Live Q&A - Ask a Squarespace Product Manager: Optimizing your store, Feb. 6th at 12PM EST

Hi everyone, 

The Customer Operations Community team is hosting a 45 min Online Stores Q&A on Tuesday, February 6th 2024 at 12PM EST. During this session, Beau Barnett, Senior Product Manager, and Drew Rapp, Group Product Marketing Manager, will reply live to any questions you have about getting ready to make your first sale. This is a unique opportunity to connect with two of our Online Stores Experts and get insight on launching your online store. If you are new to Squarespace Commerce or just getting started, then this Q&A session is for you! Save your spot now by signing up on the Ask a Squarespace Product Manager: Optimizing your store registration page.

Here are some examples of question topics we’ll address: 

• Store page and product details page setup 
• Add to cart buttons 
• Checkout setup
• Pickup and shipping/fulfillment
• Mobile devices optimization 
• Conversion rate improvement tips 
• Improving AOV (Average Order Value)
• Return policy 

To make the most out of this session, we highly recommend that you watch our Getting started with Squarespace Commerce webinar ahead of time.

You’ll get to submit your questions throughout the session, and we’ll do our best to answer live as many questions as we can.

To submit questions in advance, please share them with us in the comments.

Can I use services and products for a nonprofit organizations store? I have a few nonprofit clients who want to sell physical items such as swag, services such as event tickets, and have donations as products to make it easier to funnel and track which products are being donated towards. The donation portal is (visibly) tiny, and severely lacking features. 

Thank you

@Susana_SQSP looking forward to this! I'd love to hear more about how we can cross-sell and upsell within the platform.

Obviously, a huge part of having an online store is to have your customer find navigate your home page and find products easily.😭😭😭 I'm gutted to find to find out  that the Search Bar is virtually usesless and Squarespace has known for years and still has not resolved it. As soon as I started looking for solutions, starting with the Squarespace forums, I have only come to find out that everyone is having the same issue. Truly, a bummer. Hoping you can give some insight  to this issue.

How do you add drop down menus for products?  For example If I want a tab that says "bbq sauce" then under that tap I want a listed row of the different flavor bbq sauces.

I have two types of products: 1. register for courses, and 2. download pdfs & videos. 

For the courses, people have to provide much more information to register but for the downloads, all I need is name and email. Yet the checkout defaults to the detailed registration form. How can I change this?

I don’t have the option to duplicate a store. How can I duplicate a current store, so I don’t have to re-enter all the variations of print sizes and prices for my photographs. I’d like to have different stores in a drop-down menu showing the different types of fine art photography I offer, so shoppers can choose photographs by category/type, like macro, landscape, etc. 

    1.    Automated Email Notifications:
    •    “Can you guide me on where to find a log or list of automated email notifications sent from my Squarespace store?”
    •    “Is there a way to track communication with each customer through these automated systems?”
    2.    Product Organization and Display:
    •    “With a large inventory like mine, what’s the best approach to display products without overwhelming customers?”
    •    “Would categorizing products by seasons (like winter, summer, spring, fall) be effective for a greeting card store, or should I adopt a different strategy?”
    •    “How can I balance between showcasing new items each season and keeping bestsellers that are popular year-round?”
    •    “What are your suggestions for highlighting items that are typically seasonal but also have out-of-season appeal?”

I have a public-facing storefront for my products, and I'd like to create a second wholesale storefront that's only accessible to certain (wholesale) customers after they enter their login credentials (username and password). Which Squarespace tools/functionalities would be best for this?

I set up a webpage on Squarespace with text and videos embedded from YouTube. The page looks fine on the laptop on various browsers, but when I go to my iPhone and view the page in Safari the videos are outsized and one has to scroll to the right to get a full view. Is there a way this can be corrected?

Looking forward to it! I would love to cover a couple of things 

1. Cross listing - specifically with etsy. Is there a way to cross list with etsy? If not, will there be in the future? 

2. I run a creative studio and often have clients hire me for custom work (branding projects, custom wedding packages, custom illustrations, etc.). I have not quite figured out the most streamline way to have this on my website and would love some thoughts on this. 

Thanks!

How can purchaser select/buy multiple products that includes further selecting unique customizations for each product? 

Example -

1) they go to checkout,

2) they select 2 quantity (2 products)

3) they can select only 1 single color for this in the drop down, not 2 different colors in that step. (They're not going to choose the same color for both is the issue).

Thank you for your help!

Kristin - InMotion Albums

Love to attend and learn!

I would like to learn how to create specific lists for my e-mail campaigns for different products that have been purchased. For example, if someone purchases product A, I would like to create a specific e-mail campaign for product A purchasers that is different from product B purchasers.

I'm interested in learning more about product photos and the best way to take/edit pictures. No matter what I try, the bottom part of my picture gets cut off in the thumbnail. Curious to know if this is normal or not. 

Pagination! 🙏

I sell many products and it would be great to break up the display into multiple pages vs. one loooooong scroll. Seems like a very simple ask.

Please and thank you very much!

Dina

Hello...

I would like to know if I can add a 'link' to another payment system other than those provided/associated with Squarespace.

The reason being is that I live in a jurisdiction that only Paypal will service and it puts a lot of my potential customers off, as they don't like/trust Paypal. I'm losing a lot of potential business because of this, so may have to consider leaving Squarespace....which I do not want to do, as I love your products! 

Here's hoping you can point me in the right direction 🙂 

I have been using Squarespace for about 6 months, with some good sales, but not too many.  I have three questions, with attached screen shots numbered to match the questions.

1. I'd like to improve my Home page to get people interested in clicking through.  Any suggestions?

2. I'd like to know how to organize my drawings and paintings better so people don't give up scrolling through to get to something they really like.  There are a lot of items ATM, over 100, and it takes a long time to scroll, especially on a phone.

3. How do I allow people to get a large image for closer inspection when they click, or maybe scroll-over to magnify the image?

Thank you so much!!

Hello,

I have a travel tour company and I want customers to see a new destination on the Products page but labeled as "Coming Soon" and so there is no ability to book the tour yet until we officially launch. How can I put this label on the product? Right now, I have a quantity of 0 available and the label says "Sold Out" which isn't accurate. 

Hello,

I've had a Squarespace site for several years now (going on 5+ years). My site is a product-based ecommerce site with over 100 products available for purchase. 

Some of the issues I would like to have addressed during the webinar:

1.  I'm getting a large amount of Spam messages coming from my Newsletter form block/email sign up pages (around 20+ a day).  How can I minimize this?  Is there a way to add additional security controls to my newsletter sign up?  I'm grateful that Squarespace is blocking the Spam accounts (thank you!), but I would like to minimize the problem from the beginning. 

2.  Because I have a large product inventory on my website, it would be really helpful to be able to add a Search feature for shoppers.  I have more customers asking for this feature, and I know other ecommerce sites like Shopify offer this option.  Most platforms offer a way to search for ease of shopping and it seems strange that Squarespace doesn't have this feature, or if it does, I'm not certain how to add it to my site.

3.  I would also like to see better templates available for product-based sites.  It seems the options are limited for product-based sellers.  The template I'm using now has worked well, but I would like to freshen up my website's look.  Also...the fonts and font colors are a bit of a challenge to change on some pages. Are updates coming soon on this front?  

4. When a quantity becomes zero on a specific product, it defaults to "sold out".  This is not necessarily accurate for all of my products.  Is there a way we can choose to show something different than "sold out".

Thank you!  

I'd like to know where in the Styles menu I can find the option to change the font size of the "You might also like" verbiage on my product pages. I've tried all that seemed to be correct but haven't been able to find the right option.

Additionally, I'm having trouble with the ratio (for lack of a better word) of product picture vs Add to Cart button and the Size dropdown box. If I increase the gallery width enough to make the Cart and Size boxes the way I want them, it makes my product picture WAY too big, but if I reduce the gallery width to make the picture smaller, it makes the buttons too big.

I've attached a picture that shows examples for each question. Any advice on how to fix these 2 issues would be greatly appreciated! Thank you

What is the best way to sell products in both USD and GBP?

How do I create a bundle of digital downloads? (Ideally so if I update a product, the same product in the bundle is also upgraded)

What is the best way to encourage customers to upgrade from a single product to a bundle?

Hi,

I am really looking forward to this webinar!

I have a selection of different stationery products and would love to automate customer response emails after a purchase is completed. Is it possible to create automated response emails with attachments linked to  corresponding products in the Online Shop?

E.g: A customer buys an invitation set from our Souvenir Design and I need to send them a questionnaire(PDF) and Styleguide(PDF), specifically for this product - I would like to automate this.

Plus I have heard from a customer that she wasn't able to check out using Safari but had to use Chrome or Firefox instead - is there any information about this or was this an isolated incident?

Thanks,

Ana

I had a site hosted with GoDaddy and went through the transfer process last year to move to Square Space. I am very happy with the Square space experience and service but I have had no traction in sales or even being discovered. i've read lots of your articles including SEO etc but am I messing something that I have done in error?  Would really appreciate some insight on just being found....  My website is https://www.purinto.co.uk 

Looking forward to joining the event.

Is there a way to optimize the Search function on the products page?  Sometimes it works and other times it does not.