Redirect back to the Catalog where courses were purchased from on cart confirmation

Question

Hi,

I was on the Canvas Catalog user call last month and someone had asked about the 'Return to Catalog' button from the order confirmation page and how it routes back to the parent catalog instead of the catalog they purchased the courses from. I want to echo that this is really confusing our students and would love it to route back to our Catalog. Has this been resolved yet? How can I get the cart confirmation page to route back to the original Catalog?

JessieJohnnes · Answer

Hi @Máté Kiss, Thank you for taking the time to explain this design. Routing to the parent catalog makes sense with schools using Canvas Catalog very differently.

Do you, or maybe anyone else that comes across this post, know of any creative ways to make this feature work? For us, the parent catalog is actually not in use. Since our college invested in Catalog first, we decided to use a subcatalog and left the parent catalog open in the event that the University of Oregon would want to adopt this in other colleges. I am thinking I should configure the parent catalog to look more like a library of catalogs so that users can route back to our subcatalog from the parent one, but I'm curious if folks have done something different?

Máté Kiss · Answer

Hi @JessieJohnnes, Thanks for bringing this up. We took another look at this with our engineering team to better understand whether this could be changed. Today, there isn't a configuration option to change where the Return to Catalog button routes users after checkout. What we found is that the button currently points to the root Catalog for the domain by design. While it seems like it should be able to return a learner to the Catalog or Subcatalog they purchased from, that gets tricky in practice.

For example, a single order can contain listings from different Subcatalogs. On top of that, listings can appear in multiple places at the same time, such as in a parent Catalog and one or more Subcatalogs through cross-listing. Because of that, there isn't always a clear "source Catalog" that Catalog can reliably send the learner back to after checkout. Given those scenarios, the current behavior is to send users back to the root Catalog, which provides a consistent destination regardless of how the listings were discovered.

That said, I completely understand the confusion you're describing, especially when learners spend their entire journey within a specific Subcatalog and naturally expect to land back there after completing their purchase. Thank you for taking the time to share the use case and learner perspective. Feedback like this helps us better understand where the current experience doesn't match user expectations and it's valuable context for future discussions about the post-enrollment journey.

Best,

Máté