Squarespace E-commerce Setup and Store Design
Switching Squarespace Commerce on takes five minutes. Configuring it so the tax is right, the shipping does not lose you money, and the product pages actually convert takes rather longer. That second part is what we do.
Official Squarespace Expert · 500+ sites since 2018 · 109 five-star Google reviews
We set up Squarespace Commerce stores end to end: payment gateways, shipping rules, tax, product page design and checkout. A new store build starts at $1,500 and includes up to 15 products loaded and configured plus a training video. Work on a store you already have is billed at $100 an hour.
- New store from
- $1,500
- Existing store
- $100 an hour
- Products included
- Up to 15 loaded
- Payments
- Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay
What a Squarespace store setup covers
- Squarespace Commerce enabled and configured on the right plan for your volume
- Payment gateways connected and tested end to end with a live transaction
- Shipping rules by weight, price or flat rate, including the ones that stop international orders costing you money
- Tax configuration for the regions you actually sell into
- Product page layout designed rather than accepted as-is, with the variant, stock and delivery information customers ask about before buying
- Category and collection structure that makes sense at 200 products, not just at 15
- Checkout, order confirmation and customer notification emails styled to match the site
- Up to 15 products loaded with images, variants, SKUs and descriptions
- A training video covering how to add products, process orders and handle refunds
Which Squarespace Commerce plan do you need?
Squarespace sells two commerce tiers and the difference matters more than the price gap suggests.
Basic Commerce removes Squarespace's transaction fee, adds product reviews, and gives you customer accounts and merchandising tools. For most stores selling physical products this is enough.
Advanced Commerce adds abandoned cart recovery, subscriptions, advanced shipping and discounts, and the commerce APIs. Abandoned cart recovery on its own usually pays for the upgrade if you are doing meaningful volume. If you are selling subscriptions, you need this tier.
We will tell you which one you need during scoping rather than upselling you into the higher tier by default.
Payments
Squarespace processes card payments through Stripe and supports PayPal alongside it. Apple Pay and Afterpay or Clearpay are available depending on your region and processor. Square is supported for in-person point of sale sync in some markets.
The part people get wrong is testing. We put a real transaction through the live gateway, confirm the payout lands, and check that the confirmation emails, order notifications and any CRM handoff all fire correctly before you start advertising. Our guide to taking payments on Squarespace covers the detail if you want to read ahead.
Shipping and tax, done once, properly
Shipping is where new stores quietly lose margin. A flat rate that works for a single mug does not work for six of them going to Australia. We can help set up weight-based or price-based rules that reflect what your courier actually charges, add the free shipping threshold if you want one, and restrict the countries you are not ready to ship to.
Tax follows the same principle. We configure rates for the regions you sell into and make sure prices display tax-inclusive or exclusive in line with what your customers expect in each market. If your situation is complicated enough to need a tax automation service, we will connect one rather than pretending the native settings cover it.
Product pages that answer the objection
The default Squarespace product page is a gallery, a price and a buy button. It sells to people who had already decided. Everyone else leaves because their question was not answered.
We design product pages around the specific reasons your customers hesitate: sizing, materials, delivery time, returns, what is in the box, who else has bought it. That usually means custom sections below the fold, structured product descriptions, cross-sells, and review display if you are collecting reviews. Product page design does more for conversion than anything else in a store build.
Migrating an existing store
We move stores onto Squarespace from Shopify, WooCommerce, Etsy and Wix. Product data comes across by CSV import, which we clean up first because export files are never as tidy as they look. The important work is the redirect map: every old product and category URL needs to point at its new equivalent or you lose the search traffic those pages were earning. We build that map before launch, not after somebody notices the drop.
When Shopify is the better answer
Squarespace Commerce is genuinely good for stores with a curated catalogue, a strong brand and a team that does not want to manage infrastructure. It is not the right tool for everything.
If you need multi-currency pricing, B2B price lists per customer, thousands of SKUs with complex variant matrices, a serious app marketplace, or headless commerce, Shopify will serve you better and we will say so on the first call. We would rather lose a project than sell you two years of fighting a platform.
After the store is live
Stores need more attention than brochure sites. Products change, promotions come and go, and something always breaks the week before Black Friday. Our support and maintenance service covers that on an hourly or retainer basis, and we have a walkthrough on setting up a promotional popup if you want to run that yourself.
The rest of what we do
Most projects pull in more than one of these. Everything below is handled by the same team.
Squarespace e-commerce questions
On the Business plan Squarespace takes a 3% transaction fee on top of the payment processor's fee. On Basic Commerce and Advanced Commerce that fee is zero, you only pay the processor. If you are selling any real volume, the commerce plan is cheaper than the Business plan once the transaction fees are counted.
Stripe handles card payments, and PayPal can run alongside it. Apple Pay, Afterpay and Clearpay are available depending on your region and processor. Square integrates for in-person point of sale sync in supported markets. Squarespace does not let you plug in an arbitrary third-party gateway, which is worth knowing if you are tied to a specific acquirer.
Squarespace allows large catalogues technically, but the merchandising and filtering tools start to feel thin somewhere north of a few hundred SKUs, particularly if you have complex variants. For catalogues at that scale we will usually talk through whether Shopify is the better platform before quoting.
Yes to digital downloads on any commerce plan. Subscriptions require Advanced Commerce. Both work well, though subscription management options are simpler than a dedicated subscription platform, so it is worth checking your billing rules against what Squarespace supports before committing.
Yes. Products come across by CSV import, which we clean before importing because export files rarely map cleanly. The critical part is the redirect map from old product and category URLs to their new equivalents, which we build before launch so you keep the search traffic those pages already earn.
Only on the Advanced Commerce plan. If recovering abandoned carts matters to you, budget for that tier. We can also route cart data into Klaviyo for more sophisticated flows, which is covered on our integrations page.
No, but we will tell you exactly what we need: dimensions, aspect ratio, background treatment and how many angles per product. Consistent product photography does more for a store's credibility than almost any design decision, so it is worth getting right.
A standard store build runs alongside the website timeline, so three to four weeks. A store added to a site you already have is usually one to two weeks depending on how many products need loading and how complicated the shipping and tax rules are.