Creating Upgrade Products in Zippy Courses

Creating “Upgrade” Products in Zippy Courses

Sometimes, your educational curricula is too complex to be contained in a single course. You may have “beginner” courses that feed into more advanced courses, or upselling and upgrading options that you want only existing students to be able to use.u

Zippy Courses gives you some special tools for handling unique course configurations, which give you fine-level control over the content that your students can purchase access to. We do this through a setting in Zippy Courses called Edit Existing Course Access. This tool has two primary features: Require pre-existing access, and Revoke access when purchased.

Requiring existing access for your Product

By default, any person can purchase one of your products in Zippy Courses. In most cases, this is exactly what you want. That default setting keeps the barrier for entry into your course low, and makes it easy for any student to register for the course they want.

But what if you want to create prerequisites for your course? For example, you may have a Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing course on your site, which then feeds students into an Advanced Guide to Email Marketing. Your second course might assume that a student knows everything that was taught in the beginner’s guide. Or, you may simply want to offer a discount that only people who purchased your beginner’s guide can use. In either case, the Require Pre-Existing Access option will let you control who can purchase your product.

To begin, first create your Zippy Courses product by going to Zippy Courses → Products, and clicking Add New. Then, set up your product the same way you would a normal Zippy Courses product.

Need a refresher on creating products in Zippy Courses? Read our guide to creating and selling products here.

Once your price and course are set up, click on the Advanced tab of the Product editor.

Then, scroll down to the Edit Existing Course Access box, and select the checkbox labeled Allow this product to view and modify a student's existing course access. Then you will see a series of additional options for your course.

The first option available lets you Require Pre-Existing Access to your course. Enable this option, and then select the Course and Tier that a student needs to own in order to purchase this course. Then click Update or Publish to save your changes.

Once you’ve done that, your product will automatically be protected. When a student tries to view this product, Zippy Courses will check if the student owns the correct course, and if they do not, they will be prompted with a warning message.

If a student logs in to an account that already owns the required course, then they will be able to checkout like they would using a normal Zippy Courses product.

Revoking Access When Purchasing

Sometimes, you want to hide certain content when a student purchases a product. For example, if you have a “Free” Tier of your product, you may include some special sales or promotional messages that encourage your student to purchase the full version of your product. You would want students to see those lessons when they join your Free Tier, but you don’t want to prompt your students to purchase your course if they’ve already done so.

For example, a lesson with a message like this is a great way to upsell your students from a free course to a paid course:

But once your student purchases your paid course, that message can just look awkward and out-of-place:

This is where the Revoke Access When Purchased option can give you more fine control of your course content. To enable this option, enable this setting and then set the Course/Tier you would like to revoke upon purchase:

Then, from the student’s perspective, they will no longer see your “Free” tier of content after purchasing the “Paid” tier of course content. So if you have upsell prompts/lessons in your course, these messages will disappear when a student upgrades to the Paid version of your Course.