How To Sell Online Courses With Squarespace: A Complete Tech Roundup
What tools you need to connect to Squarespace to run a successful course business online
The search for perfect tools for your online course stops right here! Please stop wasting your time testing and trying all the different platforms and figuring out how to connect them together to make your online school work. We did all the work for you!
If you’re on Squarespace, it should be so easy to launch and sell a digital course. No matter what you do, you can package your knowledge into a digital program and add up to $2-5k monthly revenue to your business. Digital courses can do so much for your business: They fill your sales pipeline with amazing prospects and position you as an authority in your niche.
Squarespace lets you easily connect multiple tools to create an online school and sell one or multiple courses online. In the past couple of months, several business owners reached out to us asking if we could design a custom course platform for them and asked how to connect all the things together to run a course business.
Although we run a template shop, each of our templates comes with a course about the template. On top of that, each template course is bundled with our signature workshop Squarespace Mastery. We sell through Squarespace but the courses are hosted on Teachable. We used to host all courses on Squarespace (as password-protected pages) and Tilda.cc (another great landing page platform).
When our inventory got bigger, we decided to invest in a course platform that would allow hosting multiple courses, creating course bundles, etc. We’ve been trying and testing platforms for over a month and agonized over every little detail each of the platforms had.
We did all the heavy lifting for you! Right now we have 10 courses. Creating new courses as well as managing all that inventory got a lot easier.
Here’s what you will need to sell your courses with Squarespace:
1. Squarespace: Front-end website that acts as a landing page/sales page hub for your courses
Yes, if you’re a service provider looking to expand your business empire with digital courses, Squarespace is perfect! Build your main website with it and use all the awesome design features to build striking landing/sales pages for your courses. Funnel your dream customers to your site with social media, SEO, and paid advertising.
Check out our Squarespace template for coaches and digital course creators - designed specifically for this niche! Also, if you’re looking for a sales page solution, check out our Terranova Sales Page template - it was created for existing website owners who want to add a colorful page to their website but don’t want to mess the existing styles. This long-form sales page template has a variety of contrasting section designs to present your offer with elegance in a convincing and engaging way.
You can create a sales page on Squarespace yourself - use our tutorial on how to remove the header and the footer in Squarespace 7.1.
2. Ecommerce solution: shopping cart
Squarespace has built-in eCommerce features that would allow selling digital products (digital downloads) or services products (no digital downloads). It allows you to handle multiple shops under one roof and customize everything with a design editor (without using any custom code whatsoever).
The one downside of product pages in Squarespace is that default product pages don’t allow stacking full-bleed sections on top of each other - it’s still possible though, but you will have to use a little bit of custom code.
If this seems limiting, you can create a product for sale in Squarespace and add it to any page using a product block. Like this:
So it’s possible to use Squarespace as both landing page software and shopping cart - you can embed any product on any page!
We should note however that Squarespace allows very little customization of the checkout page and process. You can add custom form functionality to all your products (each product can have an individual form that people would need to fill out before they proceed to checkout). You can customize the checkout questionnaire - but that’s about it! Don’t get us wrong, the checkout page in Squarespace looks amazing - it’s compact and straightforward!
If you’re planning to get a little fancier with checkout and add upsells and downsells, we suggest you get a tool like Thrivecart or Samcart. These tools allow you to build custom checkout pages with testimonials, product shots, icons, lists and add friction-less upsells, downsells and order bumps to the checkout process.
3. Course hosting platform
When your students purchase a course from you, they need to be added to a course platform where they can view all course content, videos, and text, in a convenient way.
Luckily, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel - there are multiple robust solutions on the market that integrate perfectly with Squarespace!
We tried and tested all of them and came to the conclusion that Teachable and Thinkific are the best ones! We spent over a month trying and testing all the possible solutions on the market to find the one that suits our specific needs, which are:
We have not just one course but many courses and are planning to add more
We needed the ability to combine courses into bundles (for example, all our templates are automatically bundled with the Squarespace Mastery class and we needed a streamlined way to manage all the inventory)
We needed the ability to customize course pages with CSS
Teachable is our platform of choice for courses! Thinkific is the second choice. Both platforms are pretty similar - so it’s really a matter of preference. Which platform do you like more visually?
Both platforms allow an unlimited number of courses and students on a basic plan and a myriad of perks and customizations on higher plans.
Two more platforms you might want to consider are Kajabi and Podia. These tools, however, include full-blown landing page software and might eliminate the need to use Squarespace at all.
Squarespace recently added a membership area functionality - it’s a good choice if you are planning to run one membership or just one course. Squarespace charges per course. If you’re planning to have dozens of courses (like us!) it makes sense to use something like Teachable. One benefit of Squarespace member areas is that they integrate seamlessly with Squarespace’s own email marketing solution and e-commerce.
4. Email marketing solution
The fourth and probably the most important element in running a successful online school is email marketing.
Our platform of choice is Flodesk - it’s the fastest, cheapest, and most elegant way to set up email marketing automation in your biz without too much tech trouble. (By the way, get 50% off your Flodesk subscription by using our link).
Built-in newsletter blocks in Squarespace are really limiting in terms of design - that’s where Flodesk comes in. You can create almost any design you want with Flodesk forms (change fonts, colors, size of form input fields), and the form will work perfectly with your website design in Squarespace. So easy to put a form on a page with a simple code block and start collecting leads!
With Flodesk, you can plug the form into a segment and set up a series of emails with just a few clicks. Ahhh and the email templates are beautiful!
What should happen when somebody buys a course from your Squarespace shop? How do I join all these solutions together?
Ok, but how do you actually put all this machine in motion? Our answer is simple: Zapier.
Zapier is a business automation platform that allows connecting multiple tools together. Zapier can send data from one tool to another on your behalf. It works behind the scenes!
Let’s look at the simplest scenario in which you use Squarespace commerce and set up your products as service products.
Somebody buys a product in Squarespace. Student gets Squarespace order confirmation email
Squarespace itself can’t (at least at the time this post was written couldn’t) send order data directly to Zapier, but payment processing solutions like Stripe or PayPal can. So in Zapier, set up a PayPal or Stripe sale as a trigger.
Zapier catches a sale and sends the student info to Teachable.
Teachable creates a student registration, adds the student to the respective course, and sends confirmation/login info emails (these emails can be customized)
Zapier also sends info to a Flodesk segment
Flodesk sends student welcome email sequence
Which plan should I get on Squarespace?
You can do everything described in the previous paragraph on a Business plan. If you plan to eliminate Flodesk, you can use native Squarespace email campaigns, which can send customized emails based on order data.
Should you use Squarespace members areas?
It depends on your goals - if you are planning to have one course or membership, just keep everything on one platform. Squarespace will let you handle all the aspects of running an online school - eCommerce, email marketing, and content hosting. So if you are just starting out, it makes sense to do it this way. When your business gets bigger, it makes sense to invest in platforms that are more appropriate for this stage in business and will let you save more money in the long run!
Important mindset work
Here’s one final aspect of setting up an online school I want to talk about:
Your content marketing efforts and course creating process are much more important than getting and setting up the right tools.
So keep it simple stupid! Don’t waste your time digging for the perfect solution because it doesn’t exist.
You’d rather spend two weeks writing and organizing your course content than looking for the perfect online course tool and setting up all the tech.
Use whatever everybody else is using and just start creating content that excites you! All the rest will follow!
Don’t feel like doing all the tech work yourself and would rather spend time working on the course content - hire us to do the techy stuff!
Did we inspire you to move forward with your online biz? What questions do you have about running an online school with Squarespace and other platforms? Reach out on Instagram!
