Selling online? Should you hire a Squarespace expert, or build it yourself?

Seven out of every ten shopping carts get abandoned before checkout finishes. Baymard Institute's research, drawn from 50 separate studies, puts the average at just over 70%, and mobile runs higher still. That's the number worth sitting with before you decide whether to build your Squarespace store yourself or bring in a Squarespace expert. This isn't really a design question. It's a revenue question, and no platform fixes a broken checkout on its own.

What's actually at stake when you sell online

A brochure site that looks slightly off costs you a bad first impression. A store that looks or works slightly off costs you a sale that was already in the cart. Surprise costs at checkout, shipping fees that only appear on the last screen, taxes that weren't shown earlier, are the single biggest reason shoppers bail, cited by 39% of them in Baymard's research. Mobile makes the gap worse: checkout abandonment on phones consistently runs several points above desktop, because a form that's mildly annoying on a laptop becomes hard to finish with a thumb.

None of this is about how the store looks in a screenshot. It's about how many of the people who add something to their cart actually finish paying for it.

What Squarespace covers on its own for a store

Commerce is no longer a separate add-on tier, it's built into Squarespace's paid plans, starting around $23 a month. Out of the box you get inventory tracking with low-stock alerts, multi-location inventory for stores selling from more than one place, built-in tax calculation, and flexible shipping rules. The Squarespace Commerce FAQ covers what's included at each tier, and a few features, including full abandoned cart recovery emails, subscription selling and Commerce API access for custom integrations, are reserved for the higher plans rather than the entry-level one.

For a store with a small, stable catalog and standard shipping needs, that's enough on its own. You don't need a developer to sell twenty products with flat-rate shipping to one country.

What building the store yourself takes

Setting up the templates is the fast part. What eats the time is everything underneath: writing product descriptions that don't all sound the same, photographing dozens of items so they look consistent next to each other, setting tax rules correctly for every state or country you ship to, connecting a payment processor, and then testing the entire checkout flow on an actual phone before anyone else does. A five-page brochure site is a fixed amount of work. A product catalog scales that work with every SKU you add.

If someone on your team already has a good eye for layout and the hours to spend getting the details right, this is a reasonable route. If that person is also running the business day to day, the catalog tends to stay half-finished, and it's usually the checkout flow, the part customers never forgive, that gets the least attention.

Where self-built stores quietly lose revenue

The shipping surprise is the most common one. A flat rate set once at launch and never revisited either overcharges customers in nearby zones or eats your margin on distant ones, and either way it's the kind of thing that shows up as a cost at checkout instead of earlier in the browsing experience, right where Baymard's 39% figure lives. The second is abandoned cart recovery left switched off or unconfigured, which means every one of those seven-in-ten abandoned carts just disappears instead of getting a follow-up email. The third is tax and shipping zones that were accurate on launch day and quietly wrong six months later, once the business started shipping somewhere new.

A shop owner won't spot any of this from looking at the site itself. It surfaces later, as a sales number that's quietly lower than it should be, with no obvious cause attached.

What a Squarespace expert changes for a store specifically

Beyond fixing the gaps above, an expert earns their fee on the parts that are specific to selling, not just displaying. That includes wiring up abandoned cart email flows with a service like Klaviyo, connecting real-time carrier shipping rates instead of a flat guess, adding product schema markup so listings can show price and star ratings directly in search results (something we cover in more general terms in our Squarespace SEO checklist), and setting up subscriptions or memberships correctly the first time instead of after a customer complaint. You can't see the difference on a walkthrough call. You see it a month later, when the same traffic converts at a noticeably better rate.

The honest cost comparison

The platform costs the same either way, from around $23 a month up toward $100 for the tier that unlocks abandoned cart recovery, subscriptions and full API access. Building it yourself trades money for time, and for a small catalog that time cost is real but manageable. Hiring someone is a one-off setup cost that's typically far below a custom build from scratch, since you're paying for setup and integration work on an existing platform rather than software built from zero. For most small stores, that one-off cost pays for itself the first month the abandoned cart emails start recovering sales nobody was chasing before.

So which route fits your store

Build it yourself if your catalog is small and stable, you ship to one country with one shipping rule, and someone on the team has the time and the eye to get the details right before launch. Bring in a Squarespace expert if your catalog is growing, you ship across multiple zones or countries, you're adding subscriptions or memberships, or you're launching into a marketing push and can't afford the checkout to be the reason it underperforms. Either way, the platform was never the limiting factor. What happens on top of it is.