Higher Education & Extension Commerce

Program registration, events, and microcredentials on one platform you actually own.

Extension program managers are measured on sign-ups, on events that run cleanly in person and online, and on serving a community that stretches across every county in the state. Most are doing it across a stack of disconnected tools, paying a fee on every registration. We build the platform that pulls enrollment, events, credentials, and partner billing into one system your institution owns. We have engineered Penn State Extension for over eight years, built Purdue Extension's education store, and rebuilt the Penn State Berkey Creamery.

We work with some of the largest university systems in the United States, Penn State and Purdue among them, plus national professional-training providers running the same course, event, and credential problems.

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Book a working session with our university commerce team

Thirty minutes with the senior people who actually build these platforms, not a sales rep. Bring your current stack and your registration numbers. You will leave knowing what is worth rebuilding, what is worth keeping, and roughly what the move looks like.

We reply within one business day. Prefer email? Write to hi@iwdagency.com.

Why Extension programs outgrow their tools

Five tools, one program, and nobody can answer a simple question.

A licensed event tool handles the conference, and the registration finishes on somebody else's domain where your commerce platform never sees the order. Something else takes course enrollments. Certificates come out of a spreadsheet. The county directory lives on the main site, partner invoices go through finance by email, and none of it agrees on who a learner is. So a program manager cannot say what a season actually produced without rebuilding it by hand, and the fees climb with every registration. We are the team universities call when that stack stops scaling. We rebuild it as one platform: registration, events, credentials, county network, and partner billing, integrated with the systems you already run. When institutional buyers need purchase orders and punchout, our B2B and procurement commerce team carries that end to end, and our education ecommerce practice covers the wider institution.

8+ yrs
Engineering Penn State Extension
67
County offices mapped and served
16
Custom modules built for Extension
9
Systems integrated into one profile
Partnerships · Reviews · Awards

Credentials & recognition.

Client-first approach

We're here to help you win, plain and simple.

Same senior team from kickoff to launch and beyond. We do not outsource, we do not disappear after go-live, and we do not hand you off.

Client TestimonialWatch their story
Client TestimonialWatch their story
94%
Client retention

Across every phase. Discovery, build, launch, and growth, the same senior team stays with you.

What we build for Extension

From a first sign-up to a credential and a partner invoice.

The same senior developers handle the whole path a learner takes, and the whole path a program manager works. Every engagement is scoped to your programs and systems, not a fixed package.

/01Event registration & attendeesWorkshops, webinars, and conferences sold and managed on your own site, with capacity, group registration, attendee assignment and revocation, reminders, and reschedule and cancellation notices./02Online courses & LMS integrationCourse catalogs wired into the LMS you already run, including Open edX, with modern OAuth and OpenID Connect single sign-on so no learner ever types a second password./03Learning paths & curated bundlesSell a program, not a line item. Bundle courses, events, and publications into a single guided path with its own progress view, so learners buy the outcome they came for./04Microcredentials, badges & certificatesCompletion-triggered certificates, digital badges, and CEUs, tiered from an introductory badge to a certificate of expertise, with learner transcripts and renewal tracking./05Company accounts & partner dashboardsEmployers and agencies buy training in bulk, build teams, assign seats to staff, and watch completion progress on their own dashboard. This is where Extension B2B revenue comes from./06Registration UX & checkout conversionLong participant forms are where sign-ups die, especially on a phone. We restructure registration into a clean, mobile-first flow and cut the abandonment that form fatigue causes./07County & regional service networkA directory that maps your real footprint, with office pages, local staff, and programs filterable by county so people reach the educator nearest them instead of giving up./08CRM, finance & reporting integrationTwo-way sync into Salesforce Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud, plus attendee and revenue reporting with CSV export that your finance office and your stakeholders will accept./09Accessibility & public-sector complianceWCAG 2.1 AA remediation against the April 2027 ADA Title II date, covering registration and checkout, the flows most accessibility vendors quietly skip./10SEO, content & enrollment demandBuilding the platform is half the job. We also run technical SEO, Core Web Vitals, content strategy, and the whitepapers and campaigns that put your programs in front of learners and partners./11Migration recovery & replatformingMoving platforms is where institutions lose rankings and enrollments. We plan migrations to protect both, and we are the team brought in to recover the ones that went wrong.
Problems we solve

If two or three of these sound familiar, we have already fixed them.

These are the problems university and Extension teams actually bring us, taken from live engagements rather than a services brochure. The left column is where most programs are today. The right column is what we build them toward.

  • Today

    Registration happens on somebody else’s site, and those orders never reach your platform.

    After

    Every sign-up lands in your own system, attributed to a program and countable the day it happens.

  • Today

    Nobody can see a learner’s full history, because it is split across three systems.

    After

    One account showing every course, event, and credential, whichever system it originally came from.

  • Today

    Long participant forms sit inside the cart, and on a phone people simply give up.

    After

    A structured, mobile-first registration flow with clear status, so fewer carts are abandoned mid-signup.

  • Today

    Employers want to buy training for their teams, and there is no clean way to serve them.

    After

    Company accounts with bulk seats, attendee assignment, and a progress dashboard partners actually log into.

  • Today

    Credentials and certificates are awarded by hand, one spreadsheet row at a time.

    After

    Badges, certificates, and CEUs issued automatically on completion and visible in the learner’s account.

  • Today

    Your site and your LMS still pass user credentials between each other.

    After

    Standards-based single sign-on, so a learner signs in once and no password crosses between systems.

  • Today

    Everything is sold one item at a time, so the bigger program never gets bought.

    After

    Curated learning paths that bundle courses, events, and publications into one purchase with one progress view.

  • Today

    Reporting a season means exporting from four tools and stitching it together.

    After

    Attendee, completion, and revenue reporting with CSV export, across every storefront you run.

One ecosystem, every storefront

A university does not run one store. It runs a portfolio.

Extension sells courses and events. The creamery ships perishables. Departments buy against internal accounts. Athletics, alumni, and the campus store each want their own thing, and every one of them arrives at IT as a separate request. Run them as separate vendors and you get four contracts, four security reviews, and no shared view of a customer. We build them as one governed ecosystem instead, with a storefront and its own rules for each audience, and reporting that finally spans all of them. Very few agencies have shipped all three of these shapes. We have.

Extension

Programs, events, and publications

Courses, workshops, webinars, and conferences alongside a deep free-content library, sold to individuals, to groups, and to employer partners across every county in the state.

Penn State Extension case study
Retail & food

Perishables and physical product

A university food or retail brand has nothing in common with a course catalog. Cold-chain shipping, customer-built coolers, and delivery-date selection are their own engineering problem, and we have solved it.

Penn State Berkey Creamery case study
Departmental

Internal and gated stores

Departments buy differently from the public. A gated internal storefront bills to an internal account number and GL code instead of a card, and reconciles back to university finance.

Purdue Extension case study
Licensed event tool or owned platform

Keep paying per registration, or own the platform outright?

This is the decision most Extension programs are really facing. A licensed tool such as Cvent is quick to start and fine at a conference. An owned platform costs more to stand up and then stops charging you for growth. The honest answer depends on how much programming you run and how far it reaches beyond a single event type.

Licensed event tool

You rent registration and event management from a vendor, and the vendor is good at the thing it was built for: a conference with sessions, badges, and an agenda. Setup is fast and the software is somebody else's problem. The trade is that you pay by registration or by seat, the cost rises as your programs succeed, the learner finishes registering on a domain that is not yours, and those orders never reach your commerce platform. Extension-specific work, meaning county structure, credentials, free content sitting next to paid programming, and partner billing, is usually where these tools run out of room and the workarounds start.

Best when
  • You run a small number of conference-style events
  • Registration volume is low and predictable
  • You have no internal IT capacity to support a platform
Owned university platform

You build registration, events, credentials, and partner billing into a platform your institution owns, integrated with university sign-on, your LMS, your CRM, and your finance system. There is an upfront build, and after that growth is free: another thousand registrations costs you nothing extra. Program staff run their own events and pull their own rosters. Learner history, transcripts, and revenue reporting sit in one place, which is what finally makes a season answerable. This is the model behind our Penn State and Purdue Extension builds.

Best when
  • Registration fees have become a real line item
  • Programs span counties, formats, and credential types
  • You are adding partnerships or microcredentials

Not sure which way your numbers point? A health check audit puts the current cost and the build cost side by side before you commit.

Client reviews

Merchants keep working with us, and say so in public.

IWD has been a solid partner for over seven years. They take the time to understand our business and develop custom solutions to meet our unique requirements. They know e-commerce inside and out.
Kate OylerPenn State University · Trustpilot review
They go above and beyond to develop custom solutions to solve our unique needs. They can really do it all, and they truly care about our company's success.
Kelsey KovarTrustpilot review
IWD Agency is always responsive and they always follow back up after the job has been completed to make sure the job was done correctly.
Adam R.Arc Energy Equipment, client review
Why IWD

The same senior developers from kickoff to launch and beyond.

Most institutional projects go sideways for one of two reasons: the work gets passed to a junior team, or the agency vanishes once the invoice clears. We built IWD to do the opposite.

  • We already run university platforms

    We have engineered Penn State Extension for over eight years, rebuilt the Penn State Berkey Creamery store, and built Purdue Extension's education store. We are not learning your world on your budget.

  • One ecosystem, not four vendors

    Extension, a retail brand, and departmental stores can run on one platform your IT team governs once, with shared accounts, shared reporting, and one team accountable for all of it.

  • Built for program staff, not just developers

    Coordinators open registrations, assign attendees, and pull rosters themselves. If every change needs a developer, the platform has failed the people who run the programs.

  • You own the platform and the data

    No per-registration fee, no seat count, no renewal negotiation. Your learner records, rosters, and revenue stay inside a system your institution controls.

How we work

A clear path from audit to a season you can actually measure.

01

Audit

We map every tool your programs touch today, what each one costs in fees and staff hours, where sign-ups leak, and which records have to stay in step with the university.

02

Architect

A phased roadmap with scope, timeline, and a real number. You see the platform choice, the integration plan, and the registration model before any code is written.

03

Build

Two-week sprints, weekly demos, and a shared backlog. Programs move over in waves so no registration season is ever riding on a single launch date.

04

Grow

After launch we add programs, open partnership and microcredential revenue, tune for enrollment peaks, and keep accessibility current as the rules move.

After launch

The part most agencies skip, and university IT asks about first.

A public institution cannot run a platform that nobody patches. Our university clients keep us on long after launch, and most of that work never shows up in a case study: security patching, version upgrades, incident response, and capacity planning before the enrollment peak rather than during it. If your current arrangement ends at go-live, this is usually the gap.

Proactive security audits

A standing audit plan rather than an annual scare: authentication and admin access, API endpoints, rate limiting, log review, and policy compliance checked on a schedule.

Patch & CVE response

When a platform security advisory lands, we assess, patch, test, and deploy it as urgent work, because a public institution cannot sit on a known vulnerability.

Version upgrades

Major platform, extension, and PHP upgrades planned, staged, and regression-tested, so the institution never drifts onto an unsupported version.

Performance & documentation

Performance watched ahead of enrollment peaks, and your platform documentation kept current, so the knowledge does not leave when a staff member does.

Questions, answered

What Extension teams ask before they rebuild their platform.

The questions we hear most from program managers and university IT. If yours isn't here, just ask.

Can this replace Cvent or a similar event platform?

Usually, yes, and it is the most common reason Extension teams call us. The pattern we see is that registration leaves your own site, the learner finishes somewhere else, and those orders never land in your commerce platform, so nobody can report on a season without stitching exports together. We rebuild registration and event management inside a platform you own, and we can aggregate registrations from the outgoing tool into the learner's account during the transition so nothing goes dark on the way over. We will also tell you honestly if your event program is simple enough that a licensed tool is still the cheaper answer.

Do you handle both in-person and online programs?

Yes, in one calendar and one learner account. In-person workshops and conferences carry capacity limits, locations, directions, and printed rosters, while webinars and online courses carry access links, LMS handoff, and completion tracking. Hybrid and blended formats are handled as first-class options rather than workarounds, and a learner sees one history whichever way they attended.

Can we issue microcredentials, badges, and certificates?

Yes. We build completion-triggered certificates, digital badges, and CEUs, tiered from an introductory badge through to a certificate of expertise, with learner transcripts, expiry and renewal tracking, and exports for accrediting bodies. Where you already use a credentialing platform, we integrate with it by API and surface earned credentials inside the learner's account rather than replacing what you have.

How do B2B and partnership sales work?

This is where most Extension programs find their next revenue. An employer, agency, or commodity group gets a company account, adds staff, buys training in bulk, assigns seats to named people, and tracks completion on its own dashboard. Bulk credits, invoice and purchase-order checkout, and tax-exempt handling sit underneath. For the deeper procurement story, see our B2B and procurement commerce work.

Our registration forms are long and people drop out. Can that be fixed?

Yes, and it is usually the fastest win available. Long participant forms sitting inline in the cart are the single biggest cause of abandonment we see in Extension checkouts, and they are worst on a phone. We move registration into a structured, mobile-first flow with clear required and optional fields, save progress in place without a page reload, and show a clear status on every item before checkout is allowed. Fewer abandoned carts, and fewer support calls about incomplete registrations.

Can Extension, a campus store, and departmental stores share one platform?

Yes, and we would usually recommend it. A university typically runs several very different storefronts: a program and event catalog, a retail or food brand shipping physical and perishable goods, and gated internal stores for departments. One multi-store platform gives each its own storefront, branding, and rules while your IT team governs a single system and you report across all of it. We run exactly this shape of ecosystem today.

Do you work with land-grant and cooperative Extension systems specifically?

Yes. Penn State Extension and Purdue Extension are both long-running clients. We understand the county-based structure, the mix of free public content and paid programming, the agriculture, 4-H, and community audience, and the reporting a land-grant institution owes its stakeholders.

What about accessibility and security requirements?

Public institutions are held to WCAG 2.1 AA under the ADA Title II rule. The deadline moved: an interim final rule in April 2026 pushed it to April 26, 2027 for entities serving 50,000 or more people, and April 26, 2028 for smaller ones. The standard and the scope did not change, so the work did not get smaller, it got a date. Registration and checkout are where most platforms fail an audit and where accessibility vendors most often stop scanning, so we remediate the full path a learner takes rather than just the marketing pages. On security, we modernize the authentication between your site and your LMS to standards-based single sign-on so credentials are never passed between systems.

Which platform do you build on?

We are platform-agnostic. Penn State Extension runs on Adobe Commerce Cloud and Purdue Extension on Magento Open Source, and we also build on Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, and headless. The right answer depends on your program mix, your integrations, and your internal IT constraints, so we recommend what fits the institution rather than what we happen to sell.

Give your programs a platform that grows with them.

Tell us what your programs run on today and what each tool is costing you. We will come back within one business day with a real plan, the right platform, a real timeline, and a real number. No long sales cycle, no junior bench.

Book a free working session