How to Set Up a Squarespace Shop From Scratch
It's shop day. We're building a Squarespace store that actually sells — products, variants, payments, shipping, and taxes, all done. By the end of this, you'll have a real shop you could send a friend to buy from.
This one's a proper click-along tutorial, so it's genuinely easier to watch than to read — but I've pulled out the key steps below so you know exactly what's coming and can jump to the bit you need.
This is very much a "watch me do it" video — press play below.
Add your shop and list your first product
Head to Pages, add a Store page, and pop it into your header navigation. Squarespace gives you a few layout options to start from — you're not married to whichever one you pick, you can change it later. From there, click the plus button to add a product.
You can genuinely sell almost anything through Squarespace now — physical products, services, group events, consulting packages, gift cards, downloadable files, custom merch, even appointments. In the video, I walk through listing a physical product (an heirloom gold memory cup, since we're keeping it simple), including the bit most people skip: the additional info section. Don't just leave a one-line description — that's not enough to actually sell someone on a product. Add FAQs, materials, dimensions, images, even video if you've got an unboxing clip or an influencer mention worth showing off.
From there we cover images, pricing (plus how to set up a sale price), stock levels, and variants — size, colour, material, or a custom option of your choosing, and yes, you can stack more than one variant type on a single product. If you're selling something people would want on a recurring basis, like coffee beans, there's also a subscription option worth knowing about.
Get paid, shipped, and set up properly
This is the part most people gloss over, and it's the part that actually determines whether your store can take money. You'll need a payment processor — I use and recommend Stripe over PayPal, and I explain why in the video. Squarespace will walk you through connecting or creating a Stripe account, which is a separate company from Squarespace itself.
Then there's shipping: flat rate, weight-based, Squarespace's built-in Easy Ship, local delivery if you're a local-only business, or store pickup. And discounts — percentage off, amount off, buy-x-get-y, or free shipping past a certain spend, either as a code or applied automatically at checkout.
Design the shop page so it actually converts
Once your product's live, the overview page — the one showing all your products in a grid — has its own set of design decisions: number of columns, thumbnail aspect ratio, whether to show price on the overview page versus the product page, and how categories and tags appear down the side once you've assigned them.
If you want the deeper walkthrough on designing sections generally — backgrounds, layouts, styles, all of it — I've got a full step-by-step Squarespace tutorial that covers exactly that.
Once it's live, watch this next for 51 quick Squarespace wins — layout tweaks, button and call-to-action fixes, and a lot more that's worth running through once your store is up.
Your store's built — now it's just about testing the checkout, refining the design, and watching what actually sells.
- Squarespace basics: how to set up your e-commerce online shop
- Squarespace Ecommerce tutorial: customizing your online shop
- Shopify vs Squarespace for an online e-commerce shop
- 13 Squarespace settings you must fix before you launch your new site
- $1 million from selling Squarespace templates — Erica shows you how it's done
