Selling exams with WooCommerce - Plugixa Exam

WooCommerce takes the money; Plugixa Exam decides who may sit what. Prices, carts, payment gateways, taxes, invoices and refunds all stay in WooCommerce, exactly as your shop already works. What this adds is the other half: when an order is paid, the customer may sit the exam - for as long, and as many times, as they bought.

It needs WooCommerce 9.0 or later, and works with both the classic checkout and the Checkout block, and with WooCommerce’s high-performance order storage.

Selling an exam in three steps

1. Make the exam paid. Open the exam, and on its Access tab, under Who may sit this exam, switch on Enrolment required. From now on only people who hold access - bought, or granted by you - may start it. You, and anybody who can edit exams, are always let in, so you can still preview it.
2. Create a product. On the exam’s Sales tab press Create product, give it a name, a price, an access period and a number of attempts. That makes an ordinary WooCommerce product - virtual, sold one at a time - with the exam already attached. Open it in WooCommerce afterwards to add a description, images, a sale price or anything else a product can have.
3. Put it in front of people. The exam’s own page now shows the price and a Buy now button to anybody who may not sit it yet, and the catalogue shows the price on its card.

Prefer to start from WooCommerce? Any simple or variable product has an Exam access tab: pick the exams, the access period and the attempts there. That tab is also where you make a pass, one product that covers a whole subject or every exam (see Passes below).

What a product sells

A variable product can sell the same exam on different terms - 30 days for €19, 90 days for €29 - by setting a period and attempts on each variation. A variation left blank uses the product’s.

What was sold is what the customer keeps. The terms are copied onto the order when it is placed. Shortening the access period on a product next month changes what new customers buy; it never reaches back into an order already paid.

Passes: one product for many exams

A product does not have to name its exams one by one. The Covers setting on the product’s Exam access tab has three choices:

The last two are passes. A pass covers exams added later too: an exam you publish next month, or move into a subject the pass covers, is covered from that moment, with nothing to update. A pass only matters for exams with Enrolment required switched on; every other exam stays open to everyone, pass or not.

A pass has one more setting, Attempts count:

Four common packages

Monthly access works by buying again: when the customer buys the pass before the month is over, the new month runs on from the end of the current one (see Renewals below), and the reminder email tells them a few days before it ends. Automatic monthly charging through the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension is not supported yet. A pass bought that way is never granted twice, but it is not tested end to end, so we do not recommend it until it is.

On the exam page, the exam’s own products are offered first and the passes that cover it underneath, each saying what it covers (All exams, Exams in Nursing). The price on the catalogue card is the exam’s own price; a pass’s price only shows there when nothing sells the exam on its own.

A pass is edited on its product in WooCommerce. An exam’s Sales tab lists the passes that cover it, but cannot add the exam to a pass or take it off one.

When access starts and stops

Access follows the order, whatever its status becomes and however it got there:

A partial refund of money only - a goodwill discount - takes nothing away. Only refunding the line itself, or the whole order, does.

Orders that contain only exams complete themselves as soon as they are paid, so you never have to press Complete on something with nothing to ship. Access starts at payment either way.

Somebody halfway through a paper can always finish it. If their access ends or the order is refunded while they are sitting it, the paper they already started runs to the end. They simply cannot start another.

Accounts

Access belongs to a person, so a cart holding an exam requires an account at checkout - a guest order would have nobody to give the exam to. Carts without an exam follow your shop’s usual guest-checkout rules.

Access goes to the customer the order belongs to, never to whoever happens to own the billing email address. WooCommerce lets anybody register with any address, so matching by email would let a stranger claim somebody else’s purchase. An order with no customer holds its access as Awaiting a customer until you attach one in WooCommerce.

What customers see

• On the exam page, a clear offer: each way to buy it, its terms and its price. After their access has run out it says Renew your access; after their attempts are used, Get more attempts. Somebody who holds access sees Your access runs until 12 December · Attempts left: 2 of 3 instead - counting everything they hold, so after an early renewal it shows the new end date and every attempt left, and adds 1 of them must be used by … when the older purchase ends first.
• While their order waits for payment - a bank transfer on hold, or an order they have not finished paying - the exam page says Your order is waiting for payment with the order number, instead of offering it again. An unpaid order gets a Pay for this order button. After 30 days the offer comes back.
• On the product page, a What’s included list of the exams, their time limits and pass marks. A pass says what it covers and that exams added later are included, and lists the first 25 exams by name.
• After paying, Start exam and Access until … under the line on the thank-you page, in their order history, and in the order emails. A pass says Choose an exam and links to the exam catalogue.
• In their account, a My exams tab right after Orders, listing everything they bought, what is left of it, and a button back in.
• A reminder email a few days before their access ends, unless they have already renewed. Edit its wording under Notifications.

The offer on the exam page is the same for every visitor, so the page can still be served from a page cache.

Renewals and buying more

Buying again adds to what somebody already has, and never wastes it:

• A renewal bought before the current access ends runs on from the current end date: ten days left plus a new 30 days is 40 days.
• It is usable immediately - somebody who has used up their attempts is never told to wait for access they have just paid for.
• When several purchases are held at once, the one that ends soonest is used first. A pass and a single exam count as two purchases here.
• A pass renews a pass of the same kind, and an exam renews that exam. Buying one exam while a monthly pass is running gives that exam its own period from today, not the pass’s end date.

Somebody who already holds access that never ends, with unlimited attempts, cannot add the same exam to their cart again - there is nothing more to buy. The same goes for a pass they already hold for life, and for a single exam that a lifetime pass already covers.

Refunds and certificates

By default, refunding a purchase withdraws the certificates it paid for - only the ones earned by attempts that purchase paid for, never a certificate earned another way. The certificate is withdrawn, not deleted: its verification page says so, and you can restore it from Certificates. Switch this off under Settings → WooCommerce → After a sale if you treat refunds as a goodwill gesture.

Attempts and results are never deleted by a refund.

Settings → WooCommerce

Support tools

• People → Enrolments lists every purchase and grant, with a link straight to the order. Change the end date or the attempts, revoke, restore, or grant access by hand. See Enrolments.
• The order screen in WooCommerce has an Exam access box showing what that order holds - or Access starts when this order is paid on an unpaid order that sells an exam - and a Resync exam access button that re-reads the order.

Troubleshooting

What to do next

• Manage and grant access by hand: Enrolments PRO
• Decide who else may sit an exam: Access and enrollment
• Tell other systems about a sale: Webhooks - enrolment.granted and enrolment.revoked