Private and Hidden Bundles

Private and hidden bundle settings allow you to control who can access your bundle and the visibility of your bundle on your site.

Private Bundles

Private bundles are ideal for cases where you want your bundle landing page to be public for marketing or informational purposes but don't want students to be able to enroll in the course directly. When a bundle is set to Private, the Thinkific checkout is completely blocked, which means that you have full control over enrollments.

Some reasons for this could be because:

The bundle isn't ready for enrollment yet - you may still be working on the course content, but that's no reason not to have your bundle landing page out there and ready to share for a spot of pre-launch marketing!
Your bundle is currently unavailable - perhaps you run your courses during a specific time period or for a maximum number of students? You can simply change whether or not the bundle is private depending on whether it's currently available for enrollment.
You only accept students who meet specific criteria - you may need to speak to a person before they enroll in the bundle to make sure it's suitable for them!

Bundles set as Private will still be displayed on your site, so any visitors will be able to access them. However, the bundle won't have the usual Buy or Enroll button. Instead, the visitor will see a message encouraging them to email you and request access.

By default, this message will display Interested in this bundle? Email us at example@thinkific.com. The email displayed is your support email, which can be set in your site settings and if you would like to customize this message, see How to Customize Your Private Bundle Text.

How to Set a Bundle to Private

Go to Manage Learning Products
Select Bundles
Click on the image of the bundle you want to edit
Select Settings
Under Basic Settings, click the checkbox beside Private Bundle
Click Save
When the checkmark is visible, the feature is turned on!

How to Give Your Student Access to a Private Bundles

When you are ready to enroll a student, you can manually enroll them into your bundle! See how here: Manually Enroll Students into a Course

How to Customize Your Private Bundle Text

By default, your bundle banner will display Interested in this bundle? Email us at example@thinkific.com for private bundles. This default text will only appear on Site Builder Vogue and Vision Theme 1.17.1, Empire 1.17.2 and higher. To update your theme, see How to Update Your Theme Version.

Go to Settings
On the Site tab, click Modify text: Site in the left menu
Select Product Pages
Click Customize beside Interested in this bundle? Email us at [support_email_address]
Input your desired text
Click Save

Important Considerations for Private Bundles

Setting a bundle Private will not automatically set individual courses included in your bundle Private. This means that students can purchase or enroll in individual courses outside of your bundle. You also have the option to set individual courses to Private to prevent students from enrolling into individual courses included in your bundle.

Hidden Bundles

Hidden bundles are the best way to control who is able to access course information and content. Bundles set as Hidden will not appear on your site landing page and are only accessible with a direct link to the bundle landing page. From the landing page, they will be able to buy or enroll on the bundle as usual.

You can use this feature when:

Your bundle is for a specific group of people - your bundle may only be intended for certain people; for example, the employees of a company for whom you've specifically tailored the content. Simply hide the bundle so that you can control access!
You want to offer some bonus content - looking to offer some complimentary extras as a bonus to people who've bought other products? Add these courses to a bundle! You can then make sure that only those people receive the direct link to enroll.

How to Set a Bundle to Hidden

Go to Manage Learning Products
Select Bundles
Click on the image of the bundle you want to edit
Select Settings
Under Basic Settings, click the checkbox beside Hidden Bundle
Click Save
When the checkmark is visible, the feature is turned on!

Important Considerations for Hidden Bundles

A Hidden bundle is not indexed by Google and won't show up in search engines. However, if the bundle was previously published before it was set to Hidden, it may show up in search engine results as it takes time for search engines to recrawl your site for any updates.

You can learn more about that here: How do I stop Google from indexing my site?

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