Squarespace Review (2024): Features, Pricing and more

Beautiful website building capability and tons of built-in features that make getting up and running a breeze.

Considerations

In this review we’re going to blast through the key things you need to know about the Squarespace platform.

We’ll cover:

• How easy it is to build a website on Squarespace.
• Using Squarespace for eCommerce (is it more than just a website builder?).
• Payment & transaction fees: how does Squarespace compare to Shopify and Wix.
• Lots more.

Let’s dive in.

Build your Website in Less than 5 Minutes with Squarespace

I have to say, onboarding with Squarespace was an absolute pleasure.

With a couple minutes you can build out a good looking, mobile friendly website.

Here’s what’ll happen when you decide to start a free trial.

First, they prompt you with a couple questions. You get to specify:

1. What your site is about (Education, weddings, fashion, health & beauty, etc.)
2. What are your top goals (Promote a physical business, sell services, sell products, get appointments, etc.)
3. Whether you want to build a custom website with the support Squarespace’s AI, or use a template
4. Name your site
5. Build your homepage (add various sections)
6. Add pages (About, Contact, Shop, etc.)
7. Choose your color palette
8. Choose your font pairing
9. Describe your site, choose a writing style (neutral, professional, quirky, etc.)

   Then BAM, Squarespace builds you your website.

Now, this is a framework, keep in mind – but it’s a great start.

Once you’re website is created you’ll have access to the back end dashboard.

Let’s go through things, starting with website design.

Designing Your Website on Squarespace

Squarespace has made a name for itself by allow you to create great looking websites, mobile friendly websites.

Starting from the top, the header has easy-to-toggle elements so you can turn on buttons, social links, your cart, etc., all at the quick click of a button.

The website builder uses sections and blocks.

Sections are the surrounding container and blocks are the elements inside such as images, text, a form or a video.

Squarespace offers 20 basic blocks along with additional integrations and business blocks such as displaying product and scheduling.

Premium features are available with the Commerce plans and include blocks for:

• Menu
• Donation
• Amazon
• OpenTable

In the top right hand corner you can quickly change from desktop view, to mobile view.

The last icon on the right is a paint brush icon that links to the Site Styles.

Here you can modify style settings that appear across your entire site such as fonts, colors, buttons, spacing, etc.

In the website tools section you can add pages to your website (blog, store, portfolio, etc.) and you can even create a member site for providing member only content.

If you dig deeper, in the Utilities > Website Tools section you will find additional tools such as custom CSS (cascading style sheets), announcement bar for the top of your website, promotional pop-ups and other tools to enhance your users experience.

One of the things that I really like is the mobile information bar.

This is great for businesses with physical bricks-and-mortar presences that are looking for direct contact from customers.

Now let’s explore adding products to our website.

Adding Products to your Squarespace Website

When you go to add your products to your store, you’ll be get the opportunity to write about your product in the description as well as in the Additional Info section.

In here we can utilize Squarespaces AI capabilities to help you write descriptions quickly and easily.

This is awesome and can really help as a first draft for your product description if you don’t already have them written out.

As you get further down the product page you will fill out additional info such as inventory information (price, SKU number), fulfillment, organization (helping you tag and categorize products), selling tools, marketing (SEO & social), and checkout.

Pro Tip: Take your time and fill out the Marketing section with the SEO and URL. This will give the option to create your own URL, SEO Title, and SEO description. Don’t forget to enable Social Share.

Once you’ve created your product, you can adjust the current quantity and change it from hidden to public in the Selling > Products section.

The products section is cache all and has tabs across the top of the page for physical, services, downloads, gift cards, and digital products.

Utilizing Selling Tools to Maximize your Revenue

In the Selling > Selling Tools section you’ll find a variety of ways to sell and manage your storefront.

Squarespace has integrated the most common things that an eCommerce business might want including:

• Printful integration (if you want to sell custom, print on demand services)
• Advertising integration (Google Shopping, Facebook and Instagram)
• Point of Sale (POS)
• Donations

From this section you can also easily control product reviews, waitlists and much more.

Attention! The features like product reviews, related products and such are only available with the Commerce Basic and Commerce Advanced plan.

If you’ve selected the Advanced plan, you get access to Advanced discounting as well.

This will give you full control to provide discount codes (manual or automatic) to support any and all promotions you might want to have.

Discount codes are super powerful in getting people to try your product or join your mailing list (so you can further communicate with them).

Since I mentioned mailing list, the tab below Selling is Marketing, let’s explore this further. It offers email campaigns and marketing tools.

Marketing Your Squarespace eCommerce Website

Email is the highest converting eCommerce channel and you absolutely must use it if you want to maximize your revenue and profitability.

Squarespace has built-in email functionality where you can collect subscriber information on the website through forms and then keep in touch with customers and prospective customers through targeted email campaigns.

Pricing depends on the number of campaigns you want to run, and emails you want to send.

Once you choose a plan you can select start setting up campaigns.

Automations are a fantastic feature. You can create emails and send them to your audience at selected points in time; for example, when people sign up but haven’t made a purchase yet.

You can also control the timing or ‘trigger,’ so you can send it immediately, in a day, or at a custom time interval that you think is best.

Overall this is a must-use feature.

Squarespace Payments: How to Get Paid with Squarespace

Squarespace offers Squarespace Payments, or helps you connect to Stripe or PayPal for online payments and Square for POS (in the US only).

There are two fees you need to be aware of: transaction fees and processor fees.

Transaction fees are based on the plan you choose. For example, in the pricing section above you’ll see that the Business plan has a 3% transaction fee for physical products and services and the Commerce Basic plan has a 0% transaction fee for physical products and services.

Processor fees are 2.9% + $0.30 for Squarespace Commerce.

Stripe fees are the same as Squarespace Commerce.

PayPal are a little bit more expensive at 2.99% + $0.49 for standard credit and debit card payments.

Attention! Competitors Shopify and Wix are both the same rate (2.9% + $0.30) for their payment processing.

Now we’ve covered payment fees, let’s take a look at shipping.

Shipping with Squarespace

You can add shipping natively to Squarespace. They give you a variety of methods including:

• Flat rate
• Depending on weight
• Carrier Calculated via FedEx
• Carrier Calculated via UPS
• Carrier Calculated via USPS

Squarespace also provides you the ability to set up pickup options for bricks-and-mortar that want to order and pick-up at your physical location if you have one (or want that potential in the future).

Lastly, depending on what you sell, you can set up different fulfillment profiles for different product types. This is handy if you sell physical goods but you also offer your paid services for example.

Attention! Carrier Calculated shipping is only available on the Commerce Advanced plan and only for the United States.

How to Get More Out of the Platform with Squarespace Extensions

In the Settings > Third Party Tools you’ll find the Extensions button.

At this point in time, Squarespace only has about 47 different extensions, but they’ve got some good ones that can help.

If you check out the Shipping and Fulfillment tab there’s a few different tools to choose from.

Pro Tip: Try the Shippo extension if you don’t need live rates for your customers. They offer inexpensive shipping options and support additional countries outside of the US.

Attention! Right now Shippo only provides live shipping rates to the Wix platform – we actually talk about it in our Wix Review. However, the remainder of Shippo’s features are excellent.

Squarespace Analytics – Building and Analyzing your Customer Base

Squarespace provides important analytics that you need to run an eCommerce store.

They break it down into 4 different views for you:

1. Traffic: This shows visits, bounce rate, unique visitors and pageviews.
2. Traffic Sources: This shows more detailed information including key metrics like revenue (in dollars), orders, conversion rate, average order value (AOV), and revenue per visit (RPV).
3. Search Keywords: you can connect to Google Search Console to get granular data for info on search queries.
4. Geography: Where the traffic is coming from.

The Engagement tab takes a deeper look at on-page metrics like time on page and bounce rate and form submissions.

The Sales tab looks at important sales metrics such as revenue, units solder, orders, etc.

Attention! There is an Abandoned Cart section within the Analytics > Sales tab. This will provide you data, but you will need the Commerce Advanced plan to send automated emails to customers that leave items in the cart and don’t complete their transactions.

Squarespace Pricing

Squarespace’s offers four different plans with the option to pay annually (cheaper) or pay monthly (more expensive). 

Business: $23 /mo ($33 if you want to pay monthly)

Commerce Basic: $27 /mo ($36 if you want to pay monthly)

Commerce Advanced: $49 /mo ($65 if you want to pay monthly)

They have a personal plan that is $16 /mo on an annual basis, but its doesn’t have on-page checkout functionality.

If you’re using Squarespace as your eCommerce solution, you’re going to want the Commerce Basic at minimum.

Squarespace Customer Service

Customer service is a critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to eCommerce.

If your online store doesn’t work, you don’t earn revenue – not good.

The Squarespace Help Center is one place you can turn to.

Another option is the community forums where you can ask questions and receive help on a variety of topics (with many questions already available and answered if you use the search function.

If you’ve filtered through their documentation and still can’t resolve your problem there’s two more options.

You can email them (24/7) or use live chat (real-time, Mon to Fri, 4am to 8pm EST).

FAQ

Conclusion: Is Squarespace the Right Platform for Your New Business?

Squarespace provides a powerful website builder that helps you create a website you’ll love in short order.

The eCommerce functionality is easy to set-up and the integrations and selling tools make driving traffic through channels like Google Shopping a cinch.

It’s not as robust an eCommerce solution as Shopify for example (you can read our Shopify review here), but it has everything you need to start selling online in short order.