7 inspiring examples of Squarespace ecommerce sites

Do you have an amazing product you want to sell online, but don’t want to spend resources on hiring a developer or hours poring over thousands of lines of code? Enter: Squarespace, the website builder of choice for a rapidly increasing number of ecommerce business owners.

With its sleek templates and seamless transaction features, Squarespace makes it easy to create a standout store that enhances the shopping experience and helps grow your business.

Building or improving an ecommerce store can feel daunting, but looking at successful Squarespace examples can clarify what to include—and what to avoid. 

We’ve compiled a list of 7 Squarespace stores to inspire you to design or redesign your own ecommerce store and give you an idea of what you can and can’t do with this website builder.

How to set up an ecommerce store on Squarespace in 7 steps

Setting up an ecommerce website with Squarespace is as simple as that. It’s a perfect choice for small business owners, creators selling handicrafts, and marketers looking for a (truly) code-free site-building experience.

Despite its simplicity, the platform offers a complete set of all the must-have commerce features—from popular payment options to ready-made templates—so you can create a personalized shopping experience for each customer.

Follow our 7-step framework to build a Squarespace store (that converts): 

1. Ensure Squarespace’s payment processors support your country, currency, and payment methods

2. Access Squarespace Commerce—the platform’s premium functionality that lets you manage orders, process payments, and write AI-powered copy and product descriptions

3. Select an ecommerce website template from the Squarespace library

4. Create your first shop page, add products, and tailor the design to match your brand identity

5. Enhance your store with unique content that tells your brand story, educates your customers, and entertains them

6. Customize your store’s shopping experience: consider adding a sticky announcement bar, embedding a newsletter subscription form, and featuring product recommendations so that you can attract and retain your customers’ attention

7. Use Squarespace’s marketing tools to encourage more purchases. For example, you can build abandoned cart workflows to reduce your shopping cart abandonment rate.

7 remarkable examples of Squarespace stores to inspire you

Before you build or update your own Squarespace website, let’s take a look at the most remarkable ecommerce stores on the platform and get some inspiration. In each example, we highlight one element that should find a place on every online store. 

1. AAKS: user-friendly navigation

AAKS is a handbag store that has successfully reflected its commitment to simplicity and minimalism on its Squarespace website.

Here you won’t find a fancy web design—that’s what you may have expected from a list of remarkable ecommerce websites—but a simple layout that doesn’t require extra effort on the user's part to navigate. A disappearing/reappearing header, a very basic but user-friendly menu, large striking photos, and plenty of white space are enough to make this website stand out.

AAKS’s minimalist design prioritizes usability and relies on white space to make its striking product photos stand out even more

How to make your ecommerce website's navigation user-friendly:

• Start small: when you build your first ecommerce website, it’s easy to go overboard. Start with a basic ecommerce template and optimize it as you collect user experience insights

• Collect user insights: connect an experience intelligence platform like Contentsquare (that’s us) to your newly built website. Turn to heatmaps and session recordings (or replays) to see how users move, click, and scroll on your website pages. 

• Optimize your store’s design: use the data you collect to make informed decisions and improve your user interface (UI) and UX design

Room for improvement: AAKS specializes in handcrafted, woven handbags that come at a higher price point than those of larger competitors. To drive sales, a strong and consistent brand narrative is crucial. AAKS could boost engagement by incorporating storytelling into its website content, showcasing customer reviews, and adding local context to product photos—such as highlighting how the handbags are ethically and sustainably crafted in Ghana by women using traditional techniques.

2. Supernatural: animated content 

Carmel Hogan, the founder of the dye-free natural baking ingredients brand Supernatural, is on a mission to make cakes free of harmful additives. The website's colorful and playful content reflects Hogan’s values and helps add lightness to an otherwise serious healthy dietary alternative. Who said healthy options have to look drab and boring?

Supernatural uses impactful animated imagery, including GIFs and memes across different pages to reinforce its messaging and tell a story behind its products. It also integrates social media by importing select reels and photos from the store’s Instagram feed for an added touch of personalization.

Supernatural’s light and colorful design organically integrates the brand’s social media posts into its homepage

Room for improvement: the UI design on the Supernatural website could confuse customers—especially if the company adds more products to its collection. Using visual content and storytelling helps attract the customers’ attention, but (as we mention above) creating user-friendly website navigation is key.

Adding a sticky header and menu is a simple step that helps you create a better UI design and deliver a more delightful shopping experience to your customers.

How to use animated content to increase ecommerce sales: Animated content—be it dynamic banners, scrolling effects, or engaging micro-interactions—is a powerful way to draw users’ attention, boost engagement, and create a memorable browsing experience. Here’s how to get started:

• Define your goals: what do you want to achieve with your animations? Start with a broad objective—like improving user retention, enhancing brand identity, or increasing click-through rates—and then define measurable KPIs to track their performance.

• Choose your animation type: depending on your goals, decide on the style of animations you need. Options could include eye-catching hero animations, subtle hover effects, or storytelling sequences.

• Design and create animations: use tools like Lottie, After Effects, or Squarespace's built-in sitewide animations to create visually appealing and lightweight animations that won't compromise load speeds

• Embed animations on your website: strategically place animations on high-impact areas like your homepage, product pages, or landing pages. Squarespace lets you incorporate animated backgrounds, scrolling effects, and custom code blocks so you can easily integrate animated content into your website.

3. On Sundays: homepage design

The online store by On Sundays is a rare example where a highly customized, bright homepage design meets user-friendly navigation. 

On Sundays’ homepage wastes no time on fluff and instead, after quickly introducing the brand’s organic teas, guides visitors all the way through the sales funnel by directing them to the shop with a simple two-item header. 

The On Sundays homepage tackles the question, “Why buy tea online instead of visiting the nearest store?” with a clean, minimalist design. Furthermore, its neutral-toned layout creates a calming aesthetic that holds users’ attention all the way to the bottom of the page.

On Sundays’ clean homepage design complements its light messaging and product lineup of organic teas 

How to create a long-form homepage that makes visitors stick:

First, map out your customer journey and identify common concerns that prevent potential customers from buying your product(s). Address those concerns with different types of content, like links to guides, lifestyle videos, and social proof. 

A good long-form homepage should include the following sections:

• A catchy headline: use your unique selling proposition (USP) as a tagline on your homepage

• Sub-headline that defines what you sell: while your headline captures your visitors’ attention, you need to make your offer clear with additional context

• Visuals: include a quality hero image or video to showcase your product on the page

• Social proof: feature customer reviews from Google Reviews, social media, or G2 to build brand trust

• Links to educational content and tutorials: if you need to add more context, provide links to relevant resources—so you don’t cover everything on the page

• CTAs: whenever you mention your product, include a call-to-action (CTA) button that prompts visitors to buy. Avoid using more than two CTAs with different messages.

• Frequently asked questions: talk to your customer support team to discover at least three most common requests from prospects and customers. Answer these questions at the bottom of your homepage.

💡 Pro tip: depending on the behaviors your users exhibit on your homepage, the order of these sections may vary—so you need to continue optimizing your page layout until you identify the best hierarchy.

Use digital experience analytics to improve your homepage based on real user behavior data. Contentsquare Heatmaps, a data visualization tool that displays how users interact with different parts of your page, shows you which elements of your homepage attract users’ attention and which don’t. 

Maybe your CTA is getting overlooked, or users aren’t watching your video. Knowing this helps you take action, so you can make your CTA more prominent and move the video to another page.

Contentsquare’s Heatmaps tool shows you how far down your pages users scroll, so you can move important content to make it more visible

4. Soilboy: product filtering

Soliboy is an online store for plants, ceramic goods, and planting essentials that uses filtering to improve product findability. Visitors can filter search results by availability, collection, plant type, size, and even the type of light a plant requires—the latter helps customers who aren’t sure what kind of plant they're looking for find exactly what they need. 

Product filters ensure users more easily navigate your online store and reduce bounce rates—shoppers are less likely to bounce if they find what they’re searching for, fast.

Soilboy uses product filters for easier navigation

How to create a smooth shopping experience with product filtering:

To create helpful filters for customers on your store, follow these steps:

• Brainstorm filter ideas: think about the characteristics that define and distinguish your products

• Think like your customers: figure out which product features are most important to your audience—do they really need that ‘color’ filter, or can you come up with an idea that better defines your products? Soilboy uses the ‘light’ filter to help customers choose a plant that’s just right for their space. Similar to Soilboy, you can also provide a more personalized customer experience if you create filters that reflect what your audience really cares about.

• Do the research: get ideas for customer-centered filters by looking at their search queries. What words do customers use to find your product or relevant information about it? You can use an SEO tool for this task or just type the relevant query in search engines and see related queries at the bottom of the results page. 

5. Minna: storytelling

Sparkling tea seller Minna uses the power of storytelling to drive users to checkout. Instead of classic product descriptions, there’s a story about each tea can—a story that appeals to customers’ childhood memories and creates a positive brand perception. 

The brand also advocates for inclusion by donating 1% of its sales to relevant nonprofits and emphasizes its mission in two places: a sticky bar and a dedicated homepage section.

“What do inclusion and brewed tea have in common?” you may wonder. The thing is, today’s customers don’t buy products anymore. They buy stories. Once they become emotionally invested in your brand, they're much more likely to purchase from you—and keep purchasing.

Minna doesn’t sell its products from the Squarespace website—the company sells on Amazon. By doing so, the company gets the best of both worlds— the Amazon listing lets them get traction and sell to Amazon buyers, and the bright Squarespace website is a perfect asset for promotional campaigns on social media and other channels.

Minna applies storytelling in product descriptions to connect with customers and create a positive brand image

How to use storytelling to create high-converting website copy:

There’s no golden rule to writing a good story. But here are a few steps to follow to help you find and create your own narrative:

• Write down your brand mission, values, and product vision: the most powerful stories are those that tie your products to your values. Perhaps one of your values is that you care about the environment, so you’ll highlight that your product is made only from sustainable materials.

• Turn to customer feedback: you’ll find many real-life stories in your customers’ words on social media and Amazon reviews that you can use to create a compelling product story

• Present all your findings to a copywriter: that's right, it’s best to work with an experienced writer to create a story that sells

💡 Pro tip: for Amazon sellers, building a so-called ‘landing website’ is the first step to creating an independent online shop. 

If you aren’t sure whether you can promote your store without Amazon’s marketplace, start by building a Squarespace site that redirects customers to Amazon. Use your website in promotional campaigns and optimize it for SEO to drive more traffic to your Amazon store.

6. ARTIPS: social proof

ARTIPS is a premium gel nail seller. If Minna sells stories, ARTIPS sells lifestyles. That’s why you can find photos from customers and influencers at the bottom of the homepage.

For ARTIPS, user-generated visual content is more than social proof—it’s a way to generate demand. By publishing Instagram content on their website, ARTIPS shows how their nail designs look in real life, sparking interest in their target audience.

ARTIPS features customers’ photos on the website to establish trust and generate demand for its products

How to use social proof to create demand for your products:

There are different types of social proof: customer photos, testimonials, influencers’ endorsements, and social media proof. Follow these steps to create demand for your products through social proof:

• Encourage user-generated content (UGC): run branded challenges and contests that offer rewards, like a free sample, to encourage your customers to share photos using your products on social media. Also, use a branded hashtag, just as ARTIPS did.

• Feature social proof on your website: place relevant reviews and UGC below each product card and on your homepage

• Ask for customer feedback: embed a feedback widget on your site, and launch a post-purchase survey to your customers once they receive their orders 

💡 Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s Surveys tool to create a post-purchase survey and ask your customers about their experience shopping on your website. See how they would score their purchase satisfaction level, then follow it up with an open-ended question to find out the reason behind the score.

Create a post-purchase survey with Contentsquare in seconds

7. Unwrp: product recommendations

Unwrp’s beautiful website makes it clear—here you can buy everything for gift wrapping. 

The site has many features worth your attention—from storytelling to social proof—but we want to draw your attention to the checkout page. 

Unwrp locates the ‘Customer also bought’ section on their checkout page—this is a perfect strategy to increase your average order value and revenue.

By placing product recommendations at checkout, ecommerce businesses remind customers of the products they may have missed and increase cross-sells. And if you figure out the right complementary offers, you can also make the customer feel more satisfied with their purchase.

Unwrap uses a ‘Customers also bought’ section to cross-sell relevant products and increase the average order value

Room for improvement: this Squarespace store has every must-have feature except clear product descriptions. For example, you won’t find the size of wrapping paper in product cards—a tiny detail that may seriously affect customer experiences. As you work on your ecommerce website layout and content, be sure to include product characteristics alongside exciting stories and appealing visuals.

How to use product recommendations to increase average order value:

• Start by suggesting best-sellers or seasonal products at checkout: use one of Squarespace’s product recommendation display options—like random, recently added, or highest quantity. It’s an effective cross-selling technique when you don’t have much customer data yet.

• Create personalized recommendations: although Squarespace doesn’t offer customized product recommendations, you can connect a CRM like Mailchimp to your store to enable the feature. The platform uses purchase data and other behavioral signals to offer personalized product recommendations to each customer.

• Collect user experience insights: analyze your customers’ shopping history and uncover repeating patterns in buying behaviors to discover the most common choices of different buyer personas.

💡 Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool to uncover the paths users are taking on your store and get an idea of the combinations of products people are searching for.

Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool shows you exactly how users navigate your site, so you can see which products they search for

Build your own Squarespace store

You can build your own Squarespace store without any technical or design experience. As you work on your store design and content, keep these principles and elements in mind:

• User-friendly navigation

• Video content

• Homepage design

• Product filtering

• Storytelling

• Social proof

• Product recommendations

Remember: start small and watch how your customers respond to your changes with user and digital experience insights, so you can see what works (and what doesn’t) and optimize your Squarespace website for maximum conversions.

FAQs about building a Squarespace store