment is done, the learner will get access to the course.

All these transactions can be done automatically and there is no need for any manual activity from the administrator. You will receive all transaction notifications from the applications. You can monitor users, course and payments online whenever you want.

Hope this information will help you get some understanding on how these three applications work and how they can be integrated to provide a complete solution.