10-second breakdown:
SquareSpace is devoted to helping your store look good, which ultimately leads to more people on your site for a longer time. With half the battle won, you just have to sell good stuff and compel them to try it out. Easy to set up and very versatile for designers and visually appealing products.
The good:
The design of your online shop is bound to look good with this software. Beautiful templates and very intuitive tools to get you setup quickly. They’ve put a lot of work into the elements that draw the eye of your shoppers and if you don’t have much UX experience, it will help you (and your products) look their best.
There are multiple types of products that are sellable on SquareSpace. Digital and physical goods are both supported and well thought out. Downloads can even be facilitated by the platform which isn’t the case with some other ecommerce solutions.
Analytics data is rich and useful to help you figure out ways to keep eyeballs on the screen longer and sell more product overall.
The bad:
There is no third-party widget marketplace; which means less innovation from the seller point of view.
Surprisingly limited mobile site configurations given the mobile state of the internet at large.
How it works:
Right out of the gate you should know that SquareSpace isn’t exclusively an online shop builder, but a DIY website tool that allows you to create a store if you so desire. That doesn’t mean that it’s not a solid option. It’s especially useful for anyone who wants to build a content-based site that has the functionality built-in to sell products.
To get started, you’ll need to pick the plan that’s right for you. This platform only has two for online shops, here’s the breakdown of both:
Basic: With the basic plan, you can sell an unlimited number of products with no transaction fees. You get a free domain if you purchase a year’s worth of service and all sites are mobile-friendly (a must in ecommerce). Inventory tracking, tax calculators, and label-printing are also standard.
Advanced: The advanced plan comes with all of the features of basic as well as abandoned cart recovery, deeper analytics, and real-time shipping data.
One of the biggest selling points about SquareSpace is it’s seeming superpower to turn even the most design deficient users into web development pros. It’s not only easy to build a site, but you’ll be surprised at how stunningly beautiful your creation is. In online shopping, your site has to look as good as the pictures of your products, so if you need help in the visual department, take a good look at this platform.
One of the downsides here is the low number of shopping specific templates. While there are fewer than ten, the ones that are there look phenomenal, modern, and they all look just as good on smartphones/tablets. The templates are also fit for any products and aren’t made with one type of company (e.g fashion) in mind.
It’s not the biggest problem in the world, because the site-building capabilities with SquareSpace makes everything customizable. One of the coolest things is the ability to add a store onto a fully-functioning site. This makes it a great way for consultants, bloggers and other content-focused businesses to have a site that draws traffic and a store that can sell your services, digital or even physical goods.
Upon sign-up, you’ll have access to the dashboard. Even though it’s not their sole focus, adding and viewing your offers and orders is really good-looking and easy to understand. You just click, add a product and it will ask you if it’s physical, digital, or even a service (not something we’ve seen in a lot of other solutions). Then you can manipulate the details and even the page your product will sit on. It’s all super easy and you can have a store full of manually entered products in one sitting.
Add-ons aren’t really a thing with this solution. Other platforms have dozens of features that come standard or marketplaces that can include hundreds of gizmos to improve your site. It’s really basic, but effectively functional. The advanced plan has cart abandonment and the features they do have mostly come standard, but if you’re into bells and whistles you won’t find that here.
As far as taking payments, you’ll have to sign up for a Stripe account. SquareSpace doesn’t have integrations with other payment gateways (not even PayPal). Be sure to take this into consideration, even though Stripe is awesome. Another bonus is the included SSL and PCI compliance. There are a few other ecommerce platforms that offer this, but very few that include it at all levels with the price.
If you’re into making content (e.g blog, podcast, etc.) then Squarespace may be the option for you. Simple and beautiful sites are their strong suit. The functionality is enough to have a very successful site and the pricing is very inexpensive for what you get.
For complete rankings of all ecommerce software, go here.
http://authority.org/ecommerce-software/squarespace/ http://authorityorg.tumblr.com/post/150438368327
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