In addition to being a beautiful website builder and an easy-to-use blogging platform, your Squarespace website can also serve as an online shop. The Squarespace commerce plans (Business, Commerce Basic, and Commerce Advanced) offer a set of features for selling products and managing orders online.

Here’s how the the three plans stack up.

Business
$216/year

3% fee taken out by Squarespace (this is in addition to fees taken out by your credit card processor)
Announcement bar
Promo pop up
Discount codes manually entered at checkout
Donations accepted

Commerce Basic

$312/year

All the features included in the Business plan
No fee taken out by Squarespace
Customer accounts
Integrate with ShipStation to print shipping labels
Integrate with Xero for accounting
Extra commerce analytics

Commerce Advanced
$480/year

All the features included in the Commerce Basic plan
Integrate with Printful for drop shipping
Abandoned cart recovery
Gift cards available
Discount codes automatically applied at checkout
Calculate shipping by carrier during checkout

Interested in setting up a shop in Squarespace? Here’s a detailed how-to.

Set Up Shop

When you first get started, there’s a few key things you’ll want to set up.

Taxes

First up, taxes. Under Settings>Taxes, create tax rules based on your country, state, province, locale and/or zip code. You can apply your tax rate on shipping and service products, or include tax in the product price if you want. Tax will be based on the shipping address for physical purchases, and billing address for digital products or services. Gift cards are not subject to taxes.

How to Sell Like a Pro in Squarspace | Elle & Company

Shipping

Next up, choosing your shipping option. Squarespace offers a range of shipping options, including flat rate, depending on weight, and carrier calculated shipping through FedEx, UPS, and USPS (if you’re on the Commerce Advanced plan). You can choose your shipping option and set up the details under Settings>Shipping. You can also opt to have multiple options, all of which will show up during checkout with the least expensive option selected by default. Squarespace also offers a ShipStation integration that makes printing shipping labels super easy. You can also include a tracking number in your shipping notifications.

How to Sell Like a Pro in Squarespace | Elle & Company

Payments

Third, connect a payment processor. Under Settings>Payments, you can select which payment option(s) you’d like to accept. Squarespace can take payments via Apple Pay, PayPal and Stripe. It’s important to note that you cannot list multiple currencies on your site and your international shippers may be charged additional fees from their bank.

Add Products

Squarespace allows you to add four types of products: physical and digital products, services, and gift cards.

Rest assured, If you’re moving over from another platform, Squarespace can easily handle that by allowing you to import products from Big Cartel, Etsy, Shopify, or from a .csv file.

Physical Products

This is for anything you’ll have to ship to your customers, like art prints, apparel, jewelry, planners, office supplies, home decor, physical gift cards etc. In order to add physical products to your website, you’ll need to add at least one shipping option to your store. You’ll also need to include weight and dimensions to your product’s details.

Adding physical products to your store is a multi-step process. After adding the product, make sure to add options like color or size by creating basic and complex variants. You’ll also want to edit products to add additional information or change the thumbnail image. After you’ve added your product, don’t forget to organize your products with tags and categories (similar to how you organize your blog posts). Products always link to your Products page, so if you’d like to display your products elsewhere (like the home page), you’ll need to use the Product Block.

Digital Products

Many creative entrepreneurs offer digital products nowadays. Think ebooks, audio files, template files, graphic design files, fonts, etc. These digital products can be purchased on your website just like physical products can. After purchasing, your customers will receive an email with a download link. Once the download link has been clicked, your customers will have 24 hours to download the product before the link expires.

Services

Another offering many creative entrepreneurs are now selling are services. This includes classes, workshops, events, online courses, consultations, coaching, etc. You can treat this different from physical products by disabling the quantity option in your settings.

Gift Cards

If you’d like to offer digital gift cards, Squarespace will send your customer (or another recipient) an email with a unique code after completing the purchase. That unique code can be used when they checkout. If you want to mail a physical gift card, that should be added as a physical product.

Market Your Shop

Now that you have your shop up and running, it’s time to start bringing in customers.

Discounts and Sales

The first way to help drum up some sales is to offer discount codes or host a sale. Once you’ve decided on your discount or sale, make sure to use the Announcement Bar to let visitors to your site know.

Build Customer Relationships

One sale is great, but you want more. In order to drive more sales, you must build a relationship with your customers. Try adding a form to your checkout process. By creating a form that customers must fill out when adding an item to their cart, you’re able to gather data and information about your most engaged audience members. Consider also adding a newsletter signup at checkout, or at another high visibility spot on your website.

SEO

SEO doesn’t stop with blogging. Consider using keywords, when appropriate, in your product descriptions to help increase visibility with your SEO.

Social Media

There’s a number of ways you can use social media to promote and market your store. First, connect your store to social accounts like Facebook and Pinterest. Adding the Pin It button will allow your visitors to share your products on their own social media profiles, driving new traffic to your website and your products. You know I can’t write a blog post without mentioning blogging! Use your Squarespace website to blog as well! Whether it’s about your products or other relevant topics to your business, the more you blog, the higher chance you have of strangers finding your website and purchasing your products.

Fulfill Orders

You’ve got your customers. Now you’re making some sales!

Test Order

Before going live with your shop, make sure you run through a test order (or two) so you can gain a better understanding of the experience your customers will go through. You might consider creating a 100% discount code to use at checkout, or purchasing your lowest priced item to test out both payment options.

Orders

Yay! You received an order. You’ll get a notification from Squarespace each time someone purchases from your store (and also when an item’s stock gets low or sells out). By navigating to the Order Panel in Squarespace, you’ll see the invoice #, purchase date, customer, amount, and fulfillment status. By double clicking on an order you’re able to bring up an order summary with more details. Here you can add notes, resend email notifications, and mark the order as fulfilled. Once you’ve marked an order as fulfilled, you’ll be given the option to email your customer a shipping notification and tracking number. If you need to undo an order fulfillment, just go back to the order summary and mark the order as pending. This won’t retract the email notification, but you can send the customer an email from your email platform to update them on what’s going on.

Cancel or Refund Orders

If you need to cancel or refund an order, open the order summary and click Cancel and follow the prompts. Squarespace will issue the full refund, send your customer a notification about the cancellation and refund, and restock the item to your store. Squarespace also gives you options to issue a full refund without cancelling the order and allows you to offer a partial refund.

Communicate

There’s a several email notifications you can set up in Squarespace to keep the communication with your customers constant. You can find these by navigating to Settings>Notifications. I would suggest sending a test email of each email type so you can better understanding what your customers will experience if they make a purchase in your shop.

Here’s a complete list:

Order confirmation
Order fulfilled
Order refunded
Abandoned checkout
New customer account welcome
Customer account>reset password
Customer account>password updated

View Payments

You can view successful payments, refunds, failures, and chargebacks in the Payment Activity panel. Clicking a transaction leads to a detailed payment summary in Stripe. Transactions display the customer name, amount charged, order number, time, and date. The Payment Activity panel has a search feature that allows you to search by date or charge ID. The Payment Activity panel is only available for Stripe transactions. You must log in to your PayPal account to view PayPal payment details.

Measure Results

With Squarespace Analytics you can get a clear picture of visitor behavior and revenue. In addition to pageviews, conversion, sales, referrers, and popular content, Analytics for online stores also includes revenue, form and button conversions, purchase funnel, and cart abandonment data. It’s important to note that data in Analytics cna take up to 60 minutes to refresh and it’s not possible to export Analytics data at this time. As a best practice, you might consider keeping track of when you make big changes to your site or content to see how your data responds initially and over time.

The Best Squarespace Templates for Commerce

Squarespace has designed templates specifically for online commerce to make it easy for you to create eye-catching arrangements of products, promote sales, and much more.

Here’s a list of templates Squarespace recommends for online stores: