One course is a product. Ten instructors with ten courses each is a platform. If you’ve ever looked at a site like Udemy and thought “that model, but on my own domain, with my own rules,” you’re describing a course marketplace: multiple instructors publishing under one roof, students buying through one checkout, and everyone splitting the money.
WordPress can run that model. With a WordPress LMS plugin (LMS stands for learning management system, the software that handles courses, lessons, quizzes, and enrollments), your own site can take instructor registrations, sell courses, and split revenue automatically, without renting space on someone else’s platform.
One warning before the how-to: a marketplace means you’re running a platform now, not just selling a course. You’ll recruit instructors, review their work, and handle payouts. This guide covers what a marketplace actually requires, the honest workload, the exact setup steps with Masteriyo, and some clearly hypothetical math on how the revenue split plays out.
Let’s build it. 🏗️
What a course marketplace actually needs
Strip the idea down and a marketplace is four moving parts:
- 🧑🏫 Instructors: people other than you who create and own courses. They need a way to register and get to work.
- 📚 Courses: a catalog that grows without you writing every lesson yourself.
- 💰 Money: one checkout that pays the site, plus a split that pays each instructor their share.
- 🧹 Moderation: someone decides what’s good enough to sell. That someone is you.
Miss any of the four and you don’t have a marketplace; you have a regular course site with extra user accounts. The steps below cover all four, and the tier of each feature is marked as you go, because some of this is free and some isn’t.
The honest part: you become the platform 🧢
A marketplace is not a passive income machine. It’s an operations job, and the job description looks like this:
- 📣 Recruiting: instructors don’t appear on their own. You find them, pitch them, and answer their questions before they ever publish.
- 🆘 Support: when a student’s checkout fails or a video won’t load, they email the site owner. That’s you, not the instructor.
- 💸 Payouts: instructors earn a balance with every sale, and paying that money out (on time, every time) is your responsibility.
- 🔍 Quality control: every course on the platform carries your brand. One sloppy course refunds badly and reviews worse.
If you have one course and no instructors lined up yet, start simpler: sell online courses from your own website first, and come back to the marketplace model when people start asking to teach on it. The marketplace makes sense when the instructors are real, not hypothetical.
Step 1: Install Masteriyo and set up selling (Free)
The tool for this build is Masteriyo, a free LMS plugin from the Themeisle family (full disclosure, it’s one of ours). Install it from your WordPress dashboard like any plugin, then run through the setup wizard.
For the money side, Masteriyo has a built-in checkout that works without WooCommerce: offline payments and PayPal are built in, and there are free gateway addons for Stripe, Mollie, and Lemon Squeezy. Every tier, including free, charges 0% transaction fees, so the platform keeps what the checkout collects (minus whatever your payment gateway charges, which is between you and them).
Course creation itself is out of scope here, since this guide stays on marketplace mechanics. Your instructors will use the same drag-and-drop builder you’d use for a solo course site.
Step 2: Open instructor registration (Free)
Instructor accounts are a free feature. Two settings and one shortcode get the door open:
- Go to Masteriyo → Settings → General and find the Registration section.
- Turn on Enable Instructor Registration, which shows the instructor registration page.
- While you’re there, consider enabling Restrict Instructors under Course Access, so each instructor sees only their own content.
Want the sign-up form somewhere specific, like a “Teach with us” landing page? Drop the [masteriyo_instructor_registration] shortcode on any page and the form appears there.
💡 PRO TIP: Write a short instructor page before you recruit anyone: your quality bar, the revenue split, payout methods, and how moderation works. It answers most applicant questions and filters out mismatches early.
Step 3: Add co-instructors to a course (Pro)
Here’s the tier line, plainly: one instructor per course works on the free plugin, but putting multiple instructors on the same course requires the Multiple Instructors addon, which is part of Masteriyo Pro ($149/year introductory, renewing at $299/year). Co-teaching is the use case: two instructors sharing one course’s lessons, quizzes, and students.
If your marketplace runs the classic way, where each instructor owns their own courses solo, the free version covers you. Treat free as the try-before path: build the whole marketplace first, and upgrade only if co-taught courses become a real request. If they do:
- Go to Masteriyo → Addons and toggle on Multiple Instructors (requires an active Pro license).
- Go to Masteriyo → Courses and edit the course you want to share.
- Open Settings → General and add instructor names under Additional Instructors.
- Click Update.
Step 4: Configure revenue sharing (Free)
Now the piece that makes it a marketplace instead of a group project: splitting each sale between the platform and the instructor. Revenue Sharing is a free addon, so this works without upgrading.
- Go to Masteriyo → Addons and toggle on Revenue Sharing.
- Go to Masteriyo → Settings → Payments → Revenue Sharing.
- Toggle Enable, configure the options below, and click Save Settings.
What each option does:
- 📊 Commission rate: the split of each course sale, shown as Admin (x%) and Instructor (y%). The instructor share is the remainder of whatever the admin takes.
- 🧾 Enable Deductible Fee: subtracts a fixed fee from the sale price first; the admin and instructor shares are then calculated from the reduced total.
- 💵 Minimum Payout Amount: the smallest balance an instructor is allowed to withdraw.
- ⏳ Maturity Period: how many days a sale must sit before its money becomes withdrawable. Set it to 1 day, and instructors can withdraw one day after each sale.
- 🏦 Payout Methods: choose from PayPal, e-check, and bank account. Instructors pick one of your enabled methods for their withdrawals.
💡 PRO TIP: Set the maturity period to at least cover your refund window. That way you’re never paying out money a student is about to ask back.
Step 5: Understand payouts from the instructor side (Free)
Instructors track their earnings and request withdrawals from their account page, under Account → Withdraw. They see a total balance, a withdrawable balance (whatever has cleared the maturity period), and their chosen payout method:
Two honest caveats about the money machinery. First, payout methods top out at PayPal, e-check, and bank account; there’s no fancy payment rail beyond those three. Second, Masteriyo’s marketplace tooling is deliberately simple: there’s no built-in course approval queue, which leads straight to the step the plugin can’t do for you.
Step 6: Moderate course quality (Manual)
Because there’s no approval queue, moderation is a habit, not a feature. A workable routine:
- 🤝 Set the rule early: agree with instructors that new courses stay unpublished until you’ve reviewed them.
- ✅ Review before publish: watch a few lessons, take the quiz, check the pricing and the course page copy. Fifteen minutes per course beats a refund wave.
- ⭐ Use public signals: course reviews and the Q&A section (both free features) show you quickly which courses land well and which ones need a quiet conversation.
Built-in email notifications help here too: Masteriyo ships 11 instructor-facing emails out of the box, so instructors hear about key events automatically instead of emailing you for updates.
What the money looks like (hypothetical numbers)
Everything in this section is made-up arithmetic for illustration, not a promise or an average. Say the platform takes 30% and instructors keep 70%, on a hypothetical $40 course:
| Scenario | Sale price | Split base | Platform (30%) | Instructor (70%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plain split | $40.00 | $40.00 | $12.00 | $28.00 |
| With a $2 deductible fee enabled | $40.00 | $38.00 | $11.40 | $26.60 |
Two more settings change when money moves, not how much:
- 💵 With an $80 minimum payout (like in the screenshot above), the instructor in this example can withdraw after 3 sales ($84 earned, balance clears the threshold).
- ⏳ With a 7-day maturity period, each sale’s money becomes withdrawable one week after it happens, so the balance ages into payouts rather than arriving instantly.
Scale it up, still hypothetically: 20 instructors each selling 10 copies a month of a $40 course is 200 sales, so the 30% platform share comes to $2,400 a month, before hosting, tools, and the hours from the “you become the platform” section. Whether that trade pencils out depends entirely on your instructors and your audience, which no plugin can supply.
Is running your own marketplace worth it?
The tradeoff in one sentence: hosted marketplaces bring a built-in audience but make the rules, while your own site makes you the rule-maker and the audience-finder at the same time. On your own platform you keep the brand, the student list, and (with Masteriyo’s 0% transaction fees) the full checkout total. In exchange, you do the recruiting, support, payouts, and moderation yourself.
A reasonable sequence for most people: prove the model with your own courses first, add instructors when they genuinely appear, and let the free tier carry the marketplace until co-taught courses justify Pro. Skipping straight to “marketplace” with zero instructors and zero audience is building a mall before the town exists. 🏜️
Wrapping up 🏁
The short version:
- 🧩 A marketplace needs four things: instructors, courses, money flow, and moderation.
- 🆓 Instructor registration, course selling, and revenue sharing all work on the free Masteriyo plugin.
- 💰 Multiple instructors on the same course is the Pro feature ($149/year introductory, renewing at $299); everything else in this guide is free.
- 🧹 There is no approval queue, so quality control is a routine you run, not a setting you toggle.
Start with instructor registration and the revenue split, recruit one or two instructors you already trust, and grow the catalog from there. The mechanics take an afternoon; the platform takes ongoing work, and now you know exactly which work.
Are you running multiple instructors on your own site, or still weighing it against a hosted marketplace? Share your situation in the comments below! 👇
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