Four blocks sell: Checkout Button, Product, Cart and Course Catalogue. They differ in how much choice the visitor gets, not in how the money moves. Prices, currencies, taxes and payment methods are all decided in your memberarea, so WordPress never holds any of it.
Which block for which page
| Page | Block | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A sales page for one course | Checkout Button | One decision, one button, straight to the checkout. |
| A page selling several things | Product plus Cart | Visitors collect first and pay once. |
| An overview of everything you teach | Course Catalogue | Covers, descriptions and prices without touching the page again when you add a course. |
The Course Catalogue deserves a note: it lists your published courses and shows a price only where a product in your memberarea actually grants that course. Courses without such a product appear without a price and without a button, which is what you want for free material. Tick Only courses that can be bought in the sidebar to hide them.
If one course is sold through several products, the catalogue shows the cheapest real price, including a pay-what-you-want minimum, and the button carries that price into the checkout.
What a purchase looks like
- The visitor presses your button. The checkout opens in an overlay on your page, served by your memberarea.
- They pay there. Your WordPress server is not involved and never sees card details.
- Your memberarea creates the order, the member and the access that comes with the product.
- Back on your site, the member signs in. Locked pages open, My Courses lists the new course, and the catalogue shows it as one they hold.
Step 4 is why sign-in is worth switching on even for a pure sales site: without it, a buyer has no way to prove on WordPress what they own, and you end up sending everybody to the memberarea instead.
A fresh purchase can take up to two minutes to show, because access answers are cached that long. Clear cached responses on the settings screen skips the wait while you are testing.
Try it yourself once
Place the block, open the page in a private window, and walk through a real purchase with a real card, then refund it in your memberarea. It is the only way to see what your buyers see: the checkout, the confirmation, the mail, and what the member area looks like the first time they open it.
While you are there, check the two places a buyer can get stuck: a product that is not published, and a course that no product grants. Both look fine in the editor and fail on the page.
What stays in your memberarea
Orders, invoices, refunds, VAT and payout details live in your memberarea, not in WordPress. There is no order list here to keep in sync, no shop plugin to maintain, and no second place where a price could be wrong.
The same is true of the buyer: they are a member of your memberarea who happens to have bought on your WordPress page. Everything you do with members, groups, emails or affiliates works exactly as it does for people who bought anywhere else.