Squarespace For Ecommerce: An In-Depth Look And Review

In this in-depth article, we delve into the dynamic world of online retailing with Squarespace, which will light you up through powerful features and functionalities for your ecommerce aspirations.

Key Takeaways

• Squarespace stands out with visually-appealing templates and a user-friendly interface that simplifies e-commerce website creation and management.
• The platform equips businesses with powerful tools, including inventory management, payment options, and abandoned cart recovery, enabling effective online selling.
• From clothing brands to creative studios, Squarespace has proven its capability to support a wide range of businesses, showcasing its adaptability and potential for e-commerce success.

What Is Squarespace For Ecommerce?

Squarespace is a website-building platform that provides users with a range of tools to create, customize, and manage websites without needing to understand or write code. Renowned for its user-friendly interface and stunning design templates, Squarespace seamlessly blends creativity and functionality to provide a comprehensive solution for selling products and services on the internet.

Squarespace Ecommerce is the set of tools and features on Squarespace dedicated to building online stores and managing e-commerce operations. From building a visually captivating online storefront to managing inventory, processing orders, and facilitating secure transactions, Squarespace caters to businesses of all sizes and industries.

Squarespace Ecommerce Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Free trial and refund policy
• Access an array of stunning, award-winning templates.
• Benefit from an intuitive user interface featuring drag-and-drop functionality and easy content management.
• Prioritize mobile user optimization for seamless browsing.
• Excellent inventory system and analytical tools
• Seamless integration of eCommerce capabilities
• Leverage a wide range of social media integrations for enhanced connectivity.
• Harness built-in marketing tools at reasonable prices, covering emails, SEO, and social media.
• Rely on dedicated customer support, including 24/7 email assistance and weekly live chat sessions.

Cons:

• No free plan for starters
• No phone support for customer assistance.
• Encountered limitations in terms of customization options.
• Lacks multi-currency selling functionality.
• Limited availability of payment gateway providers and extensions
• Manual saving is required for pages and posts lacking an autosave feature.
• Point of Sale (POS) system support is limited to the USA.

Who Should Use Squarespace For Ecommerce?

Squarespace’s modern and versatile tool would be a good choice for multiple online merchants with different targets. It particularly caters to:

• Small and medium-sized businesses aiming to launch an online store without the need for extensive technical expertise.
• Artists, designers, and creative entrepreneurs who want to showcase and sell their products online
• Startups and solopreneurs with limited budgets.
• Businesses that prioritize design aesthetics.
• Businesses with moderate ecommerce needs

Squarespace For Ecommerce: A Complete Breakdown

Pricing

In general, Squarespace provides a range of four distinct pricing plans that cater to diverse requirements. The platform offers a 14-day free trial, allowing you to explore its features without any commitment.

When it comes to crafting a website with fundamental features and a friendly budget, you can choose between the Personal plan and the Business plan.

Personal: $23/month if paid monthly or $16/month if paid annually

Business: $33 per month for monthly billing or $23 per month with annual billing.

Especially when it comes to ecommerce, the more suitable choices are the Basic Commerce plan or the Advanced Commerce plan. 

Basic Commerce: $36 per month if paid monthly or $27 per month if paid annually

Besides the basic features of running a website from the Business plan, the Basic Ecommerce plan offers many ecommerce features:

• Fully ecommerce integrated
• Unlimited product selling
• Domain checkout
• Customer accounts
• Selling on Facebook and Instagram
• POS system
• Product reviews
• Advanced merchandising features
• Limited availability labels

Advanced Commerce: $65 per month if paid monthly or $49 if paid annually

It encompasses all the elements available in the Basic Commerce plan and takes it a notch higher by introducing enhanced features that elevate the potential of your online store. These include:

• Offering subscription-based sales
• Commerce APIs for advanced integrations
• Abandoned cart recovery 
• Advanced shipping options
• Providing automatic discounts on eligible orders

Interestingly, Squarespace does not levy transaction fees on its two ecommerce plans, Basic Commerce and Advanced Commerce. However, only for the Business plan, a 3% transaction fee is incurred on all sales and donations.

Squarespace has limited connections with multiple payment providers. Nevertheless, all of these are well-known payment providers on the market, especially PayPal and Stripe. Every provider adheres to distinct regulations and imposes varying payment processing fees. To illustrate, processing fees for Paypal and Stripe start at 5.4% and 2.9% + 30¢, respectively.

There are notable differences when comparing Squarespace’s ecommerce plans with other platforms, such as Shopify and Wix. 

While Squarespace’s Advanced Commerce plan offers attractive advanced features at $49 per month, Shopify’s Basic Shopify plan starts at $39 per month and provides comprehensive tools for scaling your online store, making it ideal for SMEs. Alternatively, Wix’s cheapest ecommerce plan charges $27 monthly to engage customers and start selling. 

Ease of use

Squarespace is renowned for its design versatility, offering an easy-to-use interface for building websites. Its drag-and-drop feature lets users easily position elements, making page construction a breeze, even without coding skills. Yet, some might find the limited free design space a bit restrictive.

Squarespace merchants always appreciate the extensive library of over 100 modern and professionally pre-designed themes with no add-on costs. While the number is not as large as others like Wix (800+ templates) or Shopify (150+ templates), all Squarespace templates are high-quality in appearance and features and keep up-to-date with modern trends.

Every online store template on Squarespace is entirely customizable to align with your brand’s color scheme and aesthetic. This lets you modify these pages based on the template’s structure, saving you from starting entirely from scratch. It also allows users to dive deeper and customize their website’s design, fonts, colors, and more.

Squarespace’s website editor has a clear main navigation bar, but many find the “Design” section a bit overwhelming. No need to worry too much! Squarespace offers the feature to “copy” pages from your chosen template, like the catalog or “About” page.

With Squarespace, you can simplify website management by providing a single dashboard where users can handle various aspects of their site, including content creation, ecommerce management, analytics, and more.

Sales Features

Unlimited products

Squarespace allows users to showcase and sell an unlimited number of products or services, eliminating any constraints on the size or scope of their online store. Squarespace allows them everything from physical goods and services to digital products and cards.

Flexible product variants

The platform empowers users to create intricate product variants, accommodating attributes like size, color, material, and more for new and existing products. This feature provides customers with options that match their preferences, enhancing their shopping experiences.

Inventory management

Squarespace allows merchants to access and modify products across all store pages from a centralized location. 

Its inventory management tools enable precise tracking of stock levels. Users can set up alerts for low inventory and automatically mark products as “out of stock” when inventory depletes, ensuring accurate product availability information.

Whether you are selling in bulk or individually, Squarespace is also capable of handling it effectively.

Abandoned cart recovery

The automated abandoned cart recovery feature allows users to trigger email reminders for customers who left items in their carts. This strategy encourages them to complete their purchase by offering incentives or reminders about the products they are interested in. It is such a valuable tool designed to tackle one of the most common challenges in ecommerce.

Automatic emailing

As a shopper, few things are as frustrating as uncertainty about the status of your order, delight due to the warm atmosphere with a thank you after purchasing, or even the care services. Squarespace simplifies communication with customers by automatically sending key emails, such as order confirmations, shipping notifications, and delivery confirmations.

Payment methods and currencies

Squarespace offers straightforward payment and checkout options for your customers with a variety of convenient and secure payment methods. The platform supports paying through Apple Pay and major credit cards, including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, and JCB, facilitating seamless transactions for a global customer base. It also integrates with trusted payment gateways such as PayPal, Stripe, and Square, ensuring smooth and secure payment processing. 

Currently, Squarespace offers support for nearly 30 languages across all continents in the world. Some of them are only supported when choosing Stripe as a payment provider, the Argentine Peso (ARS), Colombian Peso (COP), Indonesian Rupiah (IDR), and South African Rand (ZAR).

In general, both the payment gateways and multi-currency of Squarespace have limitations that are not as strong as those of other components such as Shopify (100+ gateways, 130+ global currencies) 

Selling digital products, physical products, and services

Squarespace empowers businesses to diversify their offerings by enabling the sale of diverse items through their online stores. 

The platform provides a seamless setup for selling digital goods, whether it’s downloadable ebooks, software, music, or online courses. For those selling tangible products, Squarespace facilitates inventory management and order processing. 

Additionally, the platform supports the sale of services, allowing businesses to showcase and market their expertise alongside physical and digital products.

Integrations

Squarespace offers 30+ integrations that enhance its capabilities and empower users to create a cohesive online presence. These integrations span various categories, each contributing to different aspects of website management, marketing, and business operations. Particularly for:

• Blocks
• Blogging
• Commerce
• Design
• Social accounts
• Domain and email
• Form
• Images
• Multilingual
• Online ordering
• Video
• Marketing

The Squarespace Extensions store offers nearly 40 valuable third-party tools and plugins for you to directly connect to with a few clicks of your mouse to install. All are reliable and trusted sources for users to connect with.

Point of sale

Squarespace’s Point of Sale (POS) connects online and in-person sales seamlessly under their e-commerce plan. Integrated with the Commerce app, it ensures smooth in-person sales, building strong customer relationships. The system provides real-time inventory updates, preventing overselling and ensuring stock availability. Partnering with Square, Squarespace offers advanced POS technology, consolidating business tools and accepting multiple payment methods. 

Though currently limited to the mobile app and US merchants, the Square partnership suggests potential future enhancements, with hopes for broader availability soon.

Marketing Features

SEO

Squarespace excels in the realm of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a critical factor for businesses seeking heightened visibility in search engine results. The platform seamlessly integrates effective SEO strategies within its backend, granting business owners the ability to optimize their websites for enhanced search engine rankings.

Moreover, each page you generate adheres to SEO best practices, facilitating the inclusion of keywords in alt-text, meticulous management of blog titles, and the incorporation of other essential SEO techniques. This emphasis on SEO equips you with the tools to bolster your website’s discoverability, expanding your online audience’s reach.

Email marketing

For e-commerce plans looking for email marketing solutions, Mailchimp stands out as an affordable and user-friendly choice. It allows for data collection and customer engagement without breaking the bank. Plus, with Mailchimp, you can ensure brand consistency across your website and marketing emails.

On the other hand, Squarespace offers its own integrated email marketing tool called Squarespace Email Campaigns. It lets you create custom emails directly from your website, aligning your marketing messages with your site’s branding. Staying true to its commitment to beautiful designs, Squarespace ensures even your emails look professionally crafted in any inbox.

However, it’s important to note that this offering isn’t available for free usage. Squarespace Email Campaigns introduces its range of pricing plans, each equipped with varying features and support, starting as low as $5 per month for a user in Google Working Space.

Social Media Integration

All the expected features are present, including social sharing options for blog posts and new product introductions in your store. 

You can strategically position share buttons throughout your page, allowing users to promptly disseminate your site to their networks via platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and more. This integration streamlines the process of sharing your content across diverse platforms, effectively expanding your online reach and engagement.

Squarespace’s social media integration extends to features such as social sharing buttons and the ability to track social feeds. These functionalities empower visitors to effortlessly share your website’s content on their own social media accounts, contributing to the creation of an appealing feed. This not only drives increased traffic to your site but also elevates your online visibility.

Blogging

Squarespace’s blogging tools are straightforward. To start a new blog, just add a new page, choose “Blog” from the “Collections”, and start writing. However, while the editing space works, it can feel a bit clunky. It’s more like building a webpage than writing a post, and formatting isn’t as streamlined as other platforms.

Though Squarespace might not rival WordPress in terms of blogging features, it’s still a solid choice, especially for creative businesses looking to highlight their work. The platform supports multiple authors, integrates easily with social media for sharing, and offers templates tailored for blogging.

Squarespace Customer Support and Security

Support

Squarespace stands out by offering premium support to all users, not just those on higher-tier plans. They provide 24/7 email support, round-the-clock assistance on social media, a detailed knowledge base, video guides, a community forum, and weekly live chat sessions. However, they don’t offer phone support, which some users miss for real-time troubleshooting. 

Regardless of your subscription level, everyone gets the same 24-hour assistance. Plus, their knowledge base is packed with valuable resources, making it a go-to for self-help.

Security

Squarespace prioritizes the safety and security of both your website and its visitors through a robust array of protective measures. Every Squarespace site benefits from SSL certificates, two-factor authentication (2FA), a defense against denial of service (DoS) attacks, the option to set page passwords, etc. 

Layering SSL certificates means that the connection between your browser and the website you’re visiting is secure, as is the web information. You can easily check the website page to see whether it’s certified with SSL through a URL that starts with “https://”, a closed padlock icon displayed beside the URL, or a trusted seal that is relevant.

The platform also supports a login activity panel. Although the login activity panel itself may not solely safeguard your site, it serves as a tool to identify any suspicious or unauthorized logins from unknown devices.

In terms of payment processing, Squarespace employs the services of Stripe, PayPal, and Square. All payments that go through these processors enhance the credibility of your site, given their compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), which is a guiding framework to ensure the security of your customer’s payment card data, underscoring the importance of safeguarding sensitive information.

Squarespace Ecommerce Success Stories

MATE the Label

MATE the Label is a sustainable clothing brand from Los Angeles that is made with organic, natural, and non-toxic materials. Its core value is to provide people everywhere with essentials that are clean from seed to skin.

Specializing in ethical and eco-friendly clothing, MATE the Label’s Squarespace-powered website presents a seamless shopping experience. The minimalist design and straightforward navigation highlight the brand’s commitment to sustainability, while product pages provide in-depth information about materials and production processes. 

The platform’s integrated e-commerce features enable customers to easily browse and purchase MATE’s clothing line, reinforcing the brand’s ethos of conscious consumerism. With Squarespace, MATE the Label has created an online space that resonates with environmentally conscious shoppers seeking both style and ethics.

Lone Flag

Lone Flag is a brand and concept space committed to offering worldwide access to high-quality contemporary menswear and lifestyle products at an affordable price. Its dedication lies in showcasing meticulously crafted items, with a central focus on bringing attention to products made in the USA, specifically created in the vibrant surroundings of sunny Southern California.

Lone Flag’s online store, powered by Squarespace, is a testament to its success. The platform has enabled them to elegantly showcase their diverse collection of products, effectively engaging visitors with their brand story and values. The seamless integration of visuals, compelling storytelling, and easy navigation allows customers to explore their offerings effortlessly. 

Through this website, Lone Flag has not only established an online store but also created an immersive e-commerce experience that reflects their unique identity and resonates with their target audience. Squarespace’s user-friendly interface has empowered Lone Flag to manage their online presence with efficiency.

Clementine Studio

Clementine Studio is a creative haven in Chicago, focusing on custom wedding stationery and specialized illustrations for brands and events that evoke a sense of individuality and style. Their collection is a celebration of artistic expression, drawing inspiration from nature and intricate designs.

Clementine Studio has curated an immersive e-commerce experience that reflects the essence of their brand with Spacesquare’s support. The platform allows them to present their custom products with elegance and attention to detail, showcasing the intricate craftsmanship that sets them apart. The seamless integration of captivating visuals, informative product descriptions, and easy navigation enhances the visitor’s journey, making it a delight to explore their offerings.

With Squarespace’s user-friendly interface, Clementine Studio has been able to manage their online store and showcase their unique creations effortlessly. The platform’s built-in features and customization options have enabled them to maintain a visually appealing online presence with pastel tones and handwriting fonts.

Bottom Line

After all, Squarespace undoubtedly emerges as a robust and versatile platform for businesses seeking to establish a compelling online presence through e-commerce. It offers comprehensive solutions for both beginners and experienced entrepreneurs.

Squarespace’s e-commerce success stories have exemplified the diverse range of businesses that have thrived on the platform. Absolutely. As a merchant, you can also solidify Squarespace’s position as a dependable partner in building your own successful online stores.

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