It’s no secret that we are obsessed with Squarespace. Their templates and ease of use are second to none. Another really great thing about the platform is that the organization is committed to pushing the boundaries. They’ve seriously stepped up their ecommerce and marketing options over the past few years.
As the go-to web guru at the organization, I recently received a list of questions from a client that I thought would be perfect to share with you all.
This client is considering which platform to launch their new e-commerce experience. After reviewing WordPress, Shopify and Squarespace from a pretty high level, it was time to get into the nitty gritty. This rapid-fire Q&A is chock full of deets you need to determine whether or not Squarespace is a good fit for your e-commerce store.
Q: We want the the ability to identify the location of the individual browsing our catalog and have that translate over to shipping options?
Basically, our platform needs to recognize the shipping proximity and offers shipping charges based off the individuals location.
In Squarespace, you can create shipping options that automatically apply at checkout. A Flat rate, Rates by Weight, Carrier Calculated, or Free Shipping.
You can apply different shipping rules based on shipping zones that you set up. You can not apply a specific shipping rule based on a specific product.
In the checkout page, the shipping option will populate after the customer enters their shipping address.
Q: Can multiple email accounts be connected to the platform so that more than one individual can receive messages or inquiries from customers?
We can have multiple contributors to the site and add them to the commerce functions. The only thing they won’t be able to get is the form submissions.
You can only select one email to receive form completions (this is based on best practices). But you can set up an integration that sends all of the submission to multiple people through Zapier. Alternatively, you can connect forms to to Google Drive, Mailchimp, or Squarespace’s email list CRM. Here’s a list of form storage.
Q: We need the ability to access stats like Sales per SKU, Total orders tracked, Total visitors, etc,.
You have access to basic analytics in each plan, and they scale up depending on which plan you are on. Here’s a list of availability by plan.
In the Commerce Advanced Plan, you have more access to conversion metrics like spot patterns, engagement, placement, etc. Here’s a list of sales KPIs you can see. Depending which payment processor you connect, we suggest Stripe, you’ll also be able to see their processing metrics.
There are also funnel analytics and abandoned cart analytics.
Q: Does Squarespace have the ability to send u alerts when an order has been abandoned so we may reach out to the individual who abandoned an order?
Do we have the ability to provide a reminder email for individuals who have an item in their shopping cart, but have not completed their order?
There’s an abandoned cart panel that lets you see the funnel. There is a feature on the Commerce Advanced plan that will send them a cart abandonment email (if they’re logged into their customer account or entered an email at checkout). If they don’t provide an email, there’s no way to recover the visitor.
There are different email notifications that you can set up like order confirmed, fulfilled, refunded.
Q: Can you see customer ordering history in Squarespace? Ex: How many times Christy has ordered and what items were ordered.
So this is one of the features I feel like Squarespace needs to do a little bit better connecting. You can see the customer’s full order history in the Orders tab but then you can view the list below in the Customer Account panel. Why they’re in two separate places, I’m not sure. You get the best data when you enable customer accounts. You can see these below plus basic contact/shipping information.
- Customer name
- Email address
- Customer since (date of first order)
- Total spent
- Date of last order
- Number of orders
- Average order value
- All saved shipping addresses. Customers can store multiple addresses and set a default.
- All saved payment methods and billing addresses. Customers can store multiple payment methods and set a default.
Q: Can you create promotional, discount codes, coupons, Tier based discounts based off quantity or dollars spent on Squarespace?
You have the ability to discounts, sale pricing, sell gift cards, and a sale/promotion within Squarespace. Here’s a good breakdown on when to use each. You can create codes as a part of the discount feature and determine how long, what amount, if it can be combined, and what rules there are.
You can limit the amount of discounts each customer can use in the Advanced Plan. These are some of the advanced discounts.
- automatically applying discounts
- limit times a discount can be applied
- create rules for how discounts can be applied/combined
- Subscription discounts
- Exclude products
- Applying discount to first payment only
- Apply discount to all payments
- Date range
Q: Are we able to edit the SKU pages?
You can edit product information, tags, pricing, variants, shipping, additional options/bundles, and even create a subscription. Physical products details. You can either upload an SKU, this will be it’s own individual product, or leave the sku field blank when you upload and Squarespace will assign a sku. I don’t recommend changing the actual SKU, you can change any other product feature. But if it’s a new product, I’d actually pull the old one and add a new item altogether. You can add products one by one or import a whole inventory list with the template attached.
Q: Can you send a monthly newsletter out through Squarespace?
This is one of my favorite Squarespace features. You can create email campaigns that are integrated into your site. You can even set up automated emails with subscriber activity or commerce activity which make for a super slick customer experience and save marketing a ton of time.
Bonus Marketing Opportunities: You can connect your shop to Instagram to tag your products, run Dynamic Facebook ads, integrate with Facebook’s pixel to set up commerce campaigns, and create trackable links.
Q: Is there a live chat feature? So could we have the ability to interact with a customer through a messenger while they are shopping?
Most third party live chat modules connect with Squarespace. They typically require dropping code into the advanced modules. We have integrated both Messenger for live chat like this site or third party systems like this site.
Q: Mobile functionality on all platforms (IOS or Android) is a must. How is Squarespace at being responsive.
Squarespace’s websites are automatically responsive and most of the templates have additional styling that you can customize specifically on mobile. They’re also extremely easy to edit and manage on the go with their mobile apps. The only bummer is that they separated out the features so there is an Analytics app, Commerce app, and Squarespace editing app.
Q: Does Squarespace have automatic order confirmation, fulfillment, shipping notifications and emails to track their packages?
Squarespace has automatic confirmation emails that you can set up with confirmation, fulfillment, shipped, and refunded emails. You can add onto that with automated marketing emails.
You can add a tracking number in the Tracking Number field on each order that was fulfilled. It just needs to be published as people mark the order throughout its journey. If Squarespace recognizes the tracking number, the Carrier drop-down menu will automatically update.
Q: Can you label an item sold out or out of stock to prevent further purchasing of said item until we lift that designation in Squarespace?
You can mark a product sold out and a label will appear. You can even enable waitlists so shoppers can be notified when it comes back in stock! Another cool feature is enabling limited availability labels to let products know when they’re low. You can always add tags and categories to products. Or show related products. Here are some of the other product page features.
Q: Does Squarespace support the ability to switch to foreign languages?
You can write out copy in any language and set the language site wide. If you need a custom font for the language you can use Google Fonts or with custom code. If you want the full site to be multi-language, you’d need to create multiple pages for each content and link out separately. You can create a separate shop in another language as well but this will get complicated on managing inventory. Squarespace is not as great as the many WordPress plugins available to help on this.
Q: Does Squarespace have its own SMTP server ?
Squarespace partners with G Suite by Google. If you have a custom domain linked, you can add a custom email for that address. It doesn’t matter if you purchase that email through Squarespace or a third party.
Q: Can Squarespace integrate with third-party payment processors?
Squarespace only allows Stripe, PayPal, or both for a payment processor. You can also use Square as a point of sale payment processor You would not be able to use your third-party as your payment processor. I’m not sure if that is a dealbreaker for you or not but I would definitely review this barrier before making a decision.
Q: How Does Squarespace position their plans? Can you pick and choose features?
This is the best place to review the Squarespace plans side by side. You can even pick your plan and scale up or down your commerce plan based on your needs. In fact, we did this with a firework stand’s site. They only needed the commerce features for one week, so we immediately shut it off and downgraded their plan when they didn’t need it.
If you want to look at Zapier to integrate some extra email firing or connection, here’s the pricing for that.
Q: Can you display related products to a viewer when they’re shopping on Squarespace?
This is a premium feature in Commerce Basic and Advanced Squarespace plans. You can filter products by
- Random
- Recently Added
- Highest Quantity
Q: Can we offer subscriptions to our products using Squarespace?
This feature is only available on the Commerce Advanced plan. It is a requirement to use Stripe as the payment processor if you want to do subscriptions. You would also have to enable customer accounts (which is really easy). You can create boxes or have specific products be available for subscription. You can even discontinue a subscription product if you need to.