Upsell Plugin Review: WordPress Sales Funnels Without WooCommerce

Why Build Funnels Without WooCommerce?

If you've ever sold digital products on WordPress, you've probably hit the WooCommerce wall. It's a powerful e-commerce platform, but when all you need is a simple sales funnel with an upsell or two, spinning up WooCommerce plus a stack of premium add-ons feels like bringing a freight train to a go-kart race.

That's where Upsell Plugin comes in. It gives you the core funnel-building capabilities — checkout pages, order bumps, one-click upsells, and downsells — directly inside WordPress, without WooCommerce as a dependency. You also skip the monthly fees of hosted solutions like ClickFunnels. If you're selling courses, consulting, or digital downloads and you want to keep things lean, this is a genuinely compelling option.

The Funnel Structure: How It All Fits Together

Before diving into the setup, it helps to understand the funnel Dave builds in this walkthrough. The primary offer is a beginner-level online course priced at $100. Attached to that checkout is an order bump — a downloadable audio file for an extra $29 that gets added with a single checkbox.

Once the customer completes their purchase, instead of landing on a thank-you page, they're immediately presented with a high-ticket upsell: an advanced course bundled with a weekly mastermind for $2,000 per year. If they decline, a downsell kicks in — the same advanced course without the mastermind for a one-time payment of $1,000. Only after they accept or decline the downsell do they reach the order confirmation page.

This is a classic value-ladder funnel. You capture the buyer at an accessible price point, then offer premium options while their wallet is still open. It's one of the most effective ways to increase average cart value, and Upsell Plugin handles every step natively.

Setting Up Courses and Protected Downloads

The demo uses LearnDash as the LMS, with three courses created to match the funnel structure: a beginner course (primary offer), a standalone advanced course (downsell), and the advanced course with mastermind (upsell). LearnDash integrates directly with Upsell Plugin, so when someone purchases a product, they're automatically enrolled in the corresponding course.

For the order bump — the audio download — Dave uses Wishlist Member to protect the file. The MP3 is uploaded to the WordPress media library, then locked behind a membership level called "Audio Purchase." Wishlist Member's file protection feature ensures only paying customers can access the download. When someone buys the bump offer, Upsell Plugin triggers the Wishlist Member integration and grants access automatically.

This combination of LearnDash for courses and Wishlist Member for protected files gives you a robust digital delivery system without any WooCommerce infrastructure.

Building the Sales Pages with Elementor

Each step in the funnel needs its own page: a sales page for the beginner course, an upsell page, a downsell page, a checkout page, and a thank-you page. Dave builds all of these using Elementor on the Astra theme, pulling in starter templates as a foundation and customizing from there.

The beginner course sales page starts with an Astra starter template — the "Learn Academy" homepage — imported directly into the page. A few tweaks to the headline and button colors, and it's ready. The upsell page uses a different template (the about page layout) customized to pitch the advanced course with mastermind. The downsell page is simply the upsell page saved as a template and re-imported with adjusted copy.

For the checkout and thank-you pages, Upsell Plugin provides shortcodes that handle the heavy lifting. The checkout shortcode renders the payment form, and the order summary shortcode displays purchase details on the thank-you page. Dave drops these into Elementor layouts alongside testimonials and confirmation messaging. The key takeaway: the shortcodes are mandatory, but everything around them is fully customizable with whatever page builder you prefer.

Configuring Products and Funnel Flow

With pages built, the next step is creating products inside Upsell Plugin and wiring them into the funnel. Each product gets a price, a type (digital or physical), and a payment structure (one-time or subscription). The beginner course is $100 one-time, the audio offer is $29 one-time, the mastermind upsell is $2,000/year recurring, and the advanced downsell is $1,000 one-time.

The funnel flow is controlled through URL options on each product. The beginner course product has its "redirect after purchase" URL pointed at the upsell page. The upsell product points to the downsell page via its "skip purchase redirect" URL. The downsell product points to the thank-you page. This chain of redirects is what creates the actual funnel experience.

Order bumps are configured on the primary product — you select which product to offer as the bump and customize the headline and image. Integrations are set per product too: the beginner course connects to LearnDash for enrollment, the audio offer connects to Wishlist Member for file access, and account creation is toggled on so buyers automatically get WordPress accounts.

Connecting Buy Buttons and Testing the Funnel

The final setup step is grabbing the purchase URLs from each product in Upsell Plugin and pasting them into the corresponding buy buttons on your Elementor pages. Each product has a unique purchase URL and a skip URL. The purchase URL triggers the sale; the skip URL advances the customer to the next funnel step without buying.

On the upsell and downsell pages, the main CTA button gets the purchase URL, and a "no thanks" text link below it gets the skip URL. This gives customers a clear choice at every step without feeling trapped.

Dave runs through the complete funnel on camera to verify everything works: clicking buy on the beginner course, landing on checkout with the order bump visible, completing payment, being redirected to the upsell, declining to the downsell, purchasing the downsell, and arriving at the thank-you page with all three orders listed. The entire flow is seamless and runs entirely within WordPress.

Styling the Checkout Experience

Out of the box, the checkout page is functional but plain. Upsell Plugin includes a set of styling options that let you customize the look without writing CSS. You can change background colors, adjust the order bump's border style and color, modify text sizes, change description text colors, and toggle bold formatting.

For example, Dave gives the order bump a red dotted border, changes the background color, darkens the description text, and makes the checkbox label larger and bold. It's not going to win a design award with a quick five-second pass, but the point is clear: there's enough flexibility to make the checkout match your brand without touching code.

If you're comfortable with CSS or using a page builder's custom styling options, you can take things further. The checkout form lives on a standard WordPress page, so anything you can do with your theme or builder applies here too.

Pros and Cons of Upsell Plugin

The biggest advantage is obvious: you get full funnel functionality without WooCommerce and without a monthly SaaS fee. It works with any WordPress page builder — Elementor, Divi, Thrive Architect, or anything else — so you're not locked into a specific ecosystem. Subscription billing is built in, which is notable since the WooCommerce Subscriptions add-on alone runs $200 per year. It also integrates with AffiliateWP and iDevAffiliate if you're running an affiliate program, and it supports both PayPal and Stripe for payment processing.

On the downside, there are no built-in page templates. You're building every sales page and upsell page from scratch (or from your page builder's template library). There's also no custom post type for funnels — everything uses standard WordPress pages, which can get disorganized quickly. And perhaps most noticeably, there's no visual funnel builder. You're manually copying URLs between products and pages, which involves a lot of back-and-forth. A unified interface showing the funnel steps visually, similar to what CartFlows offers, would be a significant improvement.

Overall, it's a more hands-on tool than ClickFunnels or CartFlows, but it's also lighter, cheaper, and doesn't saddle your site with WooCommerce overhead.

Final Verdict: Is Upsell Plugin Worth It?

If you're selling digital products, courses, or consulting packages on WordPress and you've been dreading the WooCommerce setup, Upsell Plugin is a solid alternative. It handles the core sales funnel mechanics — checkout, bumps, upsells, downsells, subscriptions — without the plugin bloat. The pricing is reasonable compared to months of ClickFunnels, and the fact that it plays nicely with LearnDash, Wishlist Member, and your page builder of choice makes it versatile.

It's best suited for people who are comfortable with WordPress and don't mind a slightly more technical setup process. If you want drag-and-drop simplicity with pre-made templates, CartFlows might be a better fit. But if you value a lean WordPress install and want to avoid WooCommerce entirely, Upsell Plugin delivers on that promise.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.