How customers find and sign up for gated content

Learn how your visitors review and purchase access to your digital products.

Last updated January 31, 2025

This guide shows what a visitor to your site experiences when learning about and signing up for a member site, enrolling in a course, reading a monetized blog, or purchasing access to a Videos page.

All of the example screenshots in this guide are from a version 7.1 site for a mock yoga studio named Lolasana. If you have a version 7.0 site, the member experience may be slightly different.

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Exploring digital products

Before a visitor to your site purchases one of your digital products, they'll probably want to explore your offerings. Your digital products are hidden behind paywalls that display their relevant pricing plans. Visitors with links to your course page, videos page, or member site can use the paywall to review options.

You can also create a sign-up page or section to help them discover all of the pricing plans you offer. On our example Lolasana site, we created a sign-up page using a Digital product page layout that contains two digital product blocks.

This gives visitors a place to compare and contrast what each pricing plan includes. The blocks display plan descriptions, benefits included, and price.

Sign-up page to sell digital products.jpg

Sign-up page to sell digital products.jpg

If the pricing plan uses two fixed amount or subscription payment options, the digital product block displays a price picker. Customers can use the picker to select their preferred pricing option before signing up. For example, if our pricing plan is a fixed amount with one payment in full of $30 or three payments of $10 charged over the course of three months, the picker will display both options.

Digital product blocks with fixed prices one month or three.jpg

Digital product blocks with fixed prices one month or three.jpg

Signing up for a digital product

After your site visitor chooses their preferred pricing plan, they'll click the Sign up button. A pop-up window prompts the visitor to create a customer account or sign into an existing account.

In our example, the site visitor—Sage Example—selected the Meditation & Yoga pricing plan. Because they don’t already have a customer account on the site, they enter their name and email address, and create a password before clicking Create account.

Example customer signing up for an account.jpg

Example customer signing up for an account.jpg

Paying for the digital product

If you charge for your digital product, the visitor lands on a checkout screen after clicking Create account. Free digital products skip the checkout process. Customers can use credit cards or PayPal for fixed amount one-time payment pricing plans, or credit cards for fixed-amount installment and subscription pricing plans.

The Meditation & Yoga pricing plan has a fixed-amount installments option of $10 per month for three months, so Sage Example enters their credit card information and clicks Continue. They then review the checkout details and click Subscribe.

Keep in mind, if you've created a custom checkout form, your member's experience will look slightly different than in these screenshots.

Example checkout page for a fixed amount pricing plan.jpg

Example checkout page for a fixed amount pricing plan.jpg

Visiting the gated content

After completing the checkout flow, Sage Example’s customer account panel opens to display the Digital Products section. From here, they can click the blog, course, member site, or videos page they purchased. When they click the digital product they want to visit, it opens for them in a new tab.

Receiving the email confirmation

When a customer creates an account and purchases a digital product, they become a member of your site. They receive your welcome email confirming their new membership. By default, this email welcomes your member, invites them to sign in, and links to the member site homepage, course overview page, or videos page (depending on what their pricing plan includes).

If your customer chooses a pricing plan with a recurring subscription, they also receive an order confirmation email every time their payments go through.

Enable subscription renewal notifications

You can enable subscription renewal notifications to send customers a renewal notification email 15 days before their renewal date. The email includes the name of the product, price, renewal date, cadence at which the subscription renews, and a link to log into their account and manage their subscription.

To enable renewal notifications:

  1. Open the Customer Notifications panel.
  2. Click Subscription orders, then click Subscription renewal.
  3. Turn the Send to subscribers toggle on.

Keep in mind, subscription terms of 11 or fewer weeks (if renewing weekly) or two or fewer months (if renewing monthly) aren’t eligible for renewal notification emails. 

Viewing digital product details

After one of your customers creates a customer account and completes the checkout process, the Customer Account panel opens on the right side of the screen. This panel also appears immediately after a member signs into their customer account or clicks the Account button in the top navigation.

In our mock site, Sage Example logs into their account and opens the Customer Account panel.

Customer Account panel after signing up.jpg

They then click Digital Products or Memberships in the panel to view a list of all the digital products that they can access through their pricing plan. At this time, they’ve only purchased a membership to the Meditation & Yoga pricing plan. 

By clicking the name of the pricing plan, all Sage Example’s membership details appear. These include:

  • The cost of their pricing plan 
  • The frequency at which their plan renews (if applicable)
  • The renewal date (if applicable)

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How customers find and sign up for gated content