Invite-only members areas with product subscriptions

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if anyone had a solution to a challenge my team is currently facing.

We want to build an invite-only members area where we can sell subscription products to approved persons (exclusively). 

Currently, anyone with the URL to the members area can sign up and access the subscription product purchasing option.

The only solution I can think of is to email the approved persons with a link to the members area. The problem with this is that while we could keep the members area 'unlinked', anyone with the url could access it and make purchases, regardless of approval from us.

Has anyone else faced this challenge and come up with a solution?

Cheers,

Luke

I've been looking for this for a long time as well. 

I believe going for a 3rd party service like memberspace is the only solution to this. 

Thanks Viktor. Looks like they have some good functionalities, but an outrageous 5% transaction fee (on top of $49/month). How is one meant to scale a business when 5% of the gross margin is being siphoned off for basic functionalities. 

Are there any memberspace alternatives that don't have transaction fees that you've come across? 

Thanks mate

On 3/13/2023 at 10:00 AM, viktormarketing said:

I believe going for a 3rd party service like memberspace is the only solution to this. 

The only way to protect Squarespace content is to use Squarespace's own membership features. Third party membership products cannot truly protect Squarespace content. It's not a fault with these third party products but a limitation imposed by Squarespace. Third party member products can only place a "veil" over the content and this is very easy for anyone to remove, revealing the content underneath. This is why the member-only content can appear in search results and be viewed by ordinary visitors. 

On 3/6/2023 at 2:13 AM, PerryLA said:

We want to build an invite-only members area. Currently, anyone with the URL to the members area can sign up and access the subscription product purchasing option.

The full functionality for invite-only memberships won't be with us for some time so in the meantime, you'll need to rely on the features and workarounds that are available, even though they are not perfect. For example:

• you can hide the Join button on the access denied page for Member Areas
• you can add a Member Sign Up Block to a page and then password protect the page so that only invitees can see it.

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@PerryLA—I'm obviously late seeing this message, but I'm curious if new developments enable you to do what you wanted.

Also, in addition to what Paul mentioned above, I think turning off the Search function in the SEO settings for the page would help keep the unlinked URL hidden.