Squarespace is a platform for making websites. It works just like WordPress or Shopify and is a website builder, store platform, and content management system all in one.
Today, we’ll talk about the different packages so that we can help you choose.
Let’s get started and figure out which plan is best for you.
What’s Squarespace?
With Squarespace, you can build a blog or an online store.
You can do the following with Squarespace:
- Sell things.
- Set up dates and times
- Set up a way to check out.
- For offline sales, use a point-of-sale system.
- Use extensions
The Squarespace platform also gives you access to the following:
- Dozens of templates for websites
- Services that are linked
- Expert website builders
- Stats about a website
You can also buy a domain name from the platform, making it a one-stop shop for everything you need to build a website.
What does each package cost?
Squarespace has four different plans to choose from. These plans have different limits and features, and customers can choose the one that fits their needs best.
Whether you’re new to E-commerce or have been doing it for a while, Squarespace has plans that you can pay for monthly or annually.
These are the four plans:
- Personal
- Business
- Basic Business
- More Business
The monthly cost for the personal plan is $16. You can make a website with this plan, but not an online store. It also doesn’t come with a Google email that looks professional.
People who only need a blog should use the Personal plan. It works well for affiliate marketers and people who want to make money from ads on their website.
The monthly cost of the Business plan is $26. You can build a store and make a checkout system with this plan. You can charge customers for their purchases, sell an unlimited number of items, or ask for donations with this plan.
Each month, the Basic Commerce Plan costs $30. With this plan, you won’t have to pay a transaction fee for orders that your store processes.
You can use powerful e-commerce analytics with this plan, and you can also set up customer accounts so that they can log in at any time and process orders.
The most expensive plan is the Advanced Commerce plan, which costs $46 per month. With this plan, you can sell subscriptions and gift cards and use the platform’s advanced shipping tools. This is also the plan where you can use the Abandoned Cart Recovery features to your advantage.
What each Squarespace plan comes with
Let’s take a look at what each plan gives you.
Personal
With the personal plan, you’ll get everything you need to run a professional website, but you won’t be able to set up an online store.
Free Domain Name
You do not have to pay extra money for a domain name. If Squarespace can cover the cost of the one you want, you get it for free.
Safety with SSL
Secure socket layer will be used to host your website. Instead of HTTP, your URL will start with HTTPS. This means that your website won’t be blocked by search engines or browsers.
If a customer tries to open an insecure website, his browser will give him a warning. If this happens, he won’t open that website because he thinks it might be harmful. With SSL, your potential lead won’t get a message like this.
Unlimited storage space and bandwidth
Bandwidth is the number of people who can visit your website every month. Many web builders put a limit on this, like 25,000 visits per month as the most.
Storage means how much information you can store on the web builder platform’s servers or storage devices. Most platforms give you between 1GB and 200GB of space to store things.
When you reach that limit, you can’t add any more videos, photos, or product pages. You have to pay more if you want more space.
You don’t have to worry about these things if you use Squarespace. Even with the personal plan, you can visit as many sites as you want and store as much as you want.
SEO Features for Getting a Site Seen
SEO is very important if you want search engines to be able to find your website. With Squarespace, you can improve how search engines find your website by adding meta-titles, meta-tags, and H1 tags. On each product page, you can also do this.
There are templates for all kinds of websites, from blogs to portfolios.
You can choose from dozens of free and paid templates with Squarespace. The same thing as a template is a theme. This means that you don’t have to start from scratch when making your website. You just need to pick a theme and replace the pictures with your own.
Contributors
Contributors are accounts for staff. In the Personal plan, you can add yourself as one of the two contributors. This person can make changes to the website, post blogs, or answer customer comments on your behalf.
Websites that work well on phones
If a person isn’t on a desktop, your website will be shown in a way that works well on a phone. This is important because it’s hard to use a desktop site on a phone.
If your website is mobile-friendly, it will be easier for people to find their way around, and they will stay longer. The longer someone stays on your page, the higher Google will rank it.
24/7 Customer Service
If you pay to be a member, you can contact customer service at any time. Squarespace does not offer phone support. You can only talk to a customer service rep through chat or email.
How to Measure a Website
This analytical tool lets you see information about your site’s traffic, site paths, where your traffic is coming from, the most popular content on your site, and other basic details.
Squarespace Extensions
This is where apps and plug-ins are sold. Here is where you can find apps from other companies that can help you improve your store. They are either free or cost money. Forms to sign up for emails, banners, discount coupon makers, and a whole lot more are all examples of these.
Business
With the Business plan, you get everything that the Personal plan has to offer. But with the Business plan, you can have as many contributors as you want on your website.
You can also build a store and ask customers for money with this plan.
Email from Google that is business-like
You will also get a G-Suite account with the business plan. This is free for one year only. You have to pay for these extra services if you want to add other people to your G-Suite account.
Integrations and blocks that cost extra
This means apps and plug-ins that can’t be found anywhere else. If you have a website, a reservation app is one example. You can also sell things on Instagram if you use this feature.
CSS and JavaScript allow for full customization.
With this feature, your website won’t look like every other website. If you know how to code, you can add Javascript and CSS codes to your website to make it look better and more personal.
Website analytics on a higher level
This is a huge improvement over basic analytics. With this feature, site visitors can sign up for your mailing list, be invited to RSVP events, and see powerful metrics about sales and conversions. With good statistics, you can run your business better.
$100 in credits for Google AdWords
Because advertising on Google is so expensive, many business owners are afraid to try it out. If you used Squarespace, Google would give you $100 worth of advertising credits. With this, you can get your Google marketing campaign off to a free start.
You can use the system’s free pop-up feature. You can also sign up for emails through these pop-ups. With this, you don’t have to buy an app and pay a separate fee to build your email list.
E-commerce that is fully integrated
With the Business plan, you can set up a full online store. You can add shipping rates, charge taxes, manage your catalog, and even ship orders. This store works perfectly, and you don’t need to buy any other apps to make it work.
Fees for transactions
Under this plan, Squarespace will charge you 3% of the cost of each transaction. This is in addition to the money you have to pay to the company that handles your online payments.
Sell as many items as you want.
Some webstore builders only let you sell up to 25 items. But you don’t have to worry about this with Squarespace. You can put as many as a thousand items on your store if you want to.
Take in money
On your website, you can do more than just take payments. You can also accept donations. This is great if you run a store that doesn’t make money for you.
Basic Business
With the Basic Commerce plan, you get everything you got with the previous plan, but you no longer have to pay a fee for each transaction. This also gives you access to better features like the point-of-sale system (POS) and more powerful tools for analyzing data.
POS
You can use an app on your phone to make sales while you’re out and about, and Squarespace will still process and record those sales in your dashboard.
Accounts for clients
With this feature, your customers can sign up for an account. Because the system already knows who they are, they can sign in and make transactions faster. It also lets you use their email addresses to talk to them, build relationships, and market new products.
Check out your website
The customer will check out Squarespace on the Business Plan. But with the Basic Commerce plan, the customer will stay in your website’s URL, which makes it look more professional.
Analysis of e-commerce
This one has all the same features as the other two, but it can show you more information, like which of your products sell the most and what your conversion rate is.
Tools for selling
This is a tool that lets you put together products that go together. You can use this information to cross-sell and upsell.
Instagram Sales
You can link your products to your Facebook store using this feature. You can also add tags to your products on Instagram, which lets you sell them on both social media sites.
Commerce Got Better
With Advanced Commerce, you get all the benefits of the first three plans, plus the ones below.
Recovering an abandoned cart
You can automatically send emails to customers who put items in their shopping cart but did not finish the purchase. This can help you get more customers or find out why a customer left his cart.
Gift Cards
On your store, you can sell gift cards. People can buy and send these cards to their friends and family. These cards will be used by their loved ones to buy things from your store.
Subscriptions
You can make recurring income by selling plans that people have to pay for every month or every year. This is great if you sell food or digital products that your customers need every month.
Advanced Shipping
With this, you can use apps that show shipping rates in real time. You can use this feature to see how much USPS, FedEx, and UPS charge for shipping. Zip codes can also be used to control your shipping options.
Discounts in advance
You can make coupons and discounts and set them up to work the way you want. You can put limits on how they can be used, or you can make them work only under certain conditions.
Labels that say “Limited Supply”
With this feature, you can use the feeling of urgency to get more people to buy. With this feature, you can put up notices or bars on certain products that show how many are still in stock. This is a good way to sell to people who don’t want to feel like they’re missing out.
Compare monthly and yearly plans
If you choose the monthly plan, you will be charged more each month. On the plan for the year. Squarespace will charge your card once a year, but you can start using the services right away.
If you have the money and want your online business to really work, you need the annual plan.
If you choose the annual payment plan for the Personal package, you can save $48 per year. You can save up to $72 per year with the Advanced Commerce.
Take the monthly plan if you are just testing the waters and aren’t sure if your website will last. If you no longer want your website, you can cancel at any time.
Squarespace’s price compared to other sites
How is Squarespace different from other websites? Let’s look at the prices and what these other platforms have to offer.
So that we can compare like with like, we’ll only look at the most basic plans.
As you can see, not every site builder is the same. Some may let you make a website for free, but you can’t make a store.
You don’t have to pay to use WordPress, but you do have to pay for a webhosting service to get your site up and running. Bluehost and Siteground are the two most popular places to host a website. The monthly cost for these two is between $4 and $6.
As you can see, Shopify, Ecwid, and BigCommerce are the three platforms with the most basic plans where you can build a store and a website. Ecwid is free, but the service you get is that you can only set up your store by integrating it with social media.
Here, you can find out more about Ecwid, and here, you can find out more about BigCommerce.
Squarespace costs $16 a month, but you can’t build a store with it. To build an ecommerce store, you need to get the Business plan. This is less expensive than Shopify, but it doesn’t have all the features that Shopify does.
Summary
Squarespace Extensions, a market where you can buy apps and use them on your website, was just opened by the company.
If you don’t have a lot of money, Squarespace is a great alternative to Shopify and other platforms. It costs $3 less than Shopify, and if you pay for it once a year, you can save even more.
Squarespace is also great if you want to charge customers for membership and host webinars. You can’t do these things with Shopify or many other e-commerce platforms.
