Website Builder Squarespace Launches New Ecommerce Tools for Business Owners

Squarespace, the web publishing platform, just launched a suite of new ecommerce tools for small-business owners.

Features include additional templates designed specifically for ecommerce transactions; a mobile commerce app to allow owners to manage commerce on the go; an abandoned checkout recovery feature, which sends out email reminders to customer who have pending items in their cart; and a real time carrier calculator that provides more accurate shipping estimates.

"Commerce is going to be really big with us, and we want to show we can compete head-to-head with major commerce competitors," said Squarespace's founder and CEO Anthony Casalena, a group that includes Weebly, Wix, Shopify and GoDaddy, all of which offer specialized commerce features for small businesses.

Commerce plans on Squarespace start at $26 a month.

With the new commerce product offerings, Casalena wants to enable small business owners to create sites on Squarespace where commerce is the focus, not an add-on feature. Most importantly this means updating the backend navigation for commerce sites, so that inventory and orders are highlighted over features such as website statistics and pages. When a small-business owner logs in to his or her site," it's not presuming you are building a website – it's presuming you are building a store."

On the other side of the spectrum Squarespace is launching Cover Pages, a low-price plan that allows users to host a single page website starting at $3 a month. There are many use cases – such as a 'coming soon' page for a store or business, an event page or a personal bio – where "paying $8 a month is too much," Casalena said.