Getting started with Digital Products

Sell access to your expertise, archive of videos, and online community with Courses, Video on Demand, and Member Sites.

You can build a community and sell your expertise using Digital Products. Your visitors sign up for exclusive access to your gated content by creating an account and purchasing a pricing plan (if you've set a price).

Digital Products include course pages, videos pages, and member sites. These are online products that your customers can purchase and access immediately. 

With Digital Products, you can:

• Monetize your content - Generate passive income by selling access to content like classes and seminars, audio or visual media, or community pages.
• Enhance your brand - Seamlessly manage your public and gated content all in one place.
• Grow your audience - Promote your expertise and accept an unlimited number of members.

Course pages and Videos pages are only available on version 7.1.

Try Digital Products for free

You can build a course page, videos page, or member site on your site at any time. How you begin selling your digital products depends on your site’s billing plan:

• Free trial period - To sell your digital products, subscribe to a business or commerce plan and consider purchasing a digital products plan to lower your transaction fees.
• Personal plans - To sell your digital products, purchase a digital products plan.
• Business, Commerce, Professional, or Premium plans - Your billing plan already includes selling digital products. Consider purchasing a digital products plan to lower your transaction fees.

Digital Products and billing plans

You can sell digital products on any website billing plan. If you purchase a personal individual billing plan, you need to also purchase a digital products plan. You may also want to purchase the add on to increase your video storage limits or decrease your transaction fees.

To learn more about the available pricing plans, visit Digital Products pricing, billing, and invoices.

Commerce features

You’ll have access to some Squarespace Commerce features after you sign up for a digital products plan, business plan, or commerce plan:

• Checkout on your domain - When visitors are ready to make a purchase, they'll be directed to a secure checkout page on your site's custom domain, ensuring consistent security and branding for your site experience.
• Customer accounts - After your visitors sign up for a plan, they'll log into their password-protected accounts to access your digital products. Visitors can securely save payment methods, shipping addresses, shopping carts, and order information in their customer accounts, making for a faster checkout experience in the future.
• Custom tax rules - Create tax rules based on the billing postal code associated with a customer’s payment method. This calculates the tax rate they pay in addition to the pricing plan price.
• Promotional discounts - Encourage sign ups by offering discounts on your digital products. You can customize each discount's name, promotion type, how it's applied, and when it begins and ends. If you’re on a Commerce Advanced plan, you’ll have access to even more discount features.

Digital Product options

Digital Products include course pages, member sites, and videos pages.

Course pages

You can use course pages to teach visitors a new skill, guide them through a project, and share your expertise. Build your course content using lessons that include videos and text. Organize the lessons into chapters, to help your students keep track of the information. 

Each course you create has a course overview page that lists the chapters and lessons. If you keep this page in your main navigation, any visitor can find it and preview your course.

Sell access or require students to sign up by adding your course page to a pricing plan.

Tip: Register for our Create and sell online courses with Squarespace webinar. We’ll provide guidance on preparing a curriculum, building an online course, and monetizing your courses with pricing plans.

Member Sites

Member sites are a great way to build an online community. Create a set of gated pages on your site that contain related content, designed for a specific audience. Only visitors who sign up for a pricing plan (paid or free) can view this content. 

If you're creating a brand new site, choose one of the Member Sites templates from the template store. These site layouts already have Member Sites enabled. 

Check out our Member Sites checklist to help you set up your member site.

Videos pages

You can build a browsable library of videos using videos pages. When you add a videos page to a pricing plan, it’s hidden behind a paywall. Videos pages are a great way to offer your members video content as you create an ongoing series for a skill or project or add to an archive of performances or lectures.

You can embed externally hosted videos, or upload videos to your asset library. The total number of hours of video you can store depends on your billing subscription.

Pricing plans and paywalls

You can sell your digital products using pricing plans. When you add a course page, videos page, or member site to a pricing plan, it’s hidden behind a paywall. To access the content, your visitors must sign up for the pricing plan. 

Choose from three pricing plan structures:

• Free - Visitors sign up by providing their email address and creating a customer account
• Fixed-amount - Visitors pay a single sum or installment payments to gain permanent access to your digital products
• Subscription - Visitors make recurring payments to maintain access to your content

When visitors that haven’t signed up for your pricing plan visit your gated content, they find a paywall. You can customize the paywalls for each individual digital product.

Selling your pricing plans

You'll sell your pricing plans using digital product blocks. These can be added to any layout page on your site. We recommend creating a public sign-up page displaying all your pricing plans. This helps visitors compare plans and purchase the one that’s right for them.

Payments

If you have a recurring subscription or fixed amount pricing plans, you’ll need to connect your site to a payment processor before you can start selling access to your gated content.

You can connect to Stripe, PayPal, or both. When connecting a payment processor, keep in mind:

• Visitors can use PayPal or gift cards for fixed amount one-time payments, but not for fixed amount installment or subscription pricing plans. If you sell these types of pricing plans, connect to Stripe to accept credit and debit card payments.
• Visitors can't purchase digital products with Apple Pay.

After connecting a payment processor to your site, your digital product blocks automatically update to display the currency associated with your payment processor, if that currency is supported by Squarespace. You can change your currency at any time in the Payments panel.

Note: All pricing plan sales have transaction fees. Learn more in Digital Products pricing, billing, and invoices.