Squarespace is one of the most innovative solutions for e-commerce design. With its sleek templates and professional editing tools, Squarespace is a great online store builder.
Squarespace for eCommerce provides users with a professional-level design interface that elevates your e-commerce site and makes it stand out.
If you are not sure how to start building a Squarespace website, this guide will provide you with a complete Squarespace eCommerce review. We discuss the pros and cons of this website builder to help you decide is Squarespace worth it?
Let’s begin.
Source: Squarespace
What Is Squarespace?
Before we discuss Squarespace pros and cons, let’s learn more about the platform and discuss how Squarespace for eCommerce is useful.
Squarespace is a website design and website building platform. With Squarespace, you don’t need extensive coding knowledge to use their design tools. With a little bit of time and effort, you can create a beautiful website with a sleek design.
A Squarespace online store is sleek, and one of the most popular platforms business owners use. Squarespace’s professional design and modern templates are the preferred choices for many eCommerce professionals.
What Is Squarespace For eCommerce?
Even though anyone can use Squarespace to create their personal blog or website, this platform is best used to create an online store. Squarespace for eCommerce is a platform designed by Squarespace to develop online stores specifically.
Currently, there are around 100,000 online stores on Squarespace. Many Squarespace online stores show just how popular the platform is for eCommerce business owners.
With this platform, you can access high-quality eCommerce tools combined with Squarespace’s stunning design templates to create a sleek and professional eCommerce website.
Who Can Use Squarespace For eCommerce?
Whether you are a magazine that wants to sell subscriptions or a restaurant that needs online booking system development, Squarespace eCommerce tools can work for all.
Squarespace for eCommerce is great for any industry, no matter the size or category. If you are a business owner who wants to take their sales online and wants a great design that elevates your product, you should use Squarespace.
Visual design is one of the key components when designing an online store. You need good visuals to attract customers. Squarespace offers multiple sleek and visually-stunning templates that will work great for any eCommerce store.
Squarespace describes each template and gives instructions on embedding the theme into your site. These details make it easy for anyone to use and build their website.
Squarespace for eCommerce is great for design-conscious companies; however, it might not have all the necessary tools for some businesses. If you want to create an eCommerce site for a large company that needs even more room for growth, you can check out Shopify.
If you run a small business or if you are budget-conscious, you can use Wix to create your online store.
Squarespace For eCommerce: Pros And Cons
Before we analyze each individual feature, let’s look at some of Squarespace pros and cons. This list of pros and cons will help you answer the question: Is Squarespace worth it?
Squarespace eCommerce Review: Pros
Best Design Features Out Of Any Website Builder.
The idea behind Squarespace was to offer website builders high-quality design tools. Their in-house design team creates all of Squarespace’s design tools and templates. This means that every single template and feature you use will enhance the look of your site.
What’s great is that you don’t need any HTML or CSS knowledge to create your website.
High-quality Site Tools
As previously mentioned, each Squarespace tool is created to elevate your website. These tools will help you create a website that is creative and unique. Design professionals developed the tools so you know you are getting the best quality.
Reliability And High Performance
Squarespace has gotten high praise for being reliable and offering great performance compared to other website builders. Squarespace’s efficient tools make it possible for your website to stay running for a long time. This is a great function if you want to create a long-lasting online store.
Free Domain Name
Squarespace offers you a free domain name when you purchase an annual plan. This is great for online store owners as it gives their website authenticity. Having a domain name makes your website seem professional and increases user trust.
If you are building your site by purchasing an annual plan, you’ll immediately get access to a domain name. However, if you’ve already purchased a hosting service, you will have to pay an additional fee to get your domain name transferred.
Variety Of Features For Online Selling
Squarespace for eCommerce gives users many tools to optimize their online stores. You can add social media integrations, advanced checkout methods, and multiple payment options to your store. These features are important as they improve your selling capabilities and user experience.
Free SSL
Security is one of the biggest concerns for many online store builders. If you create a unique product, you might be worried about getting your data stolen or shutting down your website. This can disrupt your sales, and customers will lose trust in your business.
Squarespace provides great security options, so you don’t have to worry about your website’s safety. You'll get free WHOIS privacy when registering a domain name with Squarespace. SSL certificates are also built into your purchase.
Efficient Help Center
If you get stuck or need some help while building your website, worry not, as Squarespace offers an efficient help center. With Squarespace, you get a 24/7 email support function, live chat, and an extensive help library to aid your building process.
Squarespace eCommerce Review: Cons
Price Is High
Squarespace can be a little costly compared to other website-building platforms.
You can get free plans from platforms like Wix and Weebly; however, these free plans usually don’t have the best available features for an online store. If you are budget-conscious, a small business might not be the best price option.
Occasional Slow Performance
Some Squarespace users have reported lagging while using the site. Most reviewers point to the loading times as the source of the lag. This can become a real problem when customers want to move through the checkout experience quickly.
If a customer experience lagging during the checkout process, they are less likely to make a purchase. Some users have also reported slow performance on mobile devices.
Difficult To Navigate
It is easy to become confused by Squarespace's website building process. Most beginner website builders need tools that are easy to use. Squarespace tools don’t require extensive coding knowledge. This can sometimes be overwhelming for beginner users.
Limited Templates
Although Squarespace ensures that your website looks sleek and professionally designed, the building process can feel restrictive. One of the main design features of Squarespace’s website building process is content blocks.
Content blocks make it harder to customize every little detail, and you might feel like you don’t have control over the design. The reason why Squarespace added this design function was to prevent beginner website builders from making a mistake. While this is a useful feature, it can also limit creativity for some people.
Not Enough Payment Options
Squarespace does not allow a large variety of payment options; this could alienate a certain set of your clientele. Limited payment options can also make it difficult for your business to make as much as possible. This is another con that can hinder the shopping experience for many users.
Smaller App Store
Squarespace’s app store does not feature as many extensions and Squarespace plugins as their competitors. Squarespace’s app store is limited because all its existing features are capable enough to provide your website functionality.
Despite the limited number of apps, several plugins can improve your site’s functionality. One important plugin is the review carousal. This extension lets customers look at your product reviews before purchasing.
Squarespace for eCommerce: A Complete Review
Now that you know about the pros and cons of Squarespace, let’s evaluate each Squarespace feature in detail to help you decide if this platform is worth it?
Source: Squarespace
Squarespace: Features
If you want an amazing eye-catching website, Squarespace is your platform. Because of its design capabilities, there is no doubt that Squarespace for eCommerce is one of the best online store options for many business owners.
If you want to create a website that captures your customer's attention and makes them want to buy your product, you should use Squarespace. Squarespace’s design features are bold yet professional, giving your website credibility and uniqueness.
As a content management system, Squarespace offers plenty of features, integrations, and widgets. You can easily integrate social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter into your website.
Even though Squarespace is not as customizable as WordPress, its features don’t lack functionality. In contrast, Squarespace offers more in-built tools than WordPress.
Squarespace for eCommerce: Sales Features
When it comes to eCommerce, Squarespace’s feature list keeps growing, and they don’t miss out on any important elements of eCommerce. Even though Squarespace mainly caters to small and mid-sized businesses, it allows multiples products and various transaction methods.
Although Squarespace is mostly known for its visual aspects, it offers many sales features that make your site unique and highly marketable.
Multiple Product Variants
Offering multiple products variants can be a major deciding factor for customers. When customers look at your entire variant selection, they tend to make purchases much quicker.
For example, you might be shopping for a t-shirt on another online store. The biggest factor in your decision will be the number of sizes and color variants available for one t-shirt. These variants are presented in a small section on your screen.
Since this is an important sales feature, Squarespace allows you to use this function in your online store. Squarespace makes it very easy for website builders to integrate this feature into your site, so you don’t have to worry about spending a lot of time designing one part.
Unlimited Products
As mentioned before, Squarespace allows business owners to sell unlimited amounts of products. Whether you want to offer a small capsule collection or a large selection of products, Squarespace has the features to accommodate you.
Ability To Sell Different Types Of Products
Aside from physical products, Squarespace allows you to sell digital products and services. You can sell digital products in software or downloadable content such as eBooks and music.
Another great Squarespace for eCommerce options is the ability to sell services. This flexibility makes Squarespace a great choice for many business owners. If you are any service provider, this is a great option for you.
Sales Tax Feature
The configured sales tax feature is great for businesses that offer product shipping. You can create tax rules for countries, states, and even ZIP codes with this function. Squarespace helps you comply with local tax requirements, and you’ll save time managing your tax rates.
Inventory Management
Since you can sell various products with Squarespace, the platform gives you an advanced inventory management system to efficiently organize and categorize your product. The content manager interface lets you manage your products according to name, price, and number left in stock.
Automatic Email Alerts
Automatic email alerts are crucial to building a strong relationship with your customer. Whenever a customer purchases an online product, they need a confirmation about their order and shipment. The automatic email feature allows you to add functionality to your store.
With automatic email, you can send customers a thank you for purchase email and also let them rate their customer experience. This is a great feature to improve customer satisfaction, and the automatic nature means you don’t have to spend extra time manually sending emails.
Squarespace Plugins and Extensions
Squarespace also provides an app store called Squarespace Extensions. Here you can purchase extra features to improve your site’s functionality. An important thing to note is that there are only 25 features, so the selections are limited.
However, Squarespace’s built-in features allow a lot of functionality, so you don’t have to rely on the app store.
Squarespace for eCommerce: Offline Sales Features
While Squarespace has plenty of features for an online store, you can also use this as a platform for offline sales. Squarespace Point of Sale integration allows you to take your online store offline. You sell products offline and conduct card payments while staying synced to your online inventory.
You can use this feature in a pop store, market stall, or event for your online store. Your online store and POS system will always stay synced, making it easier for you to keep track of tax rates, stock counts, and other crucial information.
To get started with Squarespace POS, you will need the Squarespace Commerce app and a Square card reader. The card reader is priced at $49.
Squarespace: Ease of Use
Building a website with Squarespace is straightforward and slightly complex compared to other website builders. Getting familiar with the website building process is a great investment if you find the website building process a little complicated.
Squarespace offers design flexibility. Usually, when you create a visually stunning website, you need a lot of coding and HTML knowledge. In this regard, Squarespace is easy to use as you can easily create a creative and eye-catching website.
Visitors to your site will be greeted by impressive template design and have a smooth user experience while navigating your store.
Squarespace has also created a helpful guide to aid you in the website building process. Their how-to video series also lets you know how to use Squarespace for eCommerce. These guides will make it easy to start and run your online store.
The main navigation bar on Squarespace’s design interface is straightforward, but the design section is where people run into problems. There’s no need to stress because you will overcome design hurdles if you follow their guide.
To allow even more ease of design, Squarespace lets you copy template pages. You can copy “about” pages or “catalog” pages to your website. Once copied, you can customize these pages according to your business. This removes the need to build your website from scratch. However, you can create your website from scratch if you want to.
Squarespace: SEO And Marketing Features
The Squarespace for eCommerce is equipped with all the standard marketing tools to improve your website’s functionality. Squarespace gives several important marketing features.
These include:
- SEO;
- Social Media Integration;
- Blog;
- Emails.
SEO
SEO features are vital for eCommerce websites. Without good practices, it will be difficult to grow your business. Squarespace keeps this in mind and provides great SEO tools.
Your Squarespace website includes built-in Search Engine Optimization tools, which help your site’s visibility and rank it higher on search engines. Squarespace SEO automatically adds all established SEO best practices to your website.
Even though Squarespace does not provide site-specific SEO, they offer an SEO checklist that makes it easy for you to follow relevant guidelines.
Social Media Integration
Squarespace allows you to connect your online store with your social media profiles, and you can do this in multiple ways. Social media usage is rising; therefore, social media advertising will grow your business.
You can integrate social media on your website with icons. Icons add your social profile to your website without taking up screen space. Icons redirect viewers to the corresponding profile page.
Source: Vecteezy
Consistency drives engagement and strengthens your brand. You can add social media sections to your landing page. If you integrate your Instagram account with your account, customers will see your latest pictures in grid form. To maximize this feature, post similar content across both platforms.
Blogs
With Squarespace for eCommerce, you can also add a blogging section to your website. In this section, you can write posts, enable comments and crosspost to your social media. This is a great of increase customer engagement with your brand.
Squarespace’s blogging feature offers two components. You can use a landing page to display multiple blog posts in a grid-like pattern or use sub-pages for each post.
Emails
If you are signed to Squarespace’s Commerce plan, you get access to the MailChimp Integration. This integration allows you to design and send emails and newsletters to a list of subscribers.
Email marketing is one of the most popular and effective marketing methods. An email or eNewsletter subscription is a great way to keep your customers updated.
You can also send them special offers, discounts, and interesting stories about your brand. With emails, you can create engagement with your customers.
Squarespace: Pricing Plans
One of the most important parts of choosing a website building platform is the price. Squarespace offers four pricing options to choose from. Of these four, two are suited for a broad range of websites, and two are specifically designed for online stores.
Since this is an eCommerce review, we will be looking at Squarespace Basic Commerce and Advanced Commerce.
Basic Commerce
The Basic Commerce plan costs $27 (paid annually) and $36 (paid monthly). This plan is great for small businesses and includes features such as:
- Customer accounts to allows customers to save details;
- Helpful commerce analytics;
- Gift cards that can be redeemed at checkout;
- Ability to flag items that are low in stock;
- Social media integrations.
Advanced Commerce
The Advanced Commerce plan costs $49 (paid annually) and $65 (paid monthly). This plan is designed to accommodate large stores and includes all the basic plan features. Some additional features in this plan include:
- Automatic carrier shipping calculation;
- Abandoned cart recovery;
- Automatic discounts on any order;
- Recurring subscription boxes.
Both these plans offer a lot of functions to improve your site and create a great customer experience. Squarespace is pricier than other website builders, so evaluate the price according to your business budget before purchasing.
Final Takeaway
Squarespace for eCommerce offers stunning templates, endless sales features, and 24/7 support. These features make it a great website-building option.
While there are some limitations to Squarespace, this review will help you decide if Squarespace is worth it or not.
Tags: ecommerce, squarespace
