If that sounds unbelievable, it’s not. My colleague is an aesthetician and massage therapist in Fishers, Indiana. A few months ago, I was going to build her a site but couldn’t because of client work that took priority. Fast-forward to the pandemic lockdowns, and a lot of that work went by the wayside while my clients paused initiatives or changed priorities to deal with revenue losses.
If I were to build a site in WordPress, I probably would have spent a week or two integrating different plugins and payment gateways and looking for a scheduling solution. Because the owner isn’t enthusiastic about technology, it probably would have been difficult for her to manage. So, I decided to take Squarespace for a spin.
Squarespace
Squarespace empowers businesses of all sizes to build a stunning online presence with its robust CMS, email marketing, and e-commerce platform. More than just a website builder, it’s an all-in-one platform with integrated tools for everything from showcasing your brand to selling products and services. With award-winning designs, powerful marketing features, and built-in analytics, Squarespace provides the tools you need to thrive in the digital world.
Squarespace offers a particularly compelling solution for spas looking to elevate their brand and streamline operations. Imagine a website that beautifully presents your services and allows clients to book appointments seamlessly online, purchase gift certificates, and even shop for their favorite skincare products. With Squarespace, this vision becomes a reality. Integrate with leading POS systems to manage inventory and sales, accept secure online payments, and even offer memberships within a user-friendly platform.
I started building the site at about 8:00 a.m. and had so much fun that I worked until 4:00 a.m. the following morning when it was completed.
Since her spa is closed due to the pandemic, she wanted to get the site up and add the capability for folks to buy gift cards—even throwing in a discount if the gift card was for first responders or healthcare workers. I was able to accomplish it all.
In less than 24 hours, I built out everything without a single line of code:
- A fully responsive, beautiful website
- An edit-in-place website editor
- An announcement bar across the top of the site
- Ecommerce for product sales
- Gift card sales
- Appointment scheduling with email and text message reminders
- Customer accounts
- Calendar integration between appointment scheduling and Google Workspace.
- Email newsletter opt-in and creation
- Discount code generation
- Payment gateway integration with Square for POS sales in her spa
- Payment gateway integration online with PayPal for online sales
- A blog for the owner to share news and updates on
Squarespace’s user interface has a learning curve, but their online help and tutorials provide all the necessary information. Getting it all working wasn’t seamless, but it was close. For example, Appointment Scheduling and E-commerce are two sections of the site that each require their own payment gateway integration.
And Squarespace has some pretty good package structures. Almost everything I needed to get everything working was an upgrade to a new package. I’m not complaining but be prepared to hit the upgrade button a few times as you figure out the features you need to get everything. Building out an entire site in a day or two for far less than $1,000 a year with all these features is pretty amazing!
Squarespace Scheduling
The Squarespace Scheduling upgrade has everything you need to operate your business that requires appointments. It’s fully self-service for your clients with a ton of features:
- Calendar Coordination: Automatically update the calendars you already use, such as Google, Outlook, iCloud, or Office 365.
- Streamlined Payments: Integrate with a payment processor to easily charge clients before or after appointments.
- Video Conferencing: No matter where your clients are, speak face-to-face with GoToMeeting and Zoom integrations.
- Customized Communication: Automatically send branded and customized confirmations, reminders, and follow-ups. Style everything to match the existing look and feel of your business.
- Subscriptions, Gift Cards, and Packages: Upsell your clients by adding more ways to book. (Available on select plans.)
- Custom Intake Forms: Learn about new clients or familiarize yourself with returning clients with custom intake forms.
Squarespace Commerce
Building an online store to sell digital or physically shipped products is easy with Squarespace. They even have add-ons for restaurant delivery, which could come in handy during this lockdown. E-commerce features include:
- Checkout Customization – add customer surveys or the option to share a gifting message.
- Content integration: Each product you sell is placed in a catalog, making it easy to reuse it in blog posts and email campaigns.
- Gateway Integration – Take payments via industry leading integrations with Stripe and PayPal.
- Gift cards – Gift cards are an easy way for customers to share your products with their family and friends.
- Inventory: Manage your inventory with an easy-to-use interface and quick views of your variants and stock levels. You can even set alerts.
- Reviews: Options range from simple HTML review boxes to directly embedding customers’ reviews from Facebook.
- Scheduling: Schedule products to appear on a specified date to get ahead of sales, promotions, and new product lines.
- Shipping: Get real-time shipping estimates for US customers during checkout with powerful shipping tools and integrations
- Shop: Merchandise, organize, and manage an unlimited number of products with tags, categories, and our drag-and-drop sorting tool.
- Social Integration: Easily share your products to Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, and tag products in your Instagram posts.
- Subscriptions: Sell weekly or monthly subscriptions to your products to Generate recurring revenue and build customer loyalty.
Squarespace Email Marketing
Integrated email marketing on Squarespace is so nice… no clunky integrations at all. Features include:
- Automation: With automated emails, welcome subscribers to your mailing list, offer them a new member discount, and more. Stay top-of-mind and build relationships with your audience without ever pressing send.
- Intuitive Contact List Management: Import email lists, intelligently build them from an email field on your site, or create a brand new list for a campaign.
- Personalization: Include your subscriber’s name in your campaign’s subject line or body to add a personal touch to every campaign you send.
Squarespace Mobile Editing Apps
Squarespace also has excellent mobile editing applications for Apple and Android, enabling business owners to edit their sites from their phones.
Every web platform has strengths and weaknesses. Of course, a custom-development platform can provide infinite flexibility compared to a platform like Squarespace. However, the benefits of a robust all-in-one platform like this outweigh the limitations by a mile, and the cost is beyond reasonable.
Squarespace POS
The only issue I ran into upon building the site was that the owner sometimes has people arrive and wish to pay in person rather than online. Unfortunately, Squarespace POS is great for any e-commerce shop item, but the appointment types don’t show up on the app to charge them in person.
Also, while Square is integrated as the payment processor, there’s no means to synchronize the appointment types within Square. There’s not even a means to export the information easily for importing into Square. As a result, I had to hand-enter all of the appointment types and add-ons in the owner’s Square account. I hope that the necessary feature is integrated soon!
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