Is Squarespace good for Ecommerce in 2024? | Pros and Cons
A lot of people ask “does Squarespace have ecommerce?” Yes. Squarespace allows you to sell products with the commerce and business plans. But is it good? How does it compare with other website builders like Wix or Shopify?
In this post we’ll give you a full perspective on Squarespace as an ecommerce platform.
The Pros of Squarespace for Ecommerce
Squarespace is one of the oldest website builders in operation, so they have years of experience in offering people what they need to get up and running. There was a trend for a while of website builders existing just so people could put a website on the web, but the sites they designed were doomed from the start. Bad code, no SEO options, and other drawbacks all meant those sites never had a chance to get real exposure. Squarespace has stood the test of time, and here’s why:
Squarespace templates are very well designed
Their entire system, from top to bottom, has been designed and re-designed over the years for usability and accessibility. You can do a lot to make a great-looking site that’s automatically compatible and accessible, and creating new content for your site is extremely easy. In particular, Squarespace uses a Blocks system to drag-and-drop elements onto the page, which is powerful and intuitive enough that certain competitors have started to mimic it. It’s slick, it’s powerful, and it works very well whether you’re building a homepage with a custom design or you’re building blog posts or product pages. Pages can be created, populated with content, and published within minutes.
Squarespace eCommerce Examples
Squarespace SEO is reasonably powerful
SEO is a very complicated industry with hundreds of different elements you need to work to optimize your visibility in Google search. When you have full control over every aspect of your site, you can tweak all of this for the best possible results. Squarespace limits what you can tweak – you can’t do anything about their servers or the core code of your site, for example – but they do give you a lot of options. Also, a lot of SEO happens off-site anyway, so what you can’t control is minor in the grand scheme of things. Much of their platform is already optimized for you out of the box. Check out our recent post for more Squarespace SEO tips
Squarespace has a history of great uptime
Uptime is critically important for an Ecommerce site, so a platform offering it needs to have uptime guarantees. While Squarespace might not rival something like Google or Microsoft in terms of uptime, they’re still really good about it. They aren’t perfect – you can see their uptime history here – but they’re pretty good compared to a lot of other website builders and hosted platforms. They’re also segmented; some of their outages only affect editing your site, but don’t impact users shopping at all.
Squarespace is mobile-responsive by default
One of the biggest SEO factors of the last decade is mobile compatibility. Over 50% of all web traffic today is done via phones and other mobile devices, so a site NEEDS to be visible on mobile. With other platforms, you might not get mobile compatibility, or you might need to go out of your way to get it. Not so with Squarespace; every one of their templates, on both 7.0 and 7.1, is mobile responsive from the ground up. You never have to worry about how your page will display on mobile devices.
Squarespace has a lot of great integrations
Squarespace isn’t quite as flexible or extensible as some of the other platforms out there. It’s not as customizable as a self-hosted framework or a custom-coded site, but it’s top of the line for website builders and hosted platforms. They have an extensions web store to link up with dozens of other services and give you more and more features. They also allow you to hook up third-party extensions and plugins to give you features they don’t offer natively or in their own managed extensions. Overall, you have a ton of options and can do just about anything you want to do, within reason.
Squarespace’s marketing and analytics tools are great.
The industry-standard Google Analytics integrations are easy to set up, and they have powerful analytics and marketing tools built right into the platform. I’m sure if Disney came in and wanted to set up a complex web store, they’d find it unnecessarily limiting, but for 99% of people who want to set up a simple web store, it’s more than adequate. You’ll be able to get meaningful insights from your analytics, and you can take action based on that data using their marketing tools, without needing to worry too much about third-party integrations or external services.
Squarespace’s help center is top-notch.
You may have noticed in this post (and in others on my blog) that I frequently link to the Squarespace help center. That’s because they’re very good at covering pretty much any topic you could want to know about. Their help center is one of the most comprehensive I’ve seen, both with web builders and various web services in general. If you have a question, you can search their help center and often find several relevant documents, laid out in meaningful ways and with useful, actionable advice. There’s very little that they hide or obfuscate.
Squarespace’s pricing is pretty reasonable.
Now, okay, I know some reviews out there list this as a con. And sure, if you’re comparing Squarespace to a free website builder, of course having to pay is going to be a downside. I figure you should compare it to something like a website made out of custom design, or paying for a web host + design + plugins + frameworks, or premium platforms on other sites.
If you’re standing up a Squarespace Ecommerce store, you need the business plan to get all of the most useful features, which means you’ll be paying $40 per month. That can be daunting if you’re not expecting to make money for a while, but it’s quite comparable to running a website in other ways with similar suites of features.
Additional Features Worth Mentioning
There are a few items that other sites list as pros (or cons) for Squarespace that I think are a lot closer to neutral. They’re worth mentioning, but I wouldn’t consider them major factors for or against using Squarespace in general.
Squarespace offers a free domain with a paid plan. Every modern website should have a unique domain name, that’s just a fact. When was the last time you saw a .squarespace.com or a .wordpress.com or a .blogger.com site ranking on Google search? Me either.
The thing is, domain names are cheap. Unless you’re trying to buy an in-demand exact match domain, in which case whoever already owns it probably wants somewhere between $1,000 and $50,000 for it (or even more in some cases). Most of the time, though, registering a domain name costs something trivial like $11 per year. Squarespace offering a minor bit of additional value is nice for the convenience, but I wouldn’t use it as the deciding factor in whether or not to go with Squarespace versus some other platform.
Squarespace offers free SSL.
Again, like domain names, most web hosts these days offer at the minimum a free SSL certificate. SSL is nearly required for good SEO these days, and 100% required for a trustworthy Ecommerce store, so Squarespace offering it is good, but when pretty much every other possible competitor also offers it, it’s not exactly a selling point. If Squarespace didn’t offer it, it would be a solid drawback, but that’s not the case here.
Squarespace isn’t ad-supported.
This one is minor, but it’s worth mentioning as well. There was a time, years ago, where there were a ton of free web hosts out there. They would let you run whatever kind of site you wanted, but they injected ads on your site to monetize your traffic to help pay for it. Google penalizes these kinds of web hosts, and these days, most of them are dead. A few still thrive, though, and some website builders offer free plans with ads supporting them. Squarespace doesn’t, which is great, but it’s still one of those “this should be the baseline for the industry” attributes that, in my opinion, is the bare minimum you should accept.
The Cons of Squarespace for Ecommerce
As much as I love Squarespace, it’s not 100% perfect in every way. I like to be fair with my analysis, so you can make an unbiased decision, so here are some of the drawbacks I’ve noticed with the platform.
Squarespace doesn’t have many payment processors available.
You can process credit cards, but you can’t link up a custom payment processor, and you can’t take ACH payments. You’re limited to these three processors: PayPal Business, Stripe, and Square. PayPal only accepts PayPal and Venmo, Stripe accepts all of the most popular credit cards and payment methods like Diner’s Club and Apple Pay, and Square is explicitly for in-person Point of Sale processing. The options are somewhat limited, and it’s one of the few drawbacks to using Squarespace for Ecommerce. That said, there are workarounds and Squarespace recently added Afterpay so it seems like there’s a commitment to meeting the needs of merchants.
Squarespace’s templates can be a bit restrictive.
If you’re used to a completely custom environment, managing code directly, or setting up advanced or uncommon Ecommerce functionality, Squarespace may feel a bit restrictive.
I will say, Squarespace has been making strides in this direction recently. Version 7.0 limited you to certain features within each theme family, but 7.1 is entirely flexible with the entire block library available to you. It may take some getting used to, and you may not be able to do everything your imagination can conceive, but it’s flexible enough for 99% of people. You’ll want to be extra picky with your themes and make sure you choose a high-quality theme that will work for you.
Squarespace isn’t always intuitive or easy to use.
I’m going to put this one bluntly; Squarespace has built up its interface and its usability over the years within its ecosystem. If they were to design it from scratch today, it would probably look quite different. If you’re a newcomer to web design, or if you’re familiar with other platforms, it may take a while to figure out where everything is and how to do what you want to do. What I’m trying to say is there’s a bit of a learning curve. It’s not bad, by any means, but it does require you to play with it for a bit to get to a point where it’s intuitive for you, and that knowledge doesn’t transfer to other platforms very easily.
Squarespace doesn’t have built-in backup and website restore features.
This is a big one for some people, especially in these days of constant cyberattacks and crypto-locker threats. Squarespace does not have a built-in backup and restoration function. You can export your site and keep a local copy, and store that local copy on the cloud somewhere else for even more redundant backups, but you have to do that manually. You can’t set something in your options to do it, there’s no button to do it, you just have to remember to take regular backups. It’s better to be safe than sorry, and you’ll be happy you have backups of your pages in-case any of them are accidentally removed.
Overall, I would say that Squarespace is well worth using. It’s SEO-friendly, fast, and easy to use. Their 14-day trial lets you start using Squarespace right away, so you’ll have plenty of time to set up your website and fall in love with the platform before committing to it. If you decide to have Squarespace power your website, excellent! I’m always available to help you out.
