Squarespace ecommerce review – selling online in style

Website features – 4.3 out of 5

Achieving an impressive 4.3 out of 5, we found Squarespace comes with a comprehensive suite of tools to help you succeed, including analytics, marketing, and third-party extensions. It achieved the highest score of all our web builders in terms of the quality of features.

However, you should note that your access to certain features depends on whether you choose a Classic, Advanced, or Unique template. For example, the Advanced templates can do everything the Classic ones can, but with the addition of features such as quick view and zoom.

This can be frustrating, particularly if you decide to choose a classic template because it fits your brand’s aesthetic, only to find you are missing out on additional features.

Squarespace’s SEO and marketing tools are also top notch, and it has recently upgraded the latter with the ability to conduct email campaigns, and feature promotional pop-ups and social media live feeds on your website pages.

The platform also has a pretty nifty logo maker, which enables you to easily design and create a logo for use across your business website.

Sales features – 3.4 out of 5

Sales features is the lowest-scoring ecommerce area for Squarespace. That being said, it has recently carried out extensive updates to its market app store meaning that many of the sales functions you require are only a simple app-download away.

Products and inventory

Unlike some of its rivals that impose restrictions, Squarespace ecommerce allows you to sell unlimited physical, digital, and service-based products on your site.

It’s easy to manage products from the backend, with tags, categories, and a drag-and-drop sorting tool. You can then add rich product descriptions, embed images and videos, and link internally to related products to give your shoppers a great browsing experience.

Within the inventory space, you can use stock management tools, revenue reports, and stock level email alerts to help monitor your product sales.

Payment options

Squarespace ecommerce supports a limited range of just four payment options, including PayPal and Stripe. It doesn’t directly allow digital wallet-type payments, but customers can choose to make an Apple Pay payment within Stripe.

If you intend to offer any of your products on a recurring basis, you can also offer your customers a subscription plan.

If you don’t opt for a Basic Commerce or Advanced Commerce plan, Squarespace will charge you two fees: a payment processor fee, and a Squarespace transaction fee (3%).

But it’s easy to avoid this additional fee by choosing the Basic or Advanced Commerce plan from the start, which will certainly save you money in the long run.

Multichannel integration

Multichannel integration is also heavily limited with Squarespace, only linking to Instagram as a sales platform with product tags. These will redirect anyone who clicks on them onto your site, where they can then pay for items. This feature starts at an additional £14/month.

In comparison to the likes of Shopify and BigCommerce, Squarespace’s multichannel integration leaves a lot to be desired. Shopify allows you to set up selling with the majority of social media platforms. Whilst BigCommerce is tailored to selling on Facebook marketplace.

Squarespace’s lack of multichannel selling capabilities can be a hindrance, particularly if you have a large social media following on a particularly platform that isn’t supported – as you can’t use this to your advantage.

Checkout

You’ll get every checkout tool under the sun with Squarespace. With the Squarespace Checkout Style Editor, you can customise the colouring, logo, and headers to match the aesthetic of your site. It might seem trivial, but consistent branding throughout the payment process helps to maintain trust. And this is in comparison to the likes of GoDaddy, which offers simplistic checkout templates with minimal customisation.

You can set up custom emails to be automatically sent to your customers, for everything from creating an account to abandoning a basket or shipping an order. Guest checkout is not currently supported, so anyone making a purchase will have to create an account – which can, unfortunately, deter some customers from making a purchase on your site.

Shipping

Squarespace shipping is supported by UPS, which enables you to automatically calculate shipping rates for different regions.

You can also add on a third party fulfilment app called ShipStation, which prints shipping labels in bulk for all major carriers. It can help you save time on fulfilling orders, and offers discounted rates on specific carriers like FedEx.

Internationalisation

Squarespace does not currently support selling in multiple currencies, unlike the likes of Shopify and BigCommerce. But it does provide a number of features that support those selling overseas.

For example, setting up alternative shipping options for customers in different global regions is a very efficient process, and taxes are automatically amended based on whatever shipping zone is selected. This really helps streamline the international selling process, making your life much easier and helping your business to grow overseas.

Sales analytics

Squarespace has a nice range of analytics available through its sales overview dashboard, including revenue, order volume, and conversions.

It also allows you to track the purchase funnel, and break down what percentage of people who viewed a product went on to buy it.

However, unlike some major ecommerce platforms such as Wix and Shopify, Squarespace does not support stock monitoring. This can make things difficult as your business grows, as you can run out of stock without being alerted, which can result in potential customers having a negative experience buying from your brand.

Security features

Squarespace users can rest safe in the knowledge that their website is protected by a comprehensive range of security features, including free SSL certificates, secure customer accounts, and Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance.

Accounting

Unfortunately, Squarespace offers very little in the way of third party accounting apps. However, you can print individual and bulk invoices, and make use of the analytics we discussed earlier for your bookkeeping.

This is just one of the reasons it falls short in the sales features category when compared to the likes of Shopify, which offers a whole host of accounting apps and support.

Design flexibility – 4 out of 5

A website designed using Squarespace

Squarespace is our top-ranked platform for creative control, thanks to its impeccable focus on design and presentation. It might have fewer templates than its rivals, but those that it does have look stunning, and can be edited to your heart’s content. You can also edit your website on your phone for both mobile and desktop format, making edits that bit easier to appraise.

And unlike with many other builders, including Wix, you can change your template at any given time, so there’s no great pressure to choose the right one the first time round. And it is great knowing if you wish to make a change, you aren’t at a loss and stuck with the same template.

The only minor issue is that, although your website content will be repopulated on the new template, the navigation link order might not follow – meaning you’ll personally have to rearrange it.

Help and support – 3.5 out of 5

Deleted pages and blog posts can be restored up to 30 days after their removal, which can be incredibly helpful if you have to remove a post as the result of a client request, but could publish it once again at a later date.

We scored Squarespace’s help features in second place in terms of how well they perform against its price point. Squarespace has a live chat function, but no phone support. However, its knowledge forum is regarded as one of the most trustworthy and supportive in the industry. You should be able to find answers to most of your questions there.

And unlike other ecommerce knowledge forums such as Shopify’s, the first page will be directly related to the query you are searching for. Whereas with other platforms you can find yourself trawling through FAQs for ages looking for an answer.

Value for money – 4.2 out of 5

Squarespace ecommerce compares relatively favourably with the likes of Wix and Square when it comes to its value for money. It’s Business plan is only a little more expensive than Wix’s basic ecommerce plan, at £17 per month.

Although it does charge its customers a 3% transaction fee for every sale made, which is nearly a whole 1% higher than Wix’s 2.1% fee. This fee becomes nullified once you upgrade to one of Squarespace’s specific commerce plans.

Its sales features aren’t as good as the likes of Shopify or BigCommerce, but it offers much more affordable ecommerce plans than both platforms. The fact you can sell with Squarespace for £2 less a month than Shopify stands for something, particularly in today’s volatile economic climate.

Overall Squarespace rightfully earns its impressive 4.2 out of 5 scoring – matching Wix’s score to come in joint second place.

Ease of use – 4.2 out of 5

We’re hugely impressed by how much Squarespace has improved its usability rating over the past two years – it has jumped from a fairly unimpressive 3.4 out of 5 to an unbeaten 4.2 in our most recent round of testing.

And for good reason. Thanks not only to updates in its help and support functions, which give you logical and simple prompts to aid you as you set up your website and shop.

But also for the rollout of its latest design feature. Squarespace Fluid Engine offers intuitive web design through an array of functionalities. These include an advanced drag-and-drop smart grid that levels up the design process.

Users can literally drag elements anywhere on the website, which is typically at least a little restricted with previous Squarespace software and with competitors such as Wix.