Squarespace for Ecommerce Review

Squarespace is a great platform for building an ecommerce website, and a standout when it comes to marketing tools. Our testers rated it 4.7 stars out of 5 overall, noting that Squarespace's interface is very easy to use, the service has great customer support, and it offers a solid range of third-party integrations.

Ecommerce plans for Squarespace start at $27 per month, which will get most businesses everything they need to operate an online store.

Here, we'll cover Squarespace's ecommerce-specific plans, features, and support. While the platform is strong in all areas, it's not perfect, with limited stock monitoring tools and some not-so-great website speeds. So, if you're not sold, we'll also note a few strong competitors that are worth considering, and that may even be a better fit for your business needs.

Alternatively, you can compare all the best ecommerce builders side by side, right now.

In this review:

• Squarespace Ecommerce Plans
  Does Squarespace Have a Free Plan?
• Squarespace Ecommerce Features
• How Does Squarespace Pricing Compare With Other Website Builders?
• Verdict: Is Squarespace Good for Ecommerce?
• FAQs

Squarespace Ecommerce Plans

Squarespace offers four plans in total, two for non-ecommerce websites and two for ecommerce websites. We have a Squarespace pricing page devoted to the pricing and features of all four, but the page you're on now will just look at the two ecommerce plans, Basic Commerce and Advanced Commerce.

Squarespace Basic Commerce

Basic Commerce costs $27 per month when paid annually, and $36 per month when paid monthly. You'll pay no transaction fee for each sale, which is nice.

Like all Squarespace plans, Basic comes with a host of standard features including unlimited bandwidth, SSL security, one year of a custom domain, 30 minutes of video storage, templates, SEO tools, metrics, and 24/7 customer support. You'll also get unlimited contributors and a suite of fully integrated ecommerce tools covering order, inventory, and product management, plus payment, taxes, and shipping.

You'll be able to sell in-person with point of sale, build customer accounts, offer mobile-optimized checkout, use analytics, and list products on Instagram.

Squarespace Advanced Commerce

Advanced Commerce costs $49 per month when paid annually, and $65 per month when paid monthly.

You'll get everything that Basic has to offer, plus six more features: Abandoned cart recovery, support for selling weekly or monthly subscriptions to a product or service, zip code tracking for advanced shipping, more advanced discount options, and commerce APIs for building your own integrations.

While the abandoned cart recovery is a genuinely useful tool for any business, the rest of these new features are advanced enough that most small businesses are better off with Basic. But if your revenue is high enough that the hike in price won't impact your bottom line much and you like the extra perks, Advanced is for you.

Does Squarespace Have a Free Plan?

No, Squarespace does not offer an on-going free plan. The closest Squarespace comes to a free plan is its 14-day free trial, which allows users to try out the platform for a few weeks before commiting to paying a monthly or annual price for the plan.

One other cost-related perk worth mentioning is Squarespace's student discount: Verified students can get 50% off of their entire first year of Squarespace, provided they sign up to pay for the whole year in one installment.

Squarespace Ecommerce Features

Squarespace isn’t solely focused on ecommerce websites, but it still offers the features you’ll need if you want to start an online store, along with some solid deals to get you the most bang for your buck.

We've looked at the features each of its plans offer, but below is a more detailed review of Squarespace's top offerings.

Squarespace Product Management

Any ecommerce platform worth its salt has good product management, and Squarespace’s system is brilliantly simple.

Adding and editing products sold on your store is straightforward. In fact, you can get a product onto your site with just a few clicks. However, you can still add lots of detail to your products, from custom stock-keeping units to sizing and weight options. You can also import products from other services, such as Shopify, Big Cartel, Etsy, or via a .csv file.

All this will make it easier to manage your products and inventory further down the line, without it seeming overly laborious for small or new businesses. You can even list an unlimited number of products with Squarespace, regardless of which plan you’re on.

Squarespace Product, Service, or Software Sales

By default, Squarespace lets you sell physical products, services, or software on its platform. There aren’t many ecommerce platforms that will let you sell services or software, and even fewer that will let you sell them alongside regular physical products.

This makes Squarespace a great choice for any business looking to sell a variety of products. In fact, when uploading a new product to Squarespace, swapping back and forth between the different types takes just a few clicks. If you want to, you can even sell subscription services (such as magazines) through the platform.

However, the inventory management tools aren't as complex as those from other top ecommerce builders, meaning that Squarespace isn't as useful for physical products as it is for digital goods or services.

Squarespace also offers Squarespace Scheduling, which will let you quickly and easily add appointment scheduling to your site. This means that your customers will be able to book your services whenever they want.

Squarespace Design Features

Some ecommerce platforms are so focused on business management tools that they fail to provide top-drawer website features. As Squarespace was primarily conceived as a website building tool, rather than an ecommerce platform, it has no shortage of neat features to make your online store great.

For example, adding a password-protected members area is super easy, as is creating logins for guests. Squarespace also has an excellent blogging platform that you could put to good use to keep customers up to speed with your latest offerings.

Squarespace Third-Party Extensions

Squarespace allows you to quickly and easily integrate a range of third-party services necessary for running a business.

For example, you could add the AfterShip extension to add branded product tracking pages and deliver bespoke automated notifications to customers.

Squarespace Payment Processing

With Squarespace you can sign up for Stripe and PayPal merchant accounts within 30 seconds, with no paperwork to sign. You can also take credit card payments using Stripe, or accept Apple Pay and PayPal.

This makes selling products a breeze, as customers can use any service they want to buy your stuff.

Sales Reporting

We’ll admit that Squarespace doesn’t have the most granular sales analytics tools on the market – head to Shopify or BigCommerce for that – but it does have a dedicated Analytics app to give you insight into your store's performance.

With the app, you'll be able to track key website metrics such as traffic sources.

You'll also be able to keep an eye on sales metrics. For example, you can easily see your top products, track conversions through the purchasing funnel, and compare performance over time.

Integration With Square POS

Squarespace has a unique integration with point of sale giant Square. The two companies have worked to integrate Square's in-person point of sale expertise into Squarespace's ecommerce platform, allowing you to track both real-life sales and online sales seamlessly. This means that you won't have to worry about setting up a separate point of sale system.

You'll need to be on one of Squarespace's Online Stores plans and have a Square account to access the system — neither of which will take too long to set up. You'll also need a Square card reader but, again, these are easy to get ahold of. At the moment, the Square-and-Squarespace integration is only available in the US to users with iPhone devices.

Find out more about Square or the Square and Squarespace integration

Squarespace Ecommerce Templates

Squarespace is renowned for its high-quality templates, and its ecommerce-specific templates are no different, poised to help you improve your ecommerce conversion rates with the right one. Here are a few examples of what design visuals to expect from ecommerce templates:

Squarespace Support

Squarespace has a wide range of support options, as you'd expect from a website builder.

• 24/7 Twitter support
• 24/7 email support
• Video tutorials
• Live chat support Monday to Friday

Squarespace also has one of the most extensive and trustworthy user support forums in the industry. This means that you’ll be able to lean on the expertise of advanced users, as well as Squarespace’s support team, in the event of a problem.

Squarespace doesn’t lock any of these support options behind more expensive pricing tiers, either – you’ll be able to get the same level of support regardless of whether you’re paying $14 or $49 per month.

Sadly, Squarespace doesn't offer phone support in any capacity.

How Does Squarespace Pricing Compare With Other Website Builders?

We’ve looked at what Squarespace gives its users to help craft top-notch ecommerce websites. Now, we'll get under the skin of other leading providers, including Wix, Shopify, and Square Online, to help you find your ideal ecommerce platform.

Squarespace vs Wix

Like Squarespace, Wix is primarily designed as a website builder, but also functions as a surprisingly competent ecommerce platform. Given the choice, we’d pick Wix over Squarespace when it comes to building ecommerce websites specifically, with our testers giving it an overall rating of 4.8 stars compared to Squarespace's 4.7 stars.

Wix bests Squarespace for sales features – one of the biggest things to look for when it comes to ecommerce. Still, the Squarespace platform is a little easier to use than Wix's, and has better design options and customer satisfaction, both of which are big considerations.

In other words, you can't go wrong with either option: They're both high-quality across all categories, and they have the same overall value for their cost. Wix has worked hard on improving its ecommerce offering in recent years, adding better sales channel integration and more advanced sales reporting tools.

Check out our non-ecommerce Wix vs Squarespace comparison, where we explain why Squarespace comes out ahead for building a non-ecommerce website.

Squarespace vs Shopify

Shopify is designed, primarily, for larger ecommerce sites, and is better than Squarespace for large companies. If you’re planning to create a small- to medium-sized online store, either one will work well – Shopify offers the best range and quality of sales features out of any top ecommerce platform (even Wix!), but Squarespace has better ease of use and better value for money.

Shopify is able to integrate more third-party sales channels and has more in-depth sales reporting than Squarespace. But for most users, Squarespace will be far easier to understand, easier to set up, and easier to create a great-looking website with.

Check out our full Squarespace vs Shopify comparison page to see more.

Squarespace vs Square Online

Squarespace is a better pick overall than Square Online, but the latter platform is a standout option when it comes to stretching your dollar. Square is the rare ecommerce website builder to offer a permanent free plan (although sales come with a transaction fee of 2.9% + $0.30), and unlike Squarespace, it starts offering abandoned cart recovery with the $29/month plan instead of saving that feature for the priciest plan available.

But our testers found that Squarespace has better features, ecommerce tools, template designs, and ease of use than Square Online, making it the more useful platform of the two.

FAQs