What is the difference between a course and a membership?

The course screen is the membership screen

Courses are built under Assets, then Courses. systeme.io's help centre documents no separate area beside it for memberships.

systeme.io's own guide to that screen opens by saying it will show you how to create your own membership site. The two words point at the same feature.

The word turns up again once somebody buys. The guide to selling a course says the customer receives an email with instructions to set a password and reach the course's membership area.

What actually makes it a membership

The recurring part comes from the price plan, not from the product. A price plan is set on the order form when you add a digital product, and there are three types of it.

• One-time payment. An amount, paid once.
• Subscription. A cost, an interval between payments, and an optional trial period entered in days, weeks, months or years. Enter 0 for no trial. systeme.io's example values are $20/month with an interval of every 1 month.
• Payment plan. The same shape as a subscription, but with a fixed number of payments. Five monthly payments, then it stops.

Sell a course on a one-time plan and people call it a course. Sell the same course on a subscription and they call it a membership. Nothing about the course itself changes.

The setting to check before you sell one

By default a customer is given access to the resource as soon as the subscription order is created, even if the payment has not arrived. systeme.io does this because processing on a method such as PayPal or GoCardless can take up to 7 days, and it does not want to hold up somebody who has paid.

The alternative sits under your profile picture, in Settings, then Payment settings. The setting has two values, and the one an account starts on is Grant immediate access after creating an order. The other reads Grant access only after receiving the first payment.

Where a community fits in

A community is a different asset, built under Assets, then Communities, then Create. The popup asks for a name, a domain, a URL path, and whether messages are validated automatically or moderated by hand.

What you get is a dashboard with six tabs: Home for posts and topics, Search, Members, Settings, Scheduled posts and Topics. A community can be public, where anyone can join after signing up, or private, where only invited members get in.

Invitations are not instant membership. The Members tab splits into four: Members, Pending invitations, Expired invitations, and Banned members. An invitation expires after 7 days and moves to the expired tab, where it can be sent again.

It is sold the same way a course is. On the order form you pick the Digital product offer type, add a resource, and choose Communities.

One difference is worth knowing before you price it. A customer who cancels their subscription automatically loses community access, and a refunded one-time purchase revokes it immediately.

Which one do I want?

• Recorded lessons somebody works through: a course.
• Posts, replies and a member list: a community.
• Both on one payment: one digital product can hold more than one resource. systeme.io's own guide to selling a course recommends adding a tag alongside the course as a second resource.