Converting and Selling Your Existing Thinkific Communities

If you created your community before the purchase option was available, not to worry! We'll walk you through all the steps needed to update your existing community and offer it as a sellable product, while making sure you maintain a seamless experience for existing members.

Before Getting Started

Converting your existing community to a sellable product will require an update to your community access settings, as well as additional customizations to external facing site pages.

Updating the access settings on an existing community will remove all of the students currently enrolled within the community. We've included detailed steps below on how to re-grant access—however, to ensure a seamless experience, make sure to read through all instructions before diving in, as there may be timing and messaging considerations for your students.

Communities are not currently supported by our bulk enroll feature, however, we have included some alternative options for re-granting access. Depending on the method you choose, we recommend notifying your students before making any changes to your community access settings.

Let's get started!

Prepare Your External Facing Pages

Each community has a landing page created by default that you can fully customize for selling! There are some new section types specific to communities including a Community overview [smart section] and Call to Action (community) section that will be added to your page automatically. Just like your other landing pages, these sections can be fully customized, rearranged, and removed depending on your preferences.

Learn how to customize your Community Landing Page here.

Note that you will see a locked message in your community landing page banner for now as your community is set to Private and Hidden to prevent anyone from accessing it while you are getting set up. We will cover removing this in the following steps.

Price Your Community

Once you are happy with your external pages, you can set a price for your community. See Community Builder for how to select your pricing settings.

If you prefer to sell your community within a bundle, that's no problem! You can add a community to your bundle alongside courses. See Product Bundles to get started.

Update Your Community Access Settings

You've done all the preparation work, now there are just a few more steps to go to selling your community!

From your Admin Dashboard, go to Products
Select Communities
Select the ellipses (three dots) beside the name of the community you would like to convert, and hit Edit
On this page, scroll down to the Access settings. Before making any changes, review your current settings to make sure you are aware of which students currently have access as you will need to re-grant access later.
Select Students that purchase this community. If this option is not available, you'll need to update your site theme.
You will see a warning popup explaining the change you are about to make will remove all students currently enrolled in this community. If you are fine with this, hit OK.
Save your changes

Disable Private and Hidden Setting

When updating your access settings to purchase, we automatically set your community to Private and Hidden to prevent any unintentional enrollments while you are getting set up. Since you have already prepared your external pages and priced your community, you can disable these settings and allow new members to start purchasing!

From your Admin Dashboard, go to Products
Select Communities
Select your Community to go to your Community Settings
Under Visibility, deselect Private community and Hidden community
Click Save

Once these settings are disabled, you'll see a community card displayed in various sections and pages throughout your site alongside your Course card including:

All Pricing Options [Smart Section]
Additional Products Site Builder Section
Upsells Site Builder Section
Bundle Includes Site Builder Section
Checkout pages
All Products page (formerly called All Courses page available at yoursite.thinkific.com/collections)

If you would like to customize the image displayed in your community card, this can be done in your community settings. See Community Builder for details.

Re-Enroll Existing Students Into Your Community

Now that you have updated your access settings, you can re-enroll your existing students back into the community! You have the following options for re-enrolling your students:

You can manually re-enroll each student. This must be done one student at a time, so we only recommend this if you have a small number of members in your community.
You can provide your students with a 100% off coupon for your community, so they can simply enroll again at their convenience!

You can also consider sharing a link to your community landing page with a coupon automatically applied to make the process as seamless as possible for your existing students. Learn how to copy your community landing page link below, and then check out Share Links with Coupons Automatically Applied.

Share Your Community

Congrats! Now that you've customized everything and re-granted existing students' access, you are ready to start selling!

From the Community Builder, select Build Landing Page on the top-right side of the header. This will take you to your landing page in Site Builder.
In Site Builder, click the link icon on the top left of the side menu

And that's it, you can start sharing this page with your audience!

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I sell my Community using the legacy two-page checkout?

No, you can only sell communities when using a Performance checkout. If you want to switch to a Performance checkout, follow these instructions: Updating from the Two-Step Checkout to the Performance Checkout.