My Squarespace Ecommerce Review: Is It Right for Your Online Store?

Squarespace has a total of four pricing plans: two for a broad range of websites, and two specifically suited for online stores:

This article will focus on the Commerce Basic and Commerce Advanced plans, but if you’re looking for a thorough dive into all four plans, check out our Squarespace pricing review.

Value for Money

When testing against other top ecommerce website builders, we found Squarespace to be great value for money. At $28 per month (billed annually), its Commerce Basic plan charges no transaction fees and is an affordable entry into selling online. To give context, Shopify’s comparable plan costs $29 and comes with a card rate of 2.9% per transaction.

With Squarespace, you’ll also get a 14-day free trial before committing to a recurring payment.

Once you decide on your plan, you can get a free domain for a year and can save up to 30% on Commerce plans by paying annually, or you can save 10% on any plan when you use our code “WBE10” at checkout.

We’ve always been impressed by Squarespace’s comprehensive set of sales features, which is one of the reasons why it scored third place, just underneath Wix and Shopify, in our testing. Since its annual product showcase, Squarespace Refresh, in September 2024, this arsenal has only gotten stronger.

These are the standout features you’ll be able to use on both Commerce plans:

• Sell unlimited products – there’s no limit to the number of items in your inventory
• Sell a range of products – you can sell services, gift cards, and digital downloads, in addition to physical products
• Upsell with add-ons – select up to six related items to show on each of your product pages
• Omnichannel integrations – linking your business’ Meta account will allow you to sell on Facebook and Instagram and promote your products with social media ads. Plus, you can also control how your product pages appear when shared to social media
• Flexible shipping options – Squarespace supports a variety of shipping options at checkout, such as pickup and local delivery. You can also configure “fulfillment profiles” for individuals or groups of products
• Collect and show product reviews – when this feature is enabled, review requests will be emailed to customers two weeks after their purchase
• Offer personalization with product forms – product forms enable your customers to make requests or leave instructions for a particular product. They appear at checkout and are fully customizable, and come in handy if you’re selling personalized items that require names or measurements

When you upgrade to the Commerce Advanced pan, you’ll unlock even more sales features:

• Additional shipping options – carrier-calculated real-time shipping rates with UPS, USPS, and FedEx
• Advanced discounting – you can set discounts to be automatically applied to carts that meet the minimum criteria
• Product subscriptions – you’re able to offer discounted subscriptions for products that customers are likely to buy again, which is a great incentive for repeat purchases
• Abandoned cart recovery – customers who’ve left unpurchased items in their cart will receive emails reminding them to check out

Other Squarespace ecommerce reviews might outline the basic facts, but my first-hand testing means I can answer your most important concerns. To get these answers, I created an online store using Squarespace. Here’s how it went:

The Initial Setup

Squarespace’s Blueprint AI is one of the most efficient AI builders I’ve used. It asked relevant questions about my brand personality, sector, and website pages – all important areas that should be considered before you create a website. While I had full freedom of choice, at every stage the AI Builder offered suggestions of what would work best for my website.

It took me around five minutes to complete Squarespace’s Blueprint AI setup, and I was left with a starting point that felt relevant to my business and provided all the necessary pages. Most importantly, its reflection of my brand’s personality and the store functions it added made the process of finetuning my ecommerce store feel like an exciting and achievable, rather than daunting, process.

Adding Products

Squarespace provides a store setup guide in the dashboard, which explains how to build an inventory and directed me to a simple, beginner-friendly product page. If you’re a beginner who’s considering using Squarespace for ecommerce, you’ll appreciate the detailed guidance Squarespace provides whenever you click on the blue circular pop-up. From product pages to SEO help, additional tips appeared as I progressed – brilliant for improving your product’s visibility in searches.

When it came time to write my product descriptions, I had a chance to test Squarespace’s AI copywriting capabilities. The writing tool gave me a vague choice between writing a pitch, a blurb, or a paragraph, but I found it difficult to understand which was suitable. In comparison, other ecommerce builders have AI copywriting tools, such as Shopify Magic, that use more specific ecommerce phrasing and so make it easier to choose the right option.” However, once the text had been generated by Squarespace’s AI, it was easy to modify its length and simplicity.

One aspect of Squarespace’s AI content generator that I particularly liked was its “Brand Identity” feature, which stores your brand description and tone of voice and uses this to shape all the AI-generated content across your site, making it feel tailored to your store and providing a level of consistency throughout your pages.

When choosing a website builder, you should always explore its app market, which can provide additional functions for your store as it develops. This Squarespace ecommerce review is no exception and, at the time of writing, the app market – Squarespace Extensions – holds 36 plugins, which is very small compared to the 8,000 offered on Shopify’s app market.

That said, Squarespace Extensions is slowly growing, and its apps are well thought out and allow you to expand your ecommerce ventures in many directions. Having looked through each app, here are the most useful ways I’ve found that they can benefit ecommerce stores:

• Inventory management – these extensions keep track of incoming and outgoing orders and give accurate, real-time inventory tracking
• Print on demand – if you’re selling artwork and merchandise, you can use POD extensions to print your designs onto various products
• Dropshipping – these apps help you find products to sell on your store from third-party partners
• Additional sales avenues – these integrations allow you to sync your inventory to TikTok Shop, sell to other businesses as a wholesaler, and control your product feeds on platforms such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Instagram
• Shipping support – these apps connect you with carriers and smooth out the process of buying shipping labels

Squarespace has a reputation as the reigning champion of sleek and stylish designs, so when I tested them myself, my expectations were high. True to form, every option maintains that trademark visual appeal.

43 of Squarespace’s 180 templates are designed with ecommerce in mind. Once you’ve selected “Online Stores” as your website type in the template gallery, you can easily whittle down your template choice by selecting from one of the 19 categories, which cover everything from fitness to podcasting to weddings.

When editing, I was pleased to see that each Squarespace online store template has a high level of customization, which means you can use one of its expert designs as a baseline and edit it to match your brand colors and style. Once you’re signed in to your Squarespace dashboard, you can change the fonts, colors, buttons, and even the margins of your website.

What’s even better is that Squarespace’s templates are interchangeable – unlike other builders like Web.com – so if you ever want to rebrand or simply feel the urge to switch up your store design with the seasons, you can simply download a new template and transfer your content over.

This Squarespace ecommerce review wouldn’t be complete without touching on its search engine optimization (SEO) tools, which increase your site’s visibility in the results pages of Google and other search engines. Squarespace’s native SEO features are impressive and, when used correctly, will help push your products to new customers and increase sales.

From the get-go, Squarespace’s ecommerce templates are designed with clear search engine friendly navigation. Squarespace also provides a helpful SEO checklist that indicates the key areas you should consider while building your website, and beyond.

You’ll have control over the following aspects of your website’s SEO:

• URLs, meta titles, and meta descriptions for all pages, including product pages – these are automatically set and can be modified at any time
• Your social image – how your content appears when shared on social media
• Page visibility – you can hide certain pages from appearing on search engines
• Translations – if you make use of Squarespace’s multilingual feature, translations are optimized for search engines

This said, Wix – our top choice ecommerce builder – has more advanced SEO features than Squarespace, like its AI meta tag creator, which automatically generates optimized meta data. If you’re an SEO beginner, or simply want to optimize your SEO processes, Wix is a brilliant alternative.

Squarespace’s customer service is available 24/7 over email, AI chatbot, and social media. If you want to speak to a human in real-time, you can do so via live chat between 4am and 8pm EST, Monday to Friday. 

However, Squarespace doesn’t offer support over the phone. This may be a deal breaker for some, but its other support channels – especially its live chat – are strong enough to feel like you aren’t really missing out. Plus, the plethora of webinars and video tutorials found in Squarespace’s Help Center can fill any gaps in human connection.

My Squarespace ecommerce review should have answered the question: “Is Squarespace good for ecommerce?” The builder understands the importance of creating and maintaining a consistent brand voice and uses its AI features – from the Blueprint AI setup to its content generator – to help you solidify yours. On top of this, its ecommerce plans are reasonably priced and you won’t have to worry about losing profits through transaction fees.

This said, if you sell globally or plan to expand soon, Squarespace’s lack of localization features and international currencies will act as obstacles to your growth. In our latest round of ecommerce builder testing, the lack of these features is what caused it to fall below Shopify in our resulting ranking. If international business growth is a priority, Shopify is a great alternative.