Using Squarespace Commerce For Your Online Shop
Having recently completed several new website design projects for small creative businesses, which included online shops, I really wanted to share my thoughts about the Squarespace commerce platform. The pro’s and con’s, which shops it is best suited for and my favourite features.
SS Commerce Overview
First let’s take a look at the basics of the Squarespace platform and what it actually is. Squarespace is a website building platform which is an all-in-one solution for building and hosting your website. This means that everything is in one place and can be a simpler solution than platforms like WordPress where you need to deal with the hosting and building of the website separately (check out this blog post for an easy explanation on hosts).
Within your Squarespace website they offer a lot of add-on services, one of which is their e-commerce platform. This is an integrated online shop where you can sell physical products, digital products, services and gift cards. There is no limitation to the number of products within your online store and you can integrate your inventory with a physical shop if you are based on the US.
It does seem that Squarespace are currently investing a lot of effort in improving their commerce platform, both for the shop owner and features for your customers. As such I hope that some of their shipping and inventory solutions which are currently available in the US only will be expanded to the UK and beyond in the future.
How Squarespace Commerce compares to the alternatives
The Squarespace commerce platform is currently available on their Business plan and above, which means the starting cost for the hosting of your website and shop starts at £15 per month. This does include some additional fees to Squarespace however, so I would always recommend using their Basic Commerce plan which comes in at £20 per month.
This compares almost exactly with Shopify’s basic plan at $29 (£20.50) and very closely to Wix at £16 per month. Each of these platforms also allow you have an unlimited inventory on all their pricing plans.
There are two tiers of Squarespace commerce plan and with the higher plan, Commerce Advanced, you can add in subscription products with recurring payments to your customers alongside a more advanced customer notification system including abandoned cart recovery.
The cheapest option for a website with an online shop, if you are looking purely at the monthly cost for hosting, would WordPress with WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a free plug-in that can be used on all self-hosting WordPress sites and hosting typically comes in around £8-12 per month.
Pro’s of Squarespace Commerce
Usability
For me, the best feature about the Squarespace platform for my clients will be the usability. Now obviously as a Squarespace designer this is hard for me to accurately judge because I spend so much time in the platform. However, from speaking with past clients who have switched from Shopify to Squarespace I have found that they agree. The interface used to add new products has recently been redesigned by Squarespace and now walks you though quite clearly the different bits of information required for your product. It’s a very clean interface and doesn’t distract you with anything too technical or complicated.
(Also, if you work with me on a website project you will get a bank of custom tutorial videos walking you through every aspect of your shop that you can refer to if you ever have trouble….just saying!)
Other Page Types
Another one of the major plus points of Squarespace is that it works exceptionally well if your online shop is only part of your website and you intend on having additional pages to promote services, to allow online booking and to write a blog. Because Squarespace started life as a website builder, rather than an online shop builder, it is set up brilliantly for all of these functions and the blogging platform and page design options are much more advanced than the Shopify alternatives.
Mobile App
The mobile app that comes with the commerce platform is really handy. It allows you to see all of your incoming orders, including all of the details for shipping. You can then mark the order as fulfilled, directly from the app, which automatically issues an email notification to your customer to say their order is on the way. This is especially handy if you are processing your orders from a kitchen or a workshop and you aren’t sitting at your computer all day.
Instagram Integration
Whilst browsing on Instagram you may have seen fellow small businesses sharing their products within a post, including clickable links taking followers directly to the product page on their shop website. This integration can be set up on your Squarespace shop and is a great way to link your social media marketing with your store.
What Shop Types Work Best With Squarespace Commerce
The Squarespace commerce platform works really well for small creative businesses who are selling homemade or handcrafted products. It allows you to easily control a small inventory and create a beautiful looking shop that can easily be navigated by your customers.
I have recently completed shop design projects for two artists, a bakery, a granola maker and a florist. These shops are all really different, offering very different products, but each client has found the platform works well for them and offers enough flexibility and control to create a shop that works for their business.
When I Wouldn’t Recommend It
It really comes to what you will be selling in your shop and how much complexity and flexibility you need from an online shop platform.
If you have an online shop with products that offer lots of variations/customisation/delivery options, then the apps and upgrades that Shopify offers will really allow you to create a completely customised shopping experience, which is something that Squarespace can’t really do. Also if you have a very large inventory, where you would like to offer customers the chance to filter by many different parameters (size, material, colour, texture) you will find many more options for this in Shopify. The downside to this within Shopify, is that many of the app to upgrade the functionality of your shop, do come with additional monthly fees.
Squarespace Shop Examples
There are a couple of instances where we had to think outside the box to create an even more custom experience to suit certain situations.
Sharing your availability
For example, when I worked on a florists website, my client didn’t want people to order from her on days her calendar was already full. Now this isn’t something that can be done directly within the Squarespace platform but we found a really inexpensive plug-in which would allow customers to see her availability in a calendar (see below!).
Availability checker
Setting Lead Time Expectation
If you are creating a product to order, there will be a minimum lead time required before you can post your item or have it collected. This could be for custom artwork, pottery, prints or in the case of this florist, they require at least 3 days’ notice to source the fresh flowers for their orders. To make sure customers are completed aware of this and don’t place last minute orders expecting next-day delivery, we added a question at checkout asking them to confirm they are aware of the lead time and are happy to proceed. They can’t process their order until they accept this.
Setting lead time expectation
Customisations
If you offer custom items, you can use the same tools I described above to ask your customers a question about their order. In the case of this bakery website, we wanted to ask customers what message they would like piped on top of their cake. These pop-up forms can be added or removed to items in your inventory and don’t have to be applied across the board, allowing you the maximin amount of flexibility.
Order personalisation
Combining Local Collection and Online Delivery
This bakery offers both cakes for collection from their store and brownie boxes for UK delivery. We really wanted to avoid any confusion for customers and create two very separate experiences for those who were looking for UK wide delivery vs the local customers who were ordering for pick-up. As a solution we created a second shop within Squarespace. This doesn’t cost anything extra and really is just a simple way to have two independent inventories sitting within the same website and with the same styling – you can see it in action below.
Round up!
I hope this post gives you a great insight into the Squarespace commerce platform and whether it is right for you and your creative business. I would love to work with you to build an online shop for your products, so please get in touch if you have any questions at all or if you’d like to get started with an enquiry!
