Since Squarespace launched its new tool for hosting and selling online courses in late 2023, I’ve been getting inquiries from several people who started their online course businesses on Hotmart and are now looking to migrate those courses to their own school on Squarespace. They’re wondering:

If it's possible to do so.
And whether it's a good idea to do so.

Maybe this applies to you, or maybe you're about to launch your first course soon and are wondering which platform is best for you. And the honest answer is: it depends.

So in this post, we’ll explore when it’s a good idea to make the switch from hosting your courses on Hotmart to hosting them on your own Squarespace website, when it’s not recommended, and when a hybrid solution might be the best option.

Table of Contents

The benefits of using Hotmart to sell your online courses

Hotmart is one of the most popular platforms for selling digital products and courses. It offers a host of benefits, especially if you're just starting out and aren't sure yet whether the online education business model is right for you:

You can start selling without needing your own website. If you already have a following on Instagram, for example, you can direct them to your Hotmart link so they can purchase your course.
Creating your course on Hotmart is free; they only charge a commission on each sale you make. Again, if you're just starting out and your sales volume isn't high, this model can work very well for you.
You can host your course content or digital products directly on Hotmart, and students can access them through their user accounts.
Hotmart also handles the checkout process so that people can purchase your courses, and charges you a commission on each sale.
If you're in Latin America (LATAM), it makes it very easy for you to collect payments from your students and automatically converts the price you've set for your course or product into the buyer's currency. This is also one of the major advantages of Hotmart for those who sell to an international audience.

In my opinion, the main advantage of Hotmart is that it lets you experiment with your digital product or course with very little risk: you only pay a commission when you make a sale, and it also offers a range of payment options for your students, which makes it very appealing.

If your brand suddenly takes off on Instagram or through a podcast that’s become a huge hit, and you need to launch a course or product ASAP and start selling, Hotmart can help you do it quickly and without making things too complicated.

Disadvantages of Hotmart

Although you can use Hotmart for free, it charges fairly high sales commissions (9.9% plus a flat fee depending on your currency). Here’s a more detailed explanation of all the fees and commissions, and you can check the general pricing page, although if you already use Hotmart, you’re probably familiar with these charges.

When you're just starting out, this is great because you can test your course idea without investing in a technology platform. The thing is, if your course is successful and you start generating high sales volume, or if your course has a high price point, this high commission rate will mean you'll lose hundreds (or thousands) of dollars.

For example, if your course costs €500, you pay Hotmart a €49.50 commission for each sale. In the long run, this is unsustainable.

Hotmart's customization options are quite limited, so your course or online school will look just like any other brand on Hotmart. Hotmart is a good platform for launching and validating ideas, but it doesn't help you position your brand as a leader in your industry or create a premium experience for your students.

And that’s fine—this isn’t a necessity for everyone: there are brands that don’t need to offer a premium experience because quality and personalization aren’t among their core values. But there are brands that do commit to offering premium experiences (whether through products, training, or services…), and they need that premium experience to be present from start to finish.

In my personal experience with my clients and those who consult with me, these are the two main factors driving the switch from Hotmart to a self-hosted platform: they started out by launching their courses on Hotmart and taking advantage of the platform’s features, but they’ve grown and gained enough visibility that they now need a more advanced solution—one that doesn’t eat into their course profits and allows for a high degree of customization.

They offer (or want to offer) mid- to high-priced products and courses; they want to position themselves as premium brands (so they can charge mid- to high prices); and right now there’s a disconnect between how they want their brand and products to be perceived and the image they project by hosting their products on Hotmart instead of on their own website and online school.

If you're in a similar situation, now is the time to invest in your own website where you can also host your courses and digital products.

The benefits of having an online school on your own Squarespace website

Squarespace is an all-in-one web design and hosting platform that increasingly allows you to sell more products and services natively: physical products, digital products, services, appointment scheduling and sales, and now also online courses and memberships.

As we’ve seen, the main advantage of using Squarespace (or another platform that gives you more control over your online school, such as Kajabi or WordPress with one of its school-building plugins) has to do with the image you project, your brand positioning, and how you want your customers and potential customers to perceive you.

Having your own school conveys authority, professionalism, quality, and trust. Plus, it gives you much more control over your customers' experience, from the moment they visit your website until they complete your course.

If you look at brands that offer online courses and that we consider synonymous with high quality (such as Susana Torralbo’s The Com School, Jackie Rueda’s School, Cahruca’s Escuela de Jefas, etc.), you’ll see that none of them host their courses on Hotmart or a similar generic platform: they all have their own schools, and one of the reasons their students keep buying their courses is because the experience they have is highly personalized.

On the other hand, with platforms like Squarespace, you can access plans with lower fees—or even 0% fees—which allows you to run a much more profitable business.

Other benefits of using Squarespace to host your online school

Squarespace is super easy to use. This is something I say a lot, but people don’t really get it until they sign up, try it out, and their minds are blown 😂. The thing is, Squarespace is specifically designed to be very user-friendly for people who aren’t web designers or developers—or who aren’t particularly tech-savvy.
In my opinion, if you run an online school, you need to be able to use your website dynamically and without restrictions: you need to be able to create lead-generation or sales landing pages for your launches, create discount codes or productbundles at attractive prices, set up automations for new students or for people who have already purchased from you and whom you want to offer something special, and so on.

And you need to be able to do all of this yourself or have someone on your team do it easily, without any hassle, and without having to call your developer for every little thing. And that’s exactly what Squarespace offers: ease of use, control over your website, and the flexibility to launch a new site in no time.

Of course, there will be times when you’ll need to call in a specialist, but 80–90% of the time, you (or your assistant) will be able to handle it on your own.

It comes with a built-in email marketing client, so you can start gathering subscribers right away, and you can later set up post-purchase email automations to follow up when someone signs up for one of your courses or purchases one of your products.
Enormous flexibility to customize your school's experience: typically, course platforms have a rather unattractive design and very few customization options. With Squarespace, this is truly amazing: you can create welcome pages with any design you want, and within the lessons you can add videos and text, as well as images, download buttons, photo galleries, audio files, forms, charts, song playlists... basically anything you want. You can create a course that’s a truly unique experience.
You can sell courses, memberships, digital products, physical products, and services all at the same time... you have a lot of flexibility in this regard.

If you have a Squarespace website plan, you can use the course tool for free (with a 9% transaction fee), or you have the option to sign up for additional plans with reduced transaction fees of 7%, 3%, and even 0%. It’s true that these plans with reduced transaction fees involve an additional annual investment in technology infrastructure for your business, but as we’ve seen, if you generate a certain level of revenue from your courses, it’s well worth investing a little to avoid paying commissions.

Squarespace's pricing plans can be a bit complicated, so if you're thinking about using Squarespace to host and sell your online courses but aren't sure how much it will cost or whether it will be profitable, we can create a customized profitability analysis for you. Drop me a line and we’ll take a look.

https://es.squarespace.com/ecommerce/cursos-en-linea

Disadvantages of using Squarespace for your school

Squarespace is my go-to platform for service-based websites and schools that sell courses or digital products, but that doesn't mean it's perfect (spoiler: no platform is 😉).

Squarespace's course tool is still very new (it was launched in late 2023), so while it has many great features, there are others that haven't been added yet... and I say "yet" because many of them will be coming in the near future.

Two features that are available on Hotmart but not yet on Squarespace are:

comment section in the lessons,
and an automatic generator for course completion certificates.

However, if you need to include these two features in your course, there are a few alternatives you can implement to achieve a similar result.

Another drawback is that if you have a global audience, Squarespace does not automatically convert your course’s currency to the user’s currency. For example: if you’re in Spain and your course costs €50, and someone from Mexico wants to buy it, when that person goes to the checkout page, they’ll still see €50—they won’t see the equivalent of €50 in Mexican pesos.

This isn't usually a problem because people living in Latin America are used to mentally calculating how much a certain amount is in euros or dollars, but it's something to keep in mind.

The main drawback of Squarespace is if you (or your business) are based in Latin America, since processing payments for your course can get quite complicated. Why? Because Squarespace currently only integrates with PayPal and Stripe (which allows payment by credit or debit card), and in Latin America, Stripe is only available in Mexico and Brazil. As a result, if you’re in another Latin American country, you’ll only be able to accept payments via PayPal, and this is far from ideal.

If you're in Latin America and want to host your school's website on Squarespace to take full advantage of its features, you'll need to implement a hybrid solution:

Set up your own school on your Squarespace website.
Have the course sales pages on Squarespace as well.
Set up the checkout or payment page using an alternative platform, such as Thrivecart or Hotmart itself, which can be easily integrated into your Squarespace sales page so that the payment process isn't confusing (here's how to set up the Hotmart widget on your website's payment page).
And finally, once the payment has been processed, redirect the student to a page where they can access the course content on your school's Squarespace site.

That said, there’s another glimmer of hope: Squarespace is working on Squarespace Payments (similar to Shopify Payments or Hotmart Payments), which will allow users to add more payment methods in the future. Although it’s currently only available in the U.S., they plan to expand it to more countries in 2024. Let’s hope they gradually include Latin American countries as well.🤞🏼

Is it possible to migrate a course from Hotmart to Squarespace?

OK, let's say you have your course on Hotmart and it's time to move it to a platform that gives you more control, like Squarespace. The big question is: is it possible to automatically migrate all the course content—and all your student information—from one platform to another?

The short answer: no. Currently, it is not possible to automatically migrate content or student information.

Right now, to make this switch between platforms, you have to redesign the entire course within Squarespace, but really, this is something that would need to be done anyway for the reasons we’ve already discussed: the type of content you can add to lessons on Hotmart is quite limited (as is the design), and one of the advantages of Squarespace is the ability to create lessons and courses that are very creative and full of personality.

As for student information, we recommend sending an email advising them to create an account on your new Squarespace school so they can access the enhanced course content. And, if you’d like, you can keep the course content on Hotmart for a while, keeping in mind that you don’t have to pay them for this (remember that Hotmart only charges a commission on sales).

That said, if we consider that Squarespace wants more and more creators to bring their courses to its platform, we can imagine that they’re working on a way to import all this information and make the process much more convenient.😉

Regarding billing: Is it possible to automate it using Hotmart or Squarespace?

This is a huge topic in and of itself, and it varies greatly depending on whether you're in Spain, the U.S., or Latin America.

Regarding billing with Hotmart, I recommend reading this post by Alba Delgado, who is a leading expert in the industry on the topic of billing in Spain.

Regarding billing specifically on Squarespace, there’s generally a bit of confusion about what you can and can’t do on the platform, and what’s possible varies greatly depending on whether you’re in the U.S. or Spain. The short answer: it can be automated, but it requires additional tools and configurations, as is the case with almost all course platforms (such as Kajabi). In the coming weeks, I’ll publish a post on this topic to cover it in more detail.

Conclusion

Both Hotmart and Squarespace can be excellent options for hosting and selling your online courses, depending on where you are in your journey and the specific needs of your business.

In general, Hotmart is a good option if you don't yet have your own website and need to launch your course or digital product as soon as possible—both to start generating revenue and to validate your product or course.
If it’s time to upgrade your online business, then it’s worth investing in your own online school on a platform like Squarespace, which gives you full control over the experience you offer your students (from the moment they find you until they complete the course) and makes your business much more profitable with commissions as low as 0% per sale.