Review of The Squarespace Online Store - The pros & cons

Since their launch in 2004, Squarespace took almost 10 years to launch an e-commerce feature. Their website builder in general stands for quality, and that’s why we are quite excited to review their new online store. It’s part of their all new Business package. At first glance it looks like the perfect solution for a small or medium-sized web store that is also very affordable to run. But we are here to find out what’s behind the curtain! We start by adding a new product. Squarespace lets you decide whether you want to sell physical or digital products. The main difference is that digital files will be delivered automatically, right after the successful payment. The buyer receives a download link via email when the transaction is finished. We are going to add a physical item now. First, let’s upload a few photos. The name and description is next. In Pricing & Variants we set a regular price and a price to use when the item is on sale. Items that are on sale will show a “Sale” label in the live store as you can see here. Squarespace will also generate a sequential, unique item number, called a SKU. Thanks to Inventory Management, you will always know how many items you have in stock and customers will never be able to place any orders you are not able to fulfill. Add the weight of your item and set up variants like sizes and colors. Under Additional Info it’s possible to provide more details to your description that will only be visible in the detail view of the product. Now let’s change the URL to a more user and search engine-friendly format. Lastly, you can set up your social media accounts to post your latest items automatically on places like Facebook or Twitter. If you want to show new items on your homepage, for example, there are summary feed items, which look like this after setting it up. You can specify categories through the filters. To access the Backend, we click the Dollar sign. Like a to do list, Squarespace shows you the steps needed to complete the setup of the online store. Under Orders you’ll find an overview of pending, completed and cancelled orders. With a click of this button you can export all data as a CSV file for your accounting or invoicing software. Inventory shows you an overview of all the products you currently have in your store. Shipping can either be flat-rate or based on the weight of the item. It's great to be able to define which countries you want to ship to and exactly what the charge will be. On the other hand, Squarespace currently doesn’t have an option to remove the shipping charge based on the dollar amount of the order. But you can set up a discount code for that as you can see in the next menu item. Here you can set up Coupon Codes and run customer promotions. Offer either a flat or a percentage discount. Limit the duration here. Under Taxes, it’s possible to define the exact tax rate that applies to each US state. Customize the Email Notifications here. There are two basic messages: the order confirmation that also includes the download link if it’s a digital item. The other email will be sent after the product has been marked as shipped. Finally, Store Settings enables you to set up the Stripe payment gateway. Currently you can only accept credit cards - Visa and Mastercard - and there is no Paypal integration. Stipe’s fees are very similar to Paypal. Here you can automatically push your customer’s email addresses into MailChimp, a newsletter software. This is very convenient if you want to promote new products or upcoming sales via email to previous buyers. Conclusion Squarespace Commerce integrates nicely with the rest of the website builder. As far as the user-experience is concerned, you won’t notice any difference at all. Their pricing is fair and there are no transaction or sales fees other than what Stripe charges. Compared to e-commerce add-ons like Ecwid, which we have also reviewed, Squarespace Commerce has the big advantage of being very search engine-friendly. What we are missing are further payment options and a way to create customer accounts to make repeated purchases easier for customers. But if you are planning to set up a rather large online store, you may also want to check out other options. If you have previously used a different provider like Big Cartell or Shopify, it’s possible to import your product data into Squarespace. Just try Squarespace Business 14-days for free. Sign up and decide for yourself. To find our detailed Squarespace review and alternatives, please check out WebsiteToolTester.com for more. And if you found this video useful, I would appreciate if you could like it on Facebook or YouTube! Thank you!