The Great eLearning Migration

The 51% revenue opportunity your competitors don’t want you to see

While optimizing course content is important, the smartest eLearning companies are rewriting the rules of acquisition and retention. They’ve discovered that great learning content isn’t enough anymore. Subscription platform choice determines who wins. Yet most companies are stuck trying to sell through platforms built to publish free content, not execute commerce.

The timing for making the switch to eCommerce couldn’t be better. With the Epic Games vs. Apple ruling opening new paths to bypass 15-30% iOS and Google app store fees and the mobile learning market exploding to $180 billion by 2028, eLearning companies finally have the opportunity to reclaim control of their economics across every channel.

eLearning companies migrating from legacy CMS and billing systems to modern eCommerce and subscription platforms are seeing up to 51% revenue increases. Here’s the playbook they’re using and why waiting costs millions annually.

“Migrating to a modern eCommerce platform has been a game-changer. We’ve seen meaningful lifts in conversion, better retention, and a smoother learner experience end-to-end.”

– Josh Rose, VP and GM, AOP

Three transformational revenue opportunities for eLearning leaders

Our survey of 500 consumers and analysis of 650 digital subscription businesses reveal major opportunities to drive profitable growth. This white paper, the second in our digital series, focuses specifically on three transformational opportunities for eLearning companies.

1. Unlock Commerce-Grade Conversion Rates: Leading companies are leveraging commerce-grade conversion optimization to achieve up to 36% higher enrollment rates while dramatically improving the student experience from first click to course completion. Already, 24% of eLearning companies have adopted eCommerce platforms, fueling a broader trend that now encompasses 17% of all digital product subscriptions.
2. Supercharge Student LTV: Modern subscription platforms unlock powerful growth tools that legacy systems simply can’t match. From intelligent cancel flows that save 24% of at-risk revenue to A/B testable incentives that lift GMV by 9%, leading eLearning companies are systematically optimizing every touchpoint in the student journey.
3. Reduce Costs and Accelerate Innovative Velocity: Fragmented systems and homegrown solutions drive up Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by up to 33%, amounting to almost $50M in wasted spend over five years for a $500M business, while preventing teams from focusing on growth initiatives. The most successful eLearning businesses have redirected resources from infrastructure maintenance to growth initiatives to drive 10% more annual revenue every year, according to Ordergroove research.

Many eLearning companies believe they’ve mastered their trajectory. Course content is world-class, instructors are experts, and the curriculum delivers tangible outcomes. Yet a hidden bottleneck is throttling growth: their learning platforms weren’t built to convert visitors into paying, recurring students.

While many companies have perfected the learning experience, leaders have perfected the subscriber experience. They’re winning market share not because their content is superior, but because their platform architecture treats student acquisition and retention as the revenue-critical process it is.

This reality cuts across the entire industry. Young, fast-moving eLearning companies discover their growth trajectory suddenly hitting a ceiling when their billing platforms can’t keep pace with their ambition, limiting how they price, package, and deliver offerings. Meanwhile, established players find that the infrastructure that powered their initial success has calcified into their biggest constraint. Whether you’re disrupting or defending, your commerce and subscription platforms determine whether you accelerate or stagnate.

The industry is experiencing what Marcus Andrews calls “strategic compression” as multiple forces converge to create a narrow window for competitive advantage. As leaders migrate to eCommerce ecosystems, mobile learning is rocketing toward $180 billion by 2028, with a quarter of online learners already studying primarily on mobile devices. This represents more than market growth; it’s a fundamental shift in user expectations. Students now demand Amazon-like purchasing experiences across every touchpoint.

Mobile learning’s generational opportunity

This mobile explosion creates a painful paradox: the fastest-growing acquisition channel is also the most expensive. Apple and Google app stores extract 15-30% of every transaction, meaning the more successful you become on mobile, the more revenue you surrender.

The Epic Games vs. Apple ruling is changing the game, enabling businesses to direct users from apps to their websites. The strategic play isn’t choosing between mobile and web, but optimizing where transactions occur. Let students discover you and engage wherever, but intelligently route purchases through your web platform, where you keep your hard-earned revenue.

The impact is immediate: Moving a $20/month subscription from App Store to web drives 12.14% more annual revenue—without raising prices or increasing marketing spend.

While the app ruling creates new revenue opportunities, it’s just one piece of a larger shift toward comprehensive eCommerce platforms. These aren’t theoretical improvements but transformational impact at scale. Let’s quantify the impact with an illustrative example: Learnova, a $200 million eLearning subscription that facilitates the migration.

Learnova at a glance:

Learnova offers professional certification courses and skill development programs serving 2.5 million  active learners globally. With a catalog of 20+ courses, live coaching sessions, and corporate training packages, they’ve built a strong brand in eLearning. Their offerings are differentiated, but the business results aren’t following. By integrating a modern eCommerce platform like Shopify with a subscription platform like Ordergroove, our benchmarks show that Learnova can realize over 50% lift in revenue:

A Good, Better, Best model is a powerful way to see impact through a different lens. If only 50% and 75% of the potential impact is realized, the ROI is still extremely compelling. This is where platform sophistication and partnership become essential. Choosing a tech partner with a platform to help you grow over time, along with the teams to consult and strategize alongside you, is the winning formula for long-term, profitable growth.

What’s stopping businesses from achieving outcomes like the example described above? Three opportunities can unlock the next era of profitable growth in the industry.

Opportunity One – Unlock commerce-grade conversion rates and flexibility

eLearning leaders are already and will continue to evolve far beyond single-course offerings. They operate sophisticated, multi-revenue stream businesses that supercharge growth potential. They have:

• Tiered subscription access to comprehensive content libraries.
• Individual course purchases for specific skills or projects.
• Live coaching sessions and one-on-one programs.
• Corporate training packages with customer pricing and billing.
• Certification programs with continued education requirements.
• Community access and networking opportunities.

Unfortunately, legacy tech stacks force each revenue stream through separate, disconnected systems. Students encounter multiple logins, fragmented checkout processes, and disjointed support channels. Internal teams juggle duplicate customer records, must reconcile data across platforms, and struggle to execute unified marketing campaigns.

Consider this example: A hypothetical certification provider we’ll call “ProCertify Academy” demonstrates how fragmented systems create unnecessary friction. A marketing professional pursuing certification must navigate four disconnected experiences: purchasing the initial certification exam through one system, paying annual membership fees in a separate portal, buying required continuing education courses through a third platform, and booking coaching sessions via an external scheduling tool. What should be a seamless customer journey becomes an administrative nightmare across four systems.

Modern eCommerce and subscription platforms consolidate these silos into a unified experience where membership can unlock discounts across all offerings, checkout information is shared across all touchpoints, and one-click purchasing works across every channel.

But the issues don’t stop there. Businesses invest millions in content creation, instructor expertise, and marketing to bring students to the door, but their checkout experience sends them away forever.

The root cause: Content Management Systems (CMS) disguised as commerce

Too many eLearning businesses run on Content Management Systems with billing functionality bolted on as an afterthought. These platforms were architected for hosting free content, not driving commerce.

Even WordPress, recognizing this fundamental mismatch, acquired WooCommerce as a separate eCommerce solution. Their diagnosis was correct: creating experiences that make it effortless for students to deepen their relationship with your brand is business-critical.

But their execution still isn’t best-in-class. This is because retrofitting commerce onto content platforms creates compromised offerings that can’t match purpose-built solutions. The results speak for themselves. Shopify conversion rates beat WooCommerce by 17%.

The commerce-first learning revolution

The highest-performing eLearning companies have discovered a powerful competitive advantage: purpose-built eCommerce platforms that treat student LTV with the same rigor Netflix applies to viewer acquisition.

Unified revenue architecture with built-In growth intelligence

Modern eCommerce platforms eliminate the technical constraints that force you to choose between business model flexibility and operational excellence:

• Intelligent Product Discovery: AI-powered recommendation engines and product merchandising guide students from introductory courses to learning aids and materials, automatically adding value to students throughout their learning journey.
• Seamless Multi-Modal Integration: Whether students engage with you through web, email, SMS, mobile apps, or even in-person, they experience one cohesive journey from interest to enrollment to ongoing engagement across every offering and touchpoint.
• The World’s Best Checkout: A Big Three consulting company found that Shopify’s overall conversion rate outpaces the competition by up to 36% and by an average of 15%.

Opportunity Two – Supercharge student LTV

Success in eLearning subscriptions depends on continuous experimentation and tools to grow the business, yet 91% of brands aren’t testing subscription incentives, leaving GMV gains on the table. Legacy billing platforms make such testing nearly impossible, forcing teams to guess at optimal strategies.

The A/B testing revolution: Why guessing is the enemy of growth

Nobody knows which strategies will work for your business. Not you, not your competitors, not even your customers. The companies pulling ahead aren’t smarter; they’re just learning 50x faster through rapid experimentation.

While most eLearning companies make million-dollar decisions based on gut instinct, growth leaders run systematic A/B tests monthly on subscription incentives, payment retry sequences, upsell timing, and pricing models. This learning velocity gap compounds daily.

The shift requires a testing-first culture where “we should test that” replaces “I think we should,” and failed experiments become learning fuel rather than setbacks. Growth teams need platforms with fundamental capabilities: A/B testing for pricing and incentives, flexible bundling to increase order value, and intelligent subscription management that doesn’t require every change to be escalated as a support ticket.

Growth levers across the complete student lifecycle

Modern eCommerce and subscription platforms transform operational limitations into revenue opportunities by giving growth teams powerful tools across every stage:

Acquisition: From stagnation to revenue science

• Dynamic bundling capabilities enable you to package study materials with course access, creating offers that increase the average order value while delivering more value to learners.
• A/B testing incentives increases GMV by an average of 9% by finding the most profitable strategies for your business.
• Intelligent upselling offers add-ons dynamically based on student progress and engagement patterns
• Flexible pricing models support everything from one-time purchases to tiered subscriptions, all configurable without developer resources.

The hidden advantage here isn’t just the tools, but the velocity of learning they enable. While competitors reinvent the wheel, you’re running dozens of experiments that compound into market intelligence. Speed beats perfection when you can iterate weekly instead of annually.

Retention: turn cancellations into conversations

• Smart cancel flows transform cancellation attempts into retention opportunities, presenting targeted alternatives like discounted rates, pause options, or plan downgrades. Ordergroove customers save an average of 24% of cancellations daily.
• Advanced subscription management lets students self-serve content access updates, payment changes, and plan modifications, reducing support burden while improving satisfaction.
• Behavioral triggers automatically engage students showing disengagement signals with personalized re-engagement campaigns.

Most companies treat churn as inevitable, but the difference between losing a student forever and creating a
lifetime learner often comes down to presenting the right alternative at the moment of decision.

Expansion: Growth at the right moment

• 1-Click upselling via SMS and email offers instant expansion opportunities at key learning moments.
• Cross-sell intelligence surfaces relevant advanced courses and certifications directly in subscription managers or via 1-click marketing offers.
• Progressive profiling builds detailed student preferences over time, enabling increasingly personalized recommendations.

Timing is everything in expansion. A student who just completed Python basics is psychologically primed for the next challenge. The platforms that win understand these micro-moments and automate around them, turning completion dopamine into expansion revenue.

“I’m so glad we found Ordergroove. Shopify gave us the flexibility and innovation we needed to mve beyond the limits of our old platform, and Ordergroove has been the missing piece to truly unlock subscriptions. Ordergroove is innovating by bridging together ecommerce and digital subscriptions in one seamless experience. The Ordergroove team has been fantastic through the migration process nd with amazing support to answer any questions we have.”

– Dale Carter, Sr. Director of Project Management and Systems, Salem Church Products

Opportunity Three – Accelerate innovation through strategic resource optimization

Your platform is now your biggest competitor

Success creates an ironic problem: the bigger you grow, the harder it becomes to move fast. Every new feature, from testing pricing to adding a course tier, requires weeks of developer time. Your engineering team spends more time maintaining systems than building the future.

The most successful eLearning companies have discovered that modern platform architecture directly determines innovation velocity. While they’re shipping new features in days, others are stuck in one of three expensive traps that consume resources and kill competitive speed.

The three platform traps killing innovation speed

1. CMS + Billing Frankenstack: You’ve chosen a CMS, then bolted on billing functionality
2. Building Everything In-House: Frustrated by legacy limitations, you built your own subscription infrastructure, and now teams maintain infrastructure instead of innovating.
3. Hijacked Checkout Chaos: You’re on an eCommerce platform, but subscriptions run through a separate billing system with its own checkout.

The solution depends on which trap you’re in, but the destination is the same: lower TCO, faster innovation, and accelerated growth.

The eCommerce platform ecosystem Advantage

If you’re juggling a CMS with billing plugins or other disconnected systems, modern eCommerce platforms offer immediate relief. Modern eCommerce ecosystems attract over $6 billion in annual R&D investment across best in-class applications. Compare this to standalone billing platforms operating with limited R&D budgets and narrow integration ecosystems. This represents a fundamental asymmetry: you’re either benefiting from collective innovation or building everything yourself.

Think of technology selection as choosing between a world-class orchestra and a talented solo performer. The orchestra brings together specialists who’ve mastered their instruments while harmonizing with the whole. Modern eCommerce ecosystems orchestrate best-in-breed solutions for checkout optimization, subscription management, payments processing, marketing tools, finance, and analytics. Legacy billing platforms are monolithic offerings that struggle to excel across all these functions simultaneously, inevitably creating gaps that impact both student experience and operational efficiency. The result: Shopify reduces Total Cost of Ownership by up to 33% while accelerating innovation velocity.

The resource reallocation opportunity

If you’ve built your own subscription infrastructure, the opportunity is clear. The highest-performing eLearning companies adopt a “Buy Then Build” framework, maintaining flexibility without wasting resources on infrastructure maintenance.

For a $200 million subscription brand, the economics are stark: Building and maintaining infrastructure costs $2.5 million in year one and $1 million annually thereafter. That seven-person infrastructure team could instead drive growth initiatives worth 10% of topline revenue, generating $20 million in year one alone. Over five years, choosing infrastructure over growth means leaving $100 million on the table.

When you eliminate infrastructure overhead, your team’s focus shifts from maintaining systems to optimizing their performance.

For those running eCommerce with separate subscription billing, you’re already halfway there. Consolidating onto a unified platform eliminates the friction killing your conversion and retention rates, the final step toward operational excellence.

Some eLearning leaders wonder whether eCommerce platforms can handle the sophisticated requirements of educational businesses. The reality is that modern eCommerce ecosystems have evolved to power complex digital subscription businesses across industries, with specific capabilities that excel for eLearning.

Drive higher LTV, faster conversion, and seamless experiences across every touchpoint.

The world’s best checkout — and ecosystem:

Shopify’s conversion rates outpace competitors across the board. Couple this with Ordergroove, the world’s leading subscription platform, and you’ve built a recurring revenue engine.

Profitable growth levers:

Shopify and Ordergroove serve the whole growth team. Acquire, retain, and expand customers and create indispensable relationships at scale.

Unmatched flexibility:

Ordergroove and Shopify optimize resources and maximize returns, keeping you ahead of shifting customer needs, amplifying your development team’s impact, and helping you outsmart competitors instead of outspending them.

Ready to transform your connected device business? Your students’ growth is your top priority. Your growth is ours. Schedule a Demo.