Squarespace Ecommerce Settings
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The items with an * must be completed before you can sell online
Accepting payments*
Before you can accept payments through your site you will need to connect PayPal and/or Stripe. We recommend connecting both to give customers as many payment options as possible but you can just connect one if you prefer.
Go to Commerce > Payments > Connect Stripe > Then Connect PayPal
A popup will open asking you signup/login and authorise. Sometimes it will push you to sign up, the login/already have an account link can be hard to see but it is there.
Setting up shipping*
Shipping can be flat rate or based on weight. You can create different rules for different countries but you can’t apply different rules for different products. So if you sell gift cards and you sell pottery, you won’t be able to create one rule for the cards and another for the pottery (see weight based shipping for a workaround). If you would like to create rules specifically for Europe, you will need to add each country in Europe manually to that rule.
Flat rate shipping rules - you can charge per order and/or add a fee per extra item in that order.
Weight dependent shipping rules - products are assigned weights and those weights are used to calculate shipping based on the rules you create. You can switch between metric or imperial in the settings.
If you sell a product which is light in weight but costly to ship, you can assign a false heavy weight to the product (the product weight is used to calculate shipping only and will not show to the user on the product page or in the checkout).
Customer notifications
A series of automated emails go out to customers when orders are confirmed, fulfilled and refunded. In addition, if you have customer accounts, abandoned cart recovery or waitlists enabled there are emails for those too. The default emails that come with Squarespace are usually fine but you may want to customise them to your business. When editing the auto emails, be careful not to edit any of the code around the text. Here’s how to find the auto emails:
In the side menu, go to Commerce > Customer Notifications > Order Emails > Select an option and edit the content in the message field.
If you have customer accounts, abandoned cart recovery or waitlists you can edit those too.
Testing the shop
Once you have connected Stripe, you can put the shop in test mode and do a test purchase without using your real card details. First, go to Commerce > Payments > Test Mode > Enable Test Mode. You can then purchase a product through your store as if you were a real customer. You will need to fill out all of the fields in the checkout process except for the card details which will be automatically populated with fake details. You won’t need to refund the order afterwards as you haven’t spent any money.
Remember to disable test mode before launching your store to real customers!