How to sell course seats to a company without an enterprise system
One buyer, several learners, a purchase order and a VAT number. How to handle a team sale with order-form questions and a bulk code.
The email arrives on a Tuesday and it does not look like your usual buyer. Someone from a company of forty people has watched your course page, likes it, and wants six seats for their team. Can you send an invoice. Their VAT number is at the bottom. They will need a purchase order reference on it. And, by the way, does everyone get their own login. You have spent two years selling to individuals and this single message contains four things you have never had to answer.
Why the first team sale feels harder than it is
Selling to a company is not a bigger version of selling to a person. The person paying is not the person learning, the money comes out of a budget that has rules attached, and somebody in finance needs a document that satisfies an accounting system you will never see. Nothing about your teaching changes, but four small things do: who pays, what paperwork they need, how each learner gets in, and what happens when one of them leaves the company in March.
The genuinely difficult part is scope creep dressed as a small request. It starts with six seats and a VAT number. By the third email there is a request for a reporting dashboard so a manager can see who finished, a request to move a seat from a leaver to a joiner, and a question about whether you support their single sign-on. Each is reasonable and each is a product you have not built. The skill is answering the first message in a way that is generous about the sale and firm about the scope.
The other honest difficulty is payment terms. Plenty of small companies are happy to pay by card on the spot, especially under a few hundred pounds a seat. Some larger ones genuinely cannot, because their process requires an invoice and thirty days. You are allowed to decide that a card at checkout is how you sell, and to lose the occasional buyer who cannot work that way. Deciding is cheaper than inventing a finance department.
What usually happens, and what a storefront changes
The default is a fortnight of email: quote, questions, spreadsheet of names, a bank transfer you have to reconcile, six manual grants of access and a chase for the VAT number you forgot to ask for. Most of that is collectable at the checkout instead.
| The usual scramble | With store.fan |
|---|---|
| Six emails to establish who is learning and where the money comes from | Order-form questions ask for the learner's name, department, purchase order reference and VAT number at checkout |
| A bespoke quote typed into an email and later forgotten | A discount code on Pro, with the bulk rate and an expiry date attached to it |
| A bank transfer you match to a person by memory | Payment through Stripe straight into your own account, with the buyer recorded automatically |
| You grant access to each learner by hand and hope you spelled the emails right | Each learner checks out with the code and access follows their own purchase |
| The company's people are invisible in your list of customers | Every buyer lands in your customer list with lifetime value, exportable to CSV on every plan |
| No idea whether team sales are worth pursuing | Views, buyers and revenue per product show what the course is actually doing |
Running a six-seat sale end to end
This is the route that behaves best on a storefront: one code, several checkouts, no manual access. It uses discount codes, which sit on the Pro plan, and order-form questions on the course product.
The team sale checklist
0/8A worked example: six seats and a purchase order
Say the course sells at £140 to individuals. The company asks for six seats. You offer £110 a seat for six to ten, expiring in three weeks, and you do not negotiate further, because the discount is the negotiation. Six checkouts at £110 is £660 with a 0% platform fee, so what you keep is that figure minus Stripe's card processing charges, paid into your own Stripe account as each person buys.
The valuable part is not the £660, which is roughly four and a half individual sales. It is that six people at one company now have your course, each with their own order page, each recorded in your customer list with a work email address and a department. When you release the advanced module next year, that is a list of people whose employer has already proved it will pay. None of that is a forecast; it is just what the admin leaves behind if you collect it at the checkout instead of in your inbox.
Set up a course with order-form questions and a bulk code before the next company email arrives.
Start free todayThe mistake most people make
They quote a bespoke price. One company asks for six seats and gets 20% off, the next asks for four and gets 30% because the email was friendlier, and within a year you have five secret prices and no idea what a seat is worth. Publish bands to yourself and hold them: six to ten, eleven to twenty-five, twenty-six and up. The second version of the same mistake is discounting before anyone asks. A team of six is buying convenience and a shared vocabulary, not a bargain, and a lot of managers will pay the list price without blinking if you simply answer quickly and clearly. Start at list, discount only in bands, and put the band in a code so it expires on its own.
They can pay for six checkouts on the company card, but the cleanest arrangement is one checkout per learner using the same code, because access follows each purchase. If a manager insists on one transaction, be clear in writing about how the other five people will get in before you take the money.
Collect the VAT number, billing address and purchase order reference through order-form questions at checkout, then issue your own invoice document from whatever you already use for bookkeeping. Payment itself runs through Stripe into your own account; store.fan never holds the funds.
Discount codes are a Pro feature, and Pro is where custom domains and email marketing sit too. Paid plans start with a fourteen-day free trial, and the platform fee is 0% on every plan. The pricing page lists what falls where.
Only if the thing you are selling to a team is genuinely different, such as a live workshop for the whole department. For a self-paced course, one product plus a code is less to maintain and much less to explain.
Your first team sale is worth taking seriously and not worth rebuilding your product for. Answer fast, price in bands, collect the paperwork at the checkout, and be straight about what you do not offer. If you want to see how the checkout questions and codes sit alongside everything else, the features overview is the short version and the FAQ covers the fiddly bits.
Open a storefront, add the questions your next company buyer will need to answer, and stop quoting from scratch.
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