February 22, 2023
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Squarespace is a highly affordable cloud-hosted ecommerce solution with some of the most stylish pre-made templates available. Read this Squarespace review to see if it's the right platform for your online business.
Squarespace is a great platform for e-tailers to get started selling online. Millions of websites use the platform, though not all of them are e-commerce sites; Squarespace is an all-purpose website builder and not exclusive to shop building like Shopify and Bigcommerce.
Squarespace is also a hosted solution, which means they will host your shop on their cloud servers and you don't have access to any the back-end code. Instead, you can massively customise your shop via Squarespace’s powerful and dynamic styling editor.
This article discusses the main benefits and drawbacks of Squarespace. There's also a comparison with some of its main competitors.
Let's begin!
Squarespace provides you with templates that command your attention. Their templates are clean, mostly minimalistic and highly professional. The themes give off an air of elegance, which is mainly due to their simplicity. With some theme stores you can scroll for a while before you find anything that you would feel comfortable presenting to your customers, but with Squarespace the challenge is to pick a single one out of the many options that you love!
Theme customisation isn’t anything groundbreaking in the website building world, and Squarespace aren’t necessarily pioneering anything here, but their Style Editor makes it exceptionally easy for anyone to customise their website design without having to type a letter of code. In the Style Editor you can adjust colours, typography, background images, opacity of images, the width of the sidebar, any spacing and padding, and page-specific styles. There is also a CSS editor built in so you can maximise the customisation of your website if you have an understanding of code.
The landscape of e-commerce is moving towards mobile and tablet devices, so having a responsive website that is optimised for desktop, mobile and tablet is absolutely essential. Regardless of the device’s screen size, the website can be seen perfectly and the content will automatically resize to give your customers the best user experience. A seamless experience for your visitors will increase conversions.
Squarespace's partnership with Typekit makes more than 65 Typekit fonts available to all Squarespace customers at no additional charge. Typography is one of the very core factors that influence a customer's perception of a brand. It's something that can be instantly judged and scrutinised when they load up your website, and has to be perfect. This partnership with Typekit makes it far easier for you to construct a brand for your business, with a much wider range of typography to choose from.
Another partner of Squarespace is Getty Images, one of the world's leading creators and distributors of high quality images and videos. Because of this partnership, Squarespace website owners get an exclusive rate for using images from Getty on their websites, at the affordable cost of just $10 a photo.
SEO is built in to all websites made with Squarespace to ensure that search engines, and thus potential customers, find you. You will also have access to analytics that are updated in real time, giving you a powerful sense of customer insight. Squarespace's dedication to social integration also makes it easier than ever to connect with your customers on Facebook, Twitter, and more (see point 7).
Every Squarespace store includes fast, unlimited cloud hosting at no extra cost. This means you don't have to pay for an external host and your site will remain available at all times.
They are Level 1 PCI compliant and use 128 bit SSL encryption to ensure that your customers' credit card data is always transferred in a safe and secure manner.
Squarespace's social integration feature allows you to easily share store news and product updates to all of your customers and followers at Twitter, Facebook, or any other social service supported by the platform.
The social accounts publishing system should save you time and effort, as you do not have to manually post any updates to your social media platforms, but can automatically share specific news with all of them. All you have to do is connect your social media accounts to your Squarespace website, then alter the settings for how people can connect with you on those social networks. This nifty feature allows you to include social 'follow' buttons on your website navigation, as well as auto-post new content - such as a new product - to all of your social media accounts, ensuring that your followers never miss an update, and that you are getting as much traffic as possible.
One of the most annoying things about Squarespace is that it isn't open source. This means that everything is designed by their in-house team and they do not allow external designers to design for their platform. As a result, the templates and tools are exceptionally designed but limited. Another downside to not having an open source system is that support can only be given from Squarespace.
When you are altering your template, Squarespace does not offer a real-time "live" editing screen, so you can't see what your website will actually look like until it is published. The difference between editing mode and live mode is not massive, though it can be frustrating to know that what you've spent a long time perfecting in editing mode may not necessarily be experienced by your customers. You will find that you will have to make edits, then preview the page in live mode, only to go back and make edits again because it looks different to how you expected. Not very instinctive!
Squarespace uses containers called 'blocks' that you can add, move and combine to customise your site. In these blocks, you can hold images, text, videos, quotes, calendars, forms and many other things. The issue is that when you try to add blocks or move them around, the editor is, again, not intuitive. People often report problems when they want to move blocks around their pages, with the editing system hindering and slowing down their customisation rather than making it an easy seamless experience.
The Style Editor has a lot of room for customisation. It's packed full of tools, sliders, widgets and fonts. Perhaps too many. Because of the extent of the customising power given to you, it would be easy to be overwhelmed and not know where to start. If you have skills in design or a very clear layout that you want your website to follow, then this wouldn't really be an issue, but for the layperson who just wants to make little edits, the wealth of options could be a bit excessive.
Unlike Shopify or Bigcommerce, Squarespace's e-commerce is not integrated with PayPal. As a result, building a website with Squarespace excludes you from perhaps the most popular online payment method, and the one that your customers will be most familiar with. Squarespace instead uses Stripe to process its payments, though this is not as universally known as PayPal is. If you think that your customers will expect PayPal and require it as your payment gateway, you may have to use either Shopify or Bigcommerce.
Squarespace does not offer phone support to any of their customers. If their customers were expected to have excellent web design skills, that could probably be swept under the carpet, though considering Squarespace is meant for people without this skillset, they are more likely to require support. Their lack of instant assistance is a big error on Squarespace's part.
Squarespace, like most website building companies, offers three different price plans for you to choose from. All of them are slightly cheaper if you opt to pay annually rather than monthly. Squarespace also uses Stripe for all their e-commerce payments, which charges transaction fees of 2.9% + 30¢. Let's look at each of them in a little detail, outlining what you get for your money.
The personal plan is the cheapest that Squarespace offers, charged at $8/month (billed annually) or $10/month (billed monthly). Here are the features included in this plan:
The professional plan is marketed by Squarespace as their most popular, probably because it is the mid-price plan - not too cheap and not too expensive. It is charged at $16/month (billed annually) or $20/month (billed monthly). Here are the features included in this plan:
The most expensive plan that Squarespace has on offer - while still being remarkably cost-effective - is the business plan. It is charged at $24/month (billed annually) or $30/month (billed monthly). Here are the features included in this plan:
You might be stuck choosing between Squarespace and a couple of other platforms to build your website. Here, we will compare Squarespace with two of the biggest e-commerce website builders - Shopify and Bigcommerce.
So there you have it!
With their responsive beautiful templates, seamless social integration, and inclusive hosting, Squarespace is an excellent platform to open your e-commerce business.
