After you have created your course in Thrive Apprentice and you have set up the "SendOwl Settings" as well, you will have the possibility to determine who will have access to your course.

This means that you can set up a restriction for the course and make it available only if the visitors of your website are logged in and are willing to buy your SendOwl products.

In order to do this, you will have to add some SendOwl access rules to your product, following these steps:

First, you need to make sure that your course (and non-course content, if you want) is added to a product from Thrive Apprentice:

You will next be redirected to this view, where you can start setting up the necessary restrictions and rules:

Click on the "Access requirements" tab:

In the new dashboard that opens, look either for the "SendOwl Product" or the "SendOwl Bundle" option, depending on what you want to protect your course with.

If you want to protect the course with a SendOwl product, then click on that option; if you want to protect it with a SendOwl bundle, then click on that option:

Note: In this example, we will go with the "SendOwl Product", but please note that the process is the same for the "SendOwl Bundle" option as well.

Once you have selected the product for setting up the access rule, a drop-down will appear with the SendOwl products that you have set up. Here you can determine what products a visitor needs to have (meaning he/she bought them previously) in order to be able to access the course.

This section contains every product that you have added to your SendOwl account. In order to select the products, check the box next to their name:

After you have selected the products, click on the "Save" button, in the lower part of the screen:

Note: It might happen that the products/bundles that you have created do not appear here. In such cases, you will have to refresh the products/bundles list.

You can do that by clicking on the "Settings" section from the left sidebar of your Thrive Apprentice dashboard and choose "SendOwl":

From there, click on the "Get Purchase Links" button from the "Purchase Links" card:

Then, choose either the Product or the Bundle option, based on what you need to refresh the list for and once you have selected it, click on the "Refresh Products List" or the "Refresh Bundles List" button:

After you have done this, your products/bundles will appear when you try to set up the SendOwl access rule. Thus, you can go back to the "Access restrictions" and continue with selecting the product/bundle you want to protect the course with.

Once the access rule is added, you can continue with setting up the general restrictions for the course. These are the exclusions, the “Message for users that do not have access” and the "Restriction label".

Next, what you also need to do here is to also configure the content that will be shown to the users who are trying to access the course without having the necessary permissions:

You can read more about how to set up these options in this article.

This option allows you to add different restriction labels to your courses. This is optional, so you can only use this feature if you want.

If you open the drop-down of this option, you will be able to select a label from here or add a new one:

This label will be shown to anyone who's viewing your course index page. Based on the label you set up here, your visitors will know whether this is a free course or a premium one.

Once you have set up all the restrictions, you can check how the course will be displayed for the logged-in visitors of your website, as well as the ones who are not logged in.

Note: Please make sure that not only the content of your course but the course itself is also published.

In order to see how the course will be displayed for logged-in users, simply click on the “Preview Course” option from the upper right part of the page:

This will open the course in a new tab, in the same browser, where you are logged in as the admin of the website.

Here is an example of it:

In order to see how the course is displayed for people who are not logged in, open the page, where the course can be found, in an incognito window, or in another browser, where you are not logged in.

When a visitor who is not logged in will try to access the restricted parts of the course, he/she will be presented with a few options, based on the restrictions that you have set up.

Naturally, they will see the message that you have set up to inform them about the restriction.

If they have previously purchased the necessary products, then, once they log in, using the login form that appeared under the message, they will have access to the entire course.

​When the visitors who ​have not bought the product, will try to access the restricted parts of the course, they will have to click on the linked call-to-action part of the message:

​This linked call-to-action will redirect them to the Registration page that you have set up in your “SendOwl Settings”.

On this page, they will be prompted to either login or register and once they do this, they will be sent to complete the payment process:

After the payment process is finalized, the visitors will be redirected to the beginning of the course or the static confirmation page, depending on your Thank You Page Settings, and they will get full access to the course.

Note: Please keep in mind, that in some cases it might happen, that the IPN (Instant Payment Notification) is delayed, so the visitor who bought the course will not have instant access to the course.

Nevertheless, in about 5 minutes, this issue should disappear and access will be granted to the visitor/buyer.

And this is how you can use the SendOwl to determine who will have access to your course.

If you want to find out more about Thrive Apprentice features and options, check out our knowledge base.

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