The most affordable Squarespace e-commerce plan is set at a low $25 per month if you pay annually, which lets you sell unlimited physical or digital products. That’s good. But there is a big catch, the 3% transaction fee. That fee is removed when you go for the online stores basic plan at $34 per month which also lets customers sign in with their own accounts.
For more advanced features like abandoned cart emails, and advanced shipping, you’ll need to go for the online stores advanced plan at $52 per month.
If you’re starting out though, it might be best to begin on the Business plan and then increase as need be. If you have an established business and are transitioning to Squarespace, then Commerce (Basic) is probably the place to start and move to Commerce (Advanced) if you want abandoned cart recovery, to sell subscriptions and more advanced shipping options.
When it comes to actually building the store I find the editor to not be the most super intuitive but after a little trial and error it becomes relatively straight forward to add a product, whether that be physical, digital or even a service or gift card.
You can add multiple variants like color, size or material. It’s also possible to set up discount prices and suggested items like on Amazon.
Finally, the inventory section is well designed and easy to manage both online and through the dedicated Squarespace mobile app. If you are on the higher plans, your site visitors will be able to log in and access their cart at any time. There’s also a great waitlist option where users can sign up for a notification when a desired item is back in stock.
For payments, you have basic options here, Stripe for credit cards, Apple Pay and PayPal. If you were in the US, you can also use Square at a point of sale, which is good if you’re at a bricks and clicks kind of shop but unfortunately it has not yet been made available in Australia.
For shipping, you can set up flat rates or rates based on the item weight. For extended shipping options, you can find ‘Apps’ in their new extention store with popular providers like Shipstation and Shipbob.
The page options are adequate, letting you control full SEO settings like page title, description, and URL.
There are apps now with providers like ShipStation and ShipBob via the new extension store which expand your shipping options. While Squarespace have a good amount of functionality already built in, around areas like Marketing, they have very limited third party integrations. The only other one of note, would be a Xero integration for managing your finances, and also Shopping Feed which links your store to Amazon, Ebay, Etsy and other marketplaces.
Social media integration for selling on Facebook and Instagram is very handy.
As above, there are third party apps in their new Extension Store such as “Shopping Feed” which creates synced listings on channels like Ebay, Amazon & Etsy. If selling on other marketplaces is important to you though, I’d probably look at Shopify or Big Commerce which are more established when it comes to multi-channel selling.
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