Digital Products to Monetize Your Content
What is Digital Products in Squarespace and how does it work?
Essentially, Digital Products includes:
Course pages
Member sites
Video pages
Anyone with a Business plan or higher can utilize the Digital Products feature for free, but the transaction fees are higher, and the video storage limits are much lower. To increase video storage and reduce transaction fees, you will need to purchase the add-on for Digital Products.
Here’s a breakdown of fees and video storage limits:
Click here to visit the Digital Products Pricing page for current pricing info
Benefits of this feature:
Monetizing your content is easier than ever within the Squarespace platform
The course pages are absolutely beautiful and offer the most flexible design options while maintaining your website’s branding and unlocking the powerful design features of Fluid Engine
The offerings are available on your website and not a 3rd party hosting platform that offers the same functionality
Because there is no charge to add a Course to your site, I am playing with the idea of having free courses (more in-depth tutorials) hosted this way. It’s a great way to add interactive content to your website while also offering value for visitors.
Where Digital Products and Courses fall short (IMO):
If you’ve ever used an online course platform, you may be used to having certain features available to you that are not currently available within Squarespace. Due to the fluid nature of relatively “new” Squarespace products, I suggest you do your due diligence to see what options may work best for you!
The transaction fees are STEEP on the free plan (9%!), and the next available paid plan still has high transaction fees of 7%. These fees are in addition to the fees your merchant processor charges (for example, Stripe or PayPal). This has been a dealbreaker for myself and many other clients. If you have established online course revenue and can easily cover the overhead, this may be moot, but it’s hard to justify this cost compared to other services.
It hurts my heart to see the beauty of Squarespace Courses, knowing it’s not the best option for me feature-wise.