We’ve ranked Squarespace as our second best ecommerce platform for small businesses based on extensive user testing, and an assessment of the six key factors that matter most to you – the small business owners.
Those six factors are website features, sales features, design flexibility, help and support, value for money, and ease of use.
Each factor was given a score out of 5. Those six scores were then combined to get the overall score.
Squarespace achieved a very commendable 4.5. Let’s see how those scores break down.
Website features
Squarespace websites come with a comprehensive suite of tools and services to help you succeed, including analytics, marketing, and third party extensions.
However, you should note that your access to certain features depends on whether you choose a Classic, Advanced, or Unique template. For example, the Advanced templates can do everything the Classic ones can, but with the addition of features such as quick view and zoom.
Squarespace’s SEO support is limited in comparison to other builders. However, it has recently upgraded its marketing capabilities with the ability to conduct email campaigns, and feature promotional pop-ups and social media live feeds on your website pages.
It also has a pretty nifty logo maker, which enables you to easily design and create a logo for use across your business website.
Sales features
Squarespace offers an excellent range of high quality ecommerce features to help you manage your online store, nearly all of which are in-built, rather than third party (as with Wix).
Products and inventory
Unlike some of its rivals that impose restrictions, Squarespace ecommerce allows you to sell unlimited physical, digital, and service-based products on your site.
It’s easy to manage products from the backend, with tags, categories, and a drag-and-drop sorting tool. You can then add rich product descriptions, embed images and videos, and link internally to related products to give your shoppers a great browsing experience.
Within the inventory space, you can use stock management tools, revenue reports, and stock level email alerts to help monitor your product sales.
Payment options
Squarespace ecommerce supports quite a limited range of payment options, including PayPal and Stripe. It doesn’t directly allow digital wallet-type payments, but customers can choose to make an Apple Pay payment within Stripe.
If you intend to offer any of your products on a recurring basis, you can also offer your customers a subscription plan.
If you don’t opt for a Basic Commerce or Advanced Commerce plan, Squarespace will charge you two fees: a payment processor fee, and a Squarespace transaction fee (3%).
But it’s easy to avoid this additional fee by choosing the Basic or Advanced Commerce plan from the start, which will probably save you money in the long run.
Multichannel integration
Multichannel integration is limited with Squarespace, but you can choose to place product tags on Instagram posts. These will redirect anyone who clicks on them onto your site, where they can then pay for items. This feature starts at an additional £14/month.
Checkout
With the Squarespace Checkout Style Editor, you can customise the colouring, logo, and headers to match the aesthetic of your site. It might seem trivial, but consistent branding throughout the payment process helps to maintain trust.
You can set up custom emails to be automatically sent to your customers, for everything from creating an account to abandoning a basket or shipping an order. Guest checkout is not currently supported, so anyone making a purchase will have to create an account.
Shipping
Squarespace shipping is supported by UPS, which enables you to automatically calculate shipping rates for different regions.
You can also add on a third party app called ShipStation, which prints shipping labels in bulk for all major carriers. It can help you save time on fulfilling orders, and offers discounted rates on specific carriers like FedEx.
Internationalisation
Squarespace does not currently support selling in multiple currencies, but it does provide a number of features that support those selling overseas.
For example, setting up alternative shipping options for customers in different global regions is a very efficient process, and taxes are automatically amended based on whatever shipping zone is selected.
Sales analytics
Squarespace has a nice range of analytics available through its sales overview dashboard, including revenue, order volume, and conversions.
It also allows you to track the purchase funnel, and break down what percentage of people who viewed a product went on to buy it.
However, unlike some major ecommerce builders, Squarespace does not support stock monitoring statistics. This can make things difficult as your business grows, and shifts more and more stock.
Security features
Squarespace users can rest safe in the knowledge that their website is protected by a comprehensive range of security features, including free SSL certificates, secure customer accounts, and Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance.
Accounting
Unfortunately, Squarespace offers very little in the way of third party accounting apps. However, you can print individual and bulk invoices, and make use of the analytics we discussed earlier for your bookkeeping.
Design flexibility
A website designed using Squarespace
Squarespace is our top ranked platform for creative control. It might have fewer templates than its rivals, but those that it does have look stunning, and can be edited to your heart’s content.
And unlike with many other builders, you can change your template at any given time, so there’s no great pressure to choose the right one the first time round.
The only minor issue is that, although your website content will be repopulated on the new template, the navigation link order might not follow – meaning you’ll personally have to rearrange it.
Help and support
Deleted pages and blog posts can be restored up to 30 days after their removal.
Squarespace has a live chat function, but no phone support. However, its knowledge forum is regarded as one of the most trustworthy and supportive in the industry. You should be able to find answers to most of your questions here.
Value for money
Squarespace ecommerce compares very favourably with the likes of Shopify and BigCommerce when it comes to value for money. Its sales features are just as good as these two ecommerce-specific platforms, and yet it’s much cheaper.
Ease of use
Although our testers thought Squarespace’s editing interface was “clean and easy to navigate”, they also found it quite challenging to use. There are very few visual cues to guide you, and you can only use the ‘undo’ button while editing.
However, our testers suggested that these challenges come hand in hand with a great deal of design flexibility – a small price to pay if you really value your creative freedom.
via https://www.AiUpNow.com/ by Henry Williams, Khareem Sudlow
