How to Sell Digital Products on Squarespace
Are you thinking about how to sell digital products on Squarespace? If so, you have come to the right article my friend.
Squarespace is one of the best website-building platforms that makes it very simple for you to sell any type of product whether it’s a digital or physical type of product.
Here is a summary of the steps you need to take to sell digital products on Squarespace:
Create a Squarespace account.
Pick your Squarespace template.
Add your online store page.
Add your digital products.
Use Canva to create product images and thumbnails.
Add product tags and categories.
Save and publish your digital product.
Add your payment gateway.
Make some design customizations.
The good thing about Squarespace is that you can set up your own digital products store with just a few clicks and in a very simple way. The platform comes with all the important e-commerce features that you will need.
Squarespace is very user-friendly if you want to build a professional online store. You just need to follow some steps that I will walk you through.
So in this article, I will give a full step-by-step guide to help you sell digital products on Squarespace. Let’s get started now.
What Type of Digital Downloads You Can Sell on Squarespace
On Squarespace, you can sell any type of digital download that you want. There are no limitations on the type of digital product that you can sell on your Squarespace website.
Just don’t break any rules and don’t scam your customers. If you follow the platform’s rules, you will be good to go.
By using the Squarespace e-commerce features, you can sell ebooks, templates, audio files, printables, online courses, and much more. In addition to that, Squarespace makes it very easy to build your online store and upload all your digital products to it.
Another good thing to keep in mind is that Squarespace has a lot of free templates that you can start with to save time. As a result, this will help you build your online store quickly.
Squarespace template examples for an online store.
Now with the new fluid engine feature on Squarespace, you can also fully customize your website template with drag-and-drop tools. As a result, your website will look very unique so that you can stand out from the crowd.
How to Sell Digital Products on Squarespace
As I said, selling digital products or what we call digital downloads is not a hard process. Especially when you use the Squarespace platform because it’s very user-friendly to the point that even my grandmother can create a Squarespace website.
Here are the steps that you need to follow to sell digital products on Squarespace:
1. Create a Squarespace Account
If you haven’t already created your own Squarespace account, then you need to do so right now. To use Squarespace, you have to create your account. That’s the first step you need to take if you want to start your digital products shop.
Creating a Squarespace account is very simple and easy. Just go to the Squarespace home page, then use your own Gmail to start your account.
By the way, Squarespace gives you a 14-day free trial to try the platform and see if you like it. No credit card is required when you start your account.
Once your account is set up, Squarespace will ask you some questions about the type of website that you want to build. You can simply skip that part if you want, all you have to do is to click the skip button.
You don’t have to answer all the Squarespace questions, just skip that, and let’s go to the next step.
2. Pick Your Squarespace Template
After creating your Squarespace account, you will need to pick a template that you can start with to save time.
There are a lot of free Squarespace templates that you can use. But you need to pick the one that is close to the type of website that you want to build.
Also keep in mind that no matter what template you choose, you can fully customize it as you want. You can add your pages, edit all the styles, customize the look of your website, and add your content.
You can also start with a blank template if you want to start building all your website pages from scratch.
I recommend starting with the Hester Squarespace template because it has a simple design and you can easily customize everything on it. But the choice is yours, you can start with any template you want because all Squarespace templates are flexible for every use case.
3. Add Your Online Store Page
After picking your template, make sure you remove all the unnecessary pages and content on that template. Only let the pages that you need.
Also, make sure to add your own logo and put all the required information for your website.
Once you do that, go to the Pages section on your Squarespace account, then click on the plus icon to add a new page for your website.
After clicking the plus icon, go to the store tab and click it. Once you do that, a popup will show up telling you to choose how your shop page will look like.
Once you choose your store page design, you can write a name for your online store. After that, you will have an online store on the pages section with sample products on it.
4. Add Your Digital Products
The next step before we add our digital product is to go to the pages section again, click on your online store page that we just created, then select all the sample products and remove them. That’s because we need to add our own digital products there instead of having sample products.
So in order to add our first digital product to the store that we have created, we just have to access the store page from the pages tab, then click the button add product.
Once you do that, a new popup will show up telling you to choose the type of product that you want to sell as you can see in the picture below.
Since you want to sell digital products, you will have to click the tab Digital download. After that, you will be asked to add all your digital product details and information. That includes your product name, description, images, product file, price, and more.
So you just have to go through each step and then put in the required details. The process is very simple because Squarespace is very user-friendly.
Also, don’t forget to scroll down to the marketing section and then add the product URL, the SEO title, and the SEO description to help your product appear in search results.
Just click the button edit in the marketing section of your product, then add all the SEO details.
5. Use Canva to Create Product Images and Thumbnails
I really recommend using Canva if you want to easily create good-looking images and eye-catching thumbnails for your digital products. It’s a great design tool that allows you to design anything quickly without any graphic design experience.
Canva gives you a 30-day free trial to try the tool and see if you like it. The great thing about this popular design tool is that it has a lot of templates that you can use to make your life easier. With Canva, you don’t have to worry about hiring a graphic designer anymore.
Keep in mind that if you’re selling an ebook or any type of design template as a digital product, Canva can create all of that for you.
But the choice is yours if you want to use another tool to create your designs. What’s important is that you create beautiful product images that will help you increase your store’s conversion rates.
6. Add Product Tags and Categories
After creating and uploading your product files and images, you also need to add some tags and categories if you want to categorize all your digital products. That’s useful if you have a lot of products and you want customers to easily find items in your store.
But if you only have one or two digital products to sell, you don’t really need tags and categories, so you can skip this part.
In order to add tags and categories for your products, all you have to do is to scroll to the organization section while editing your product details.
Once you add all of that, just scroll down and see if there is any missing information that you forgot to add. Make sure that you proofread everything and check if you have uploaded the right product files.
7. Save and Publish Your Digital Product
After filling in all the required information about your digital product, it’s time to save and publish it for the public.
You can save the product and then publish it later or you can choose to directly publish it in the store.
If you only save the product without hitting the publish button, it would be hidden in your store. So in order to make the product available for everyone to buy, you need to go again to the pages tabs in your Squarespace account and then access the store page.
Just click that page and find your product, hover over it then click the three dots to edit your product in order to have access to the publish button. Just hover over the save button if you want the publish button to show up.
Once you do hit publish, the product will be available for your customers to buy at any time.
If you want a full video that guides you step by step to learn how to sell digital products on Squarespace, just check out the Youtube video below by Dragonfly Ave where she explained everything to you.
A Youtube video to help you easily learn how to sell digital downloads on Squarespace.
That was a full explanation of how to create an online store in Squarespace to sell your digital downloads. If you’re still unsure about using Squarespace for your store, I recommend that you start the 14-day free trial to see if you like the platform. No credit card is required.
If you like Squarespace, you can use my affiliate code MEHDI10 for 10% off and a free domain name for the first year.
So now after hitting publish, you can access the commerce tab in your Squarespace account to help you manage everything about your online store. Just go back to the home page of your Squarespace editor then click the commerce tab.
Here are some of the commerce features that you can use in your Squarespace online store:
Tracking all the orders in your store.
Managing your inventory.
Managing your audience and customers.
Adding product discounts and reviews.
Sales channels for your products.
The ability to sync your Squarespace catalog to Google shopping, Instagram and Facebook in order to allow your customers to buy your products from there.
The point-of-sale feature: allows you to sell your products in person.
You can almost manage and run your entire store from the commerce tab. You can add payments, tax settings, customer notifications, and a lot more from there.
8. Add Your Payment Gateway
Now the important step is to add your payment gateway to allow your store to process online payments.
The great thing is that Squarespace allows many payment gateway options including PayPal, Stripe, and Apple Pay.
In order to accept payments in your Squarespace online store, just go to the commerce tab, scroll down, and then click store payments.
As you can see, you can easily connect your payment processor from there to help you accept payments. As a result, you won’t have to create a separate merchant account to collect the store payments.
You can also watch the video below by the Squarespace Help Youtube channel to walk you through the simple process of connecting payment processors in Squarespace.
A video explanation of how to connect a payment processor in the Squarespace 7.1 version.
So now customers can easily go to your store, add any product to the cart, and do the checkout to buy your digital products.
9. Make some Design Customizations
After saving and publishing your online store, it’s time to do some design edits to make your shop looks beautiful and clean.
To do that, just go to the design tab in your Squarespace account then click site styles to edit the colors, fonts, spacing, and image blocks. You can also add some animations if you want.
In addition to that, you can as well go to any page you want and then click the edit button in the top left corner to edit the pages. This will allow you to customize things like text alignment, product gallery images, aspect ratio, padding, width, and a lot more.
Squarespace Digital Product Variants
In Squarespace, you don’t have the option to add multiple variants to your digital product. That means you can only have one item and one price per product or listing.
That’s just something that you need to keep in mind if you’re looking to add a lot of variants to your digital product listing.
For example, if you want to have all the different sizes of a printable in one listing, you can’t really do that in Squarespace. I hope they add that feature in the near future.
However, it’s not really a big deal because most digital products that people sell don’t need that variant feature.
Squarespace Digital Downloads Delivery
When a customer purchases a digital download from your Squarespace shop, the product will be directly sent to the customer's email.
The purchaser receives two emails when buying a product from your store: the order confirmation email and another email that includes a link to download the digital product. All emails are automatically sent immediately after an order is made.
In addition to that, after making a purchase, the customer will also be directed to a page that contains a download link for your digital product.
Squarespace Digital Download Email Expiration
As I said, the customer immediately receives an email with the digital download link after making a purchase. That digital download link that allows the purchaser to download the product will expire 24 hours after the customer purchases the item.
Squarespace digital download email notification.
However, if the purchaser or the customer didn’t download the digital product in 24 hours, you can still send a new link from the Squarespace commerce backend.
That’s why it’s a good idea to tell your customers that the download link will expire after 24 hours even though that’s already written in the order email that they receive. As a result, they will immediately use the download link and your product will be in a safe place.
Is Squarespace Good for Selling Digital Products
Yes, Squarespace is a good website-building platform for selling digital products. It allows you to easily pick a template and create an online store with just a few clicks.
With Squarespace, you can sell digital products on your website as downloads. That makes it easy for your customers to purchase your digital downloads and access them.
In addition to that, Squarespace has a lot of powerful e-commerce features that you can use in your online store. You can track your orders, track customers in a user-friendly dashboard, manage your inventory, and connect to other sales channels(Facebook, Google Shopping, etc).
Another good thing about Squarespace is that it has good SEO features and gives you a lot of marketing tools to help your store reach more customers.
How to Organize Products on Squarespace
Organizing products on Squarespace can feel a little daunting at first. However, with the proper tools and strategies, it can be a breeze.
Squarespace offers a powerful product category navigation system as one of its key features, which enables users to sort their products into distinct categories and subcategories.
To add categories to your products on Squarespace:
Go to the pages tab in the Squarespace editor.
Select your store page.
Then edit any product you want and add a category to it.
After that, just click save and apply your changes.
Once you do that, go to your store page, click the page edit button, and then set up category links on the store page for users to click on. You can watch the YouTube video below by David Alex to understand how to achieve that.
How to organize your products by category on Squarespace.
This functionality makes it easier for visitors to your website to find precisely what they're searching for, allowing them to navigate your site with ease.
Another powerful alternative way to organize your products is by using the Squarespace filter plugin. Having that plugin on your site allows your customers to filter products based on a wide range of criteria, such as price, color, size, and more.
This is very valuable when dealing with large product inventories, making it simpler for customers to locate the items they need.
In addition to using the product category navigation and the filter plugin, it's wise to make use of tags to further categorize your products. Tags are specific keywords or phrases that describe a product, whereas categories are more general groupings under which products can be grouped.
Utilizing both tags and categories ensures that your products are straightforward to find for customers and that your website is well-organized and more user-friendly.
When it comes to organizing products on Squarespace, it's critical to keep your customer's preferences in mind!
By effectively utilizing the product category navigation, filter plugin, and tags, you can create a seamless shopping experience that keeps customers returning to your site.
Squarespace Ecommerce Website Examples
There are a lot of Squarespace ecommerce examples that you can look at to get some design ideas for your online store. This will help you have the inspiration to design a good digital products store on Squarespace.
I have written an article about 21 Squarespace store examples that you can look at to get some inspiration. One example of a Squarespace ecommerce website selling digital products is the Will-Myers website. He sells Squarespace plugins in his online store that he built using Squarespace.
Another example is BigCatCreative which sells website templates on their Squarespace store. The website has a clean and beautiful design that stands out.
Can I Sell on Squarespace for Free?
Squarespace itself is not a completely free platform for selling products. After the trial period, you'll need to choose a subscription plan to continue using Squarespace for your ecommerce business.
Squarespace offers 4 pricing plans, including ones specifically designed for ecommerce. These plans come with different features and capabilities, such as unlimited products, mobile-optimized websites, and integrated tools for managing inventory and orders.
The specific plan you choose will depend on your business needs and the scale of your ecommerce operations.
On the other hand, if you want to offer your products for customers to buy for free, Squarespace allows you to do that. You have the option to provide a physical, downloadable, or service product at no cost by either setting the price to 0.00 or applying a discount.
It's important to note that free products can only be offered for one-time purchases and do not apply to subscription-based transactions.
Make sure to review Squarespace's pricing details on their official website to understand the costs associated with using their platform for selling products.
Conclusion
So that’s it, my friend. These are the steps you need to follow to sell digital products on Squarespace. As you can see above, the process of starting an online store is very simple in the Squarespace 7.1 version.
All you have to do is follow the steps and you will be able to launch your digital downloads shop quickly. Squarespace gives you all the tools you need to sell any type of product on your website.
Thank you so much for reading this long article. I hope that you found it useful and informative.
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