Setting up a Paid Product

Callum Updated by Callum

Here you can learn how to:

  • Add a paywall to your content.
  • Create a description for your product.
  • Add a preview thumbnail to your content.
  • Schedule your content releases.

You can:

  • Add a paywall to your content, this can be a subscription on your website/apps or a one-time-purchase on your website.  
  • Create paywalled products e.g. a course, a members subscription tier, sell an audiobook, etc.
Top Tip: Each piece of content can be in more than one product if you want.  

When you create paid content, you’ll need to add it to the right Product.  Here’s how you create the Product. 

Creating Paid Products

  1. Head to Products (left menu in COMMERCE section).
  2. On the Products page on the right click ‘Create Product’ button.
  3. For Access Type choose ‘Paid access’  (learn about the types of content access).  You need a ‘Paid access’ product if you want to add a paywall.    
  4. Add your Product Name - that’s what your audience will see. 
  5. Specify the Product Web Link - this will be the text at the end of the URL for this product checkout page. You can use the name of the product or choose something else.
Warning: Your Product Web Link cannot be changed.

Other settings:
  1. Add all new content to this product automatically

    To save you time you may want to automatically add new content to this product. When you create content the form has some products already ticked. If this is toggled on, you’ll still be able to untick that product for any content that you don’t want to include, but if you’ll be adding lots of content to this product it can save you time to have the product pre-selected on the content creation screen (so turn this toggle on). 
    You can un-toggle this later once your product creation is complete.  This can also be a helpful setting if you’re making a subscription for access to all your content.

  1. Select the preview setting
    1. You can choose to allow users to view the title and image of the content before they buy (but not access the content) - there will be a padlock and when they click to play/read the content it will bring up the paywall for them to buy it.
    2. Or you can hide the content completely making it invisible until they buy it.  
Top Tip: Allowing previews helps your audience know about the awesome content they are missing out on and makes it easier for them to decide to buy it.
  1. Add a product image.
    This is a landscape rectangular image to showcase the product. The ratio is the same as a video thumbnail, ratio 16:9 (it will automatically crop to this so don’t worry about getting the right dimensions before you upload). Pick something that really grabs attention, shows off your brand, and an insight into the type of content available inside the product.
Top Tip: Need an eye-catching image? Our best advice to get amazing images is to buy some stock images or use a free stock image gallery like unsplash.com.
  1. Set the Short description and Product Summary.
    1. The short description shows on the Products Page showing all your products, on the product card. A short sentence is ideal.  
    2. The Product Summary shows on the checkout page and can be longer, and can include bullet points and other formatting. 
  2. Publishing. Do you want to publish straight away or later? 
    1. Pick a date when your product will be available. By default it’s set to publish immediately, but you can choose a future date. 
    2. Add a date to “Hide content from new users” if you want to make this product unavailable and remove it from sale. This can be used to grandfather products or limit their availability for promotional purposes.  Existing subscribers will continue to be charged, but new users will not be able to sign up.  
Top Tip: there are two ways to remove from sale - you can use the Hide Product from new users setting on the Product if you want the content to be hidden too. But if you want to just remove the pricing and still show the content with a padlock you can change this setting on the Price Plan to remove the price from sale but still keep the content visible.
Don’t forget to click ‘save’!

When you click “save” it will ask you to set up your pricing.  You will need to have set up your stores first, link them and then you can add pricing.  You may want to do that step later and get started with uploading your content first.  

How did we do?

The four types of access - free, gated, paid, secret

Setting up a Secret Space

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