Squarespace Refresh 2023: Product Updates To Support Online Stores

Squarespace’s new built-in payment solution brings Squarespace in line with its counterparts, such as Wix and Shopify, who already provide an alternative to third-party providers.

With Squarespace Payments, business owners can accept and manage transactions from their Squarespace dashboard. The new feature for online stores offers a fast, easy-to-manage, and secure channel for sellers. It also improves the overall checkout experience by offering a variety of payment methods to customers.

Despite the announcement, the feature has yet to be made available but will be rolled out across the US in the coming months. Other territories can expect the feature in 2024.

Squarespace’s Client Invoicing aims to streamline the invoicing process with a customizable workflow. Businesses can collect important client information through intake forms, take payments through branded invoices, and track it all from a single dashboard.

Additional documents that incorporate business assets and branding, such as proposals and price quotes, are currently labeled as “Coming soon”.

For many online businesses, it’s important to make their presence known across social media platforms. Squarespace has revamped its Bio Sites feature with a new tier: Bio Sites Pro.

Bio Sites Pro offers premium features for one-page link-in-bio sites, such as advanced customization tools and monetization functionality. Users can easily tweak and edit Bio Sites from any web browser using the new web editor option.

While Squarespace already offers several AI tools, such as Squarespace Blueprint (which now includes AI) and AI-generated text, the builder also revealed its AI aspirations for 2024. Let’s take a quick look at what we can (hopefully) expect next year:

• Recommended pre-generated pages, layouts, and sections, based on existing website content and brand identity
• AI image support – AI could automatically create alt text when adding images, generate new images from a prompt or existing image, propose image styling recommendations, and edit your images
• Change your copy’s tone using AI
• AI assistant in the website editor – for example, request an SEO check on your website and action any recommended changes using the AI assistant
• “At Your Service” AI feature – for example, request Squarespace’s support on a book launch and receive new page ideas, email marketing templates, and social media posts to support your marketing efforts

As mentioned already, these features are still being developed and we don’t know when they’ll be released – but you can read more about Squarespace’s existing AI functionality in our review of the best AI website builders.

In the meantime, you can check out the other Squarespace Refresh 2023 product updates, such as Squarespace Payments and Client Invoicing.