An online store built on Certifications does not automatically show your full catalog of courses and exams. Rhythm checks specific rules to decide what appears, and it also returns every fee’s price so the store can show item costs. This article explains both.
Why a Course Might Not Show Up
For a course to appear in a store catalog, these requirements must line up:
- The course must have a type, and that type must be active. A course with no assigned type can never be sold through a store, even when the rest of its setup looks correct.
- The course itself must be published and active. Rhythm leaves out any course that is unpublished or inactive.
A course offering is a specific scheduled instance of a course, and it has its own rules. To appear, the offering must be upcoming, published, and within its sale window, based on its sell-from and sell-until dates. The catalog checks whether the course is active, but it does not check whether the offering is marked active. It also does not check capacity, so a fully booked offering still appears in the store as available.
Tip
If the course looks correct but one offering is missing, check that offering’s sale window and publish status instead of the course settings. Rhythm checks those separately.
A course’s end date can also affect a linked webinar registration outside the store catalog. Support has seen a webinar fail to load for registration because the course’s end date had already passed, and correcting that date resolved the issue. If a webinar-based registration page will not load, check the underlying course’s end date before assuming the store listing is broken.
Warning
When the store shows an offering as available, that does not prove checkout will stop registration once the offering is full. Reports have disagreed on whether portal registration for a sold-out offering is actually blocked, even after a fix was reported. If capacity matters for a specific offering, do not rely on the catalog display alone; verify the offering’s registration count directly.
Why an Exam Might Not Show Up
Exams and exam sittings follow a similar pattern, but their defaults are different. An exam must be published and active to appear. If an exam has no active value recorded, Rhythm treats it as inactive and leaves it out.
A sitting stays in the catalog when it has no active value recorded, so sittings use the opposite default from exams. Sittings also do not use a sale window the way course offerings do. A sitting stays listed until its own date passes, even when its registration deadline has already closed.
Tip
If a course appears unavailable for registration after it has already begun, and you are not sure whether that is expected, try registering yourself or ask someone with access to test it. If registration goes through, the issue is more likely tied to your account’s configuration, visibility rules, or audience restrictions than to a fixed product limit.
Narrowing What a Store Shows
A store does not have to show your full catalog. You can configure it to include only selected course types, courses, or exams, or you can configure it to exclude selected ones instead. A store uses one of those modes, not both at the same time.
Exams do not have their own type, so you cannot narrow a store by exam type the way you can by course type. If an identifier in either mode does not match anything, Rhythm matches nothing and does not treat it as an error.
Every Fee's Price Is Always Returned
Apart from the courses, offerings, exams, and sittings that are visible, a store catalog request also returns the price of every fee in your Rhythm account. That includes fees for unpublished or inactive courses and exams, plus fees that are not currently in use.
Each fee includes its name, price, member price, related course or exam, whether it has special pricing logic, and portal display name. Details about your Rhythm account and taxes are not included.
Warning
Because every fee’s price is returned regardless of what the catalog lists, do not assume a fee is hidden just because its course or exam is missing from the visible catalog. The price data and the visible listing are separate.
What Bundling a Course Fee Into Another Product Does and Doesn't Do
A course registration fee can be added to a store product as a bundled or inline add-on, such as when you combine it with a merchandise item. Buying it that way charges for the fee, but it does not register the purchaser for a course offering. Rhythm has no way to know which specific offering the registration belongs to from a bundled purchase, whether the fee is set up as bundled or inline. If you sell a course fee this way, register the purchaser for the course offering separately.
Fulfillment actions tied to a fee, such as granting a bundled membership package, also do not run for an inline bundled product. In one observed case, a non-member who bought a course fee with an inline bundled membership package did not receive the membership, even though existing members on the same kind of order were updated correctly.
A displayed course total can also be higher than you expect because of an unrelated add-on. If a store prompts for a donation and one is preselected by default, the displayed total includes that donation on top of the course fee. Check for a preselected donation before assuming the member price itself is wrong.
Tip
There is no built-in way to send course confirmation content based only on whether a particular course’s fee was actually charged in a shared shopping-cart checkout. If you need different confirmation wording per course or per offering, one workaround is to link a product confirmation email to the course fee itself and put the offering’s details directly in that email. This works best when each course has only one offering, or when you can set up a distinct fee and email per offering, because the offering details must be entered and kept up to date by hand instead of being pulled in automatically.
Related
For where courses, offerings, exams, and sittings are set up before they reach a store, see the related setup articles for courses and exams.