Squarespace is an excellent platform for simpler websites, but be aware of some e-commerce limitations

Overall Satisfaction with Squarespace

We use Squarespace as our e-commerce website and platform. It is our portal through which customers can find out about us, our products and what we do and then they are able to purchase our products on our website. It is basically like most traditional e-commerce websites. We do utilize certain other tools that Squarespace offers, like their Analytics tools to gauge the traffic to our site, traffic sources and sales data. We do also use their "Abandoned Cart feature which allows us to contact customers that added product to their shopping cart but did not complete a purchase. At this time we do not use a lot of the marketing tools that Squarespace offers as part of their Advanced Commerce plan.
  • Getting started with Squarespace is incredibly easy. Their templates make getting an early design for your website set up and published quick and simple. There are plenty of advanced features that can be utilized to tweak the design indefinitely but getting up and running smoothly and quickly is key and Squarespace does that beautifully.
  • The Squarespace Analytics tools are incredibly helpful. They are quite detailed yet very easy to understand and parse through. If you've ever tried to understand all of your Google Analytics data, you can feel like you need to get a new degree to comprehend it all. Squarespace Analytics are intuitive and easy to understand allowing you have an easier time making decisions based not eh data you re provided.
  • Squarespace makes integrations with other platforms very easy as well. Email service providers (like MailChimp or Contant Contact), or integrating with outside fulfillment centers for orders of your products is very easy to set up. The back end design and control makes navigating through these things very easy (with the right instructions, of course).
  • My biggest complaint about Squarespace is particularly about the shipping rates controls in the Commerce plans. Squarespace does not allow you to assign different shipping costs to different products. You can set up different costs for different levels of shipping (for example, Ground, Express, Overnight, etc.). But if you have two different products that are different sizes and weights you cannot independently assign each of them a different cost for Ground shipping. All products have to have the same price for Ground, the same price for expedited, etc. It is incredibly frustrating. This one deficiency alone has actually been enough to have prompted me into looking for alternative platforms for my e-commerce site. If you sell multiple products of varying sizes and weights and you intend to charge you customers shipping, then be aware of this beforehand. If you only sell digital products, or products that don't vary much in size or weight, or you intend to offer free shipping on everything then this will not be as big a deal for you.
  • Squarespace offers excellent help services via live chat, but in the years that I've used it I get the sense that recommendations from users are taken seriously. I've made numerous recommendations for enhancements and fixes over the years and I know other people that have as well. However what I continue to see from Squarespace is development of new product offerings that aren't necessarily in line with their core product offering, and not much in the way of making what they already offer much better. There are certain things that should be prioritized by their development team but I don't get the sense that these are taken seriously. Of course this is just my guess as I don't work there but it's important to remember that perception is reality to those who are perceiving.
  • As much as Squarespace makes integrations easy, they still have along way to go with regards to being recognized by many other platforms as integration worthy. Very often I come across services that offer integrations with web design platforms and Squarespace is not one of them. I'm not sure why this is but I wish Squarespace would do a better job of working with these other companies to have integrations with them.
  • Our direct to consumer selling platform is done primarily via our website so Squarespace is the major player here. We do sell on Amazon and eBay as well, but the majority of our direct to consumer revenue is generated via our website with Squarespace.
  • Due to the above-mentioned deficiencies in making shipping costs product specific we do see a small percentage of loss in individual orders depending on where an order is being shipped to. We have to make sure our shipping prices are not exorbitant so in some cases the cost to ship a product is greater than what we charge the customer. This could be rectified is Squarespace would enhance the way they allow users to implement shipping charges.
  • The clean look of the website, the ease of creating new content and the ability to add new products in the Commerce Advanced plan has surely allowed us to grow our sales with a clean look and added product offerings. Hard to measure though how much the can be attributed though directly to Squarespace.
It's hard for me to say how Squarespace stacks up against these other options as I've only recently just begun to look into other options. I selected Squarespace initially due to good marketing on their part to get me to look at them first, and also because we initially only started with one product and the Squarespace platform was perfect for that. The cost was relatively inexpensive and the feature set was perfect for that kind of business. Now that we have grown and expanded I'm not sure if Squarespace is still the best platform for us. I have yet to do enough evaluating of other platforms though to make a thorough comparison.
Squarespace is a perfect platform for an informational website, for selling digital products or as a scheduling website. These kinds of things it does incredibly well, what with their myriad templates and design tools. As an e-commerce platform it can be very good but it definitely has some catching up to do with other more well known platforms. They need to focus on some core features a little bit better to make selling easier.

Squarespace Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG editor
10
Code quality / cleanliness
10
Admin section
9
Page templates
10
Library of website themes
10
Mobile optimization / responsive design
10
Publishing workflow
10
Form generator
10
Content taxonomy
9
SEO support
9
Availability / breadth of extensions
9
Community / comment management
8
API
8
Internationalization / multi-language
9
Role-based user permissions
8