15 Steps to Setting Up Your Squarespace Store
Are you setting up your first online store on Squarespace? From writing engaging product descriptions to producing beautiful product photos to setting up shipping and order fulfillment, here is your setup checklist to ensure you don’t miss a crucial step:
Add a store page: You can find this as one of the page types (alongside “blank,” “portfolio,” and “blog”).
Choose a product type: Will it be a physical (to be shipped), digital (to be downloaded) or service (requires no shipping) product? This will influence checkout and cannot be changed later.
Add a product name: This should be fairly descriptive and not feature just numbers or other functional elements, especially for stores with a lot of products.
Add a product description: You can leave this blank, but adding a custom description will help your product and store stand out. If you have a lot of details, you can add them to the Additional Information section, including a graphic such as a size chart.
Add variations: Will you have multiple sizes or colors of an item? You can set up all possible variations that will be displayed as dropdown menus to the site visitor.
Add a product image(s): Ideally, you’ll have professional photography so that you can successfully stand up to your competitors. (If that isn’t an option now, however, I’ve got you covered! See my post here on taking good photos with your phone.) You’ll want to add at least one; more will definitely help the potential customer to be more comfortable in what they will be receiving.
Set your price: If you have multiple variations of an item, you can set different prices per option.
Add categories: If you have a lot of items in your store, it can be helpful to organize the by category (such as soaps and candles) to allow shoppers to quickly filter their options.
Set a quantity: If you need to keep a close eye on inventory so you don’t oversell or if you have just one of an item, you’ll want to set the exact quantity available. If you have no limits, you can set the quantity to "unlimited” and keep those sales coming in.
Set up a subscription: You can turn any physical or service product into a subscription to charge customers on a recurring basis, such as for a membership or a monthly food delivery.
Connect a payment processor: You can choose Stripe and or PayPal; Stripe will then also allow payment via Apple Pay and PayPal will also allow payment via Venmo. Square is only an option for in-person checkout with a Square reader connected to a mobile device.
Set up taxes: You can manually set this up yourself or connect to TaxJar with any commerce subscription.
Set up shipping rates: You’ll choose between flat rate, weight-based or carrier-calculated. The last two will also require additional details to be entered into the product record (weight and box sizes).
Customize order emails: Squarespace’s generic template is excellent, as is, but you can add your branding for a customized presentation.
Enable customer accounts: This will allow a customer to save their name, address, phone, email and payment for easy checkout in the future.
