Squarespace is a pretty well known website builder that offers beautifully designed templates and is intuitive for people with no design or coding knowledge.

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Initially, it was built as a website builder where conveying information is the priority (great for blogs, news site, a magazine, photography portfolio, etc)

Squarespace templates are easy to work with and beautiful, it’s CMS is intuitive and easy to use, it’s photo editing is pretty good, and blogging features are strong.

A note on Squarespace templates - Truth is they really are beautiful and professionally designed. You can get a great site using their templates if you want to blog, showcase an art, photography, or music portfolio. However, out of the 100-ish templates offered, only a few are dedicated online store themes. Not to say you can’t add e-commerce functionality to any of the themes that aren’t designated for e-commerce, but it’s just an extra couple steps.

Squarespace really is a great platform if your primary web goals are to showcase your portfolio and one or two products but if you have more than just a few products I highly recommend checking out Shopify.

Couple of things to watch out for when using Squarespace’s e-commerce platform:

• Squarespace charges a 3% transaction fee on any sales when you’re on their Business plan - this is in addition to any credit card processing fees
• To have access to several important features like abandoned cart recovery, real time carrier shipping, advanced discounts and gift cards you will need to go for the most expensive “advanced commerce” plan
• You only get dedicated e-commerce reporting on the basic commerce and advanced commerce plans
  

With Squarespace, transaction fees are only applied to the “business plan” at a rate of 3%. The credit card fees are determined by either Stripe or PayPal (the two options provided by Squarespace for processing credit cards)

Note: Stripe can only be used in certain countries which leaves PayPal as the sole payment processing option for a lot of Squarespace users.

Squarespace pricing and plan’s 411:

You might be tempted to check out their personal plan because it’s the cheapest. However, this plan lacks a lot of functionality (integrating Mailchimp to the standard Squarespace data capture forms, promotional popups and announcement bars are not facilitated, and there is a restriction on adding CSS or javascript. This also means that it’s hard (if not impossible) to add a GDPR-Compliant cookie banner to your Squarespace site. (I’ll discuss this fun issue in depth in another post) Because of this, many users tend to go for the more expensive Business plan which lifts all these restrictions and provides e-commerce functions too.
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Note: this pricing is for annual fees - paid upfront

As mentioned earlier, Squarespace’s business plan charges 3% transaction fees in addition to any credit card processing fees. This gives the Basic Shopify plan better value as far as e-commerce is concerned, even if their monthly fee is a little higher. ($26/month Business Squarespace, $29/month Basic Shopify)

So here’s the bottom line - Squarespace can help you put a professional looking site together very quickly. If you only have one or two products, it’s a great option! But if you’re looking to scale and have more functionality, I highly recommend checking out Shopify.

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