LMS with e-commerce?

Hi, Craig -- Thanks for reaching out! And while I will defer to your fellow community members to share their specific recommendations on the providers they prefer, I did want to pass along this article that may be of interest: How To Choose The Right Learning Management System (LMS) for You. 

And to reach a larger portion of the community, you would also be welcome to post over in our Building Better Courses forum, as well. :)

Thanks, Christie - will do!

Hi Craig,

I am in the middle of migrating from Litmos to another LMS, and a main reason was the e-commerce capabilities, so I have some pretty good insight here.

Your experience with any of these services depends greatly on your needs. For example, here is a list of the major features we were looking for during our search:

• Automated order processing  for individuals as well as groups
• Clean, modern interface
• Automated account or access termination after 1 year
• Geared towards sales, has e-commerce abilities
• Discounts, promo codes, volume discounts
• Bundling courses into one curriculum or product
• Manage, schedule, and execute ILT sessions, including calendar invites and waitlists
• Automated reminders X months and X weeks prior to account expiration 

The only two that fit our needs in this regard, to our liking, were LearnUpon and Skilljar. Also please note that the system we are looking for is intended to serve at least 5 of our business units, all with different needs, so we were definitely looking for something with a wide range of capabilities.

But getting back to the systems you've mentioned, here are my thoughts, as I had done research on Docebo and Absorb, and currently use Litmos:

Docebo: Very well put together system, the eCommerce capabilities are adequate, and the course creation and management are pretty good. The interface is very modern. The extent of the features was somewhat limited, which took it out of the running.

Litmos: Has a huge variety of features and customization available, and it pretty intuitive to use. I actually would have loved to stay with Litmos except for the price and what is, in my opinion, an inadequate and unimpressive e-commerce capability. It works, don't get me wrong, and for the right needs, it will be fine. But the store is a simple list with a buy now buttons attached, which takes you to a shopping cart that lets you pay with PayPal. You can extend it by integrating Shopify and using that as a store page, giving you another account to manage. And in almost no circumstances can you enroll a group of users efficiently, unless you have the time and resources to develop a solution using the API. Again though, group registration through ecommerce was a huge need for us.

Absorb: I was very impressed with almost all aspects of Absorb, and I find it to be one of the most progressive of the LMSs that I have seen. They have a number of options available for all of the needs you might have and can accomodate a number of needs. I believe the only reason we walked away from working with Absorb was the pricing. Of the 3 mentioned, this still has my vote.

Hope this helps!

What a thorough reply, Bill! Many thanks for taking the time to spell out all of that info for Craig, and others who will surely benefit when they encounter this discussion in the future, as well! 

Yes, thanks for the detailed reply, Bill - very helpful!

Glad to see that this is still assisting users Craig :) Thanks for chiming in to share.