Squarespace Adds Payments to Serve the Needs of ‘Long Tail’ eCommerce Sellers

Dan Chandre, Squarespace vice president, head of Acuity and payments, told Karen Webster that a key to connecting merchants with his firm’s platform lies with payments.

And to that end, Squarespace’s taking on the mantle of payments facilitator.

“It’s the beginning of an evolution,” he said.

The pivot, he said, is one that serves the “long tail” of sellers that are Squarespace’s bread and butter, a broad set of smaller firms and 4.3 million subscribers across a broad range of verticals that are seeing high transaction volumes amid the continuing shift to online commerce.

Squarespace said Wednesday (Oct. 4) that its latest, annual product Refresh will include the introduction of Squarespace Payments — billed as a native payment solution that lets merchants accept payments directly through Squarespace instead of having to connect a third-party payment provider. The new payments offering helps merchants manage transactions, payouts and view refunds, disputes, and charges, all within a centralized dashboard. The company is also launching enhanced client invoicing solutions that let merchants “vet” leads and receive payments via invoices.

For Chandre, this is not the first go-round in branching out into payments functionality — he’d done much the same during his previous stint as VP of strategic development at Mindbody. That tenure taught him, above all else, that the enterprise customer experience matters as they onboard to the commerce platform itself, as they take in payments and reconcile those payments with the back office — and how they present the checkout experience to their own customers, too.

“This type of payments approach has evolved over the years,” he said. And this time around, with a nod to Squarespace, where he’s coming up on his one-year anniversary, Chandre told Webster, “This is about what customers should expect from a platform like Squarespace — it’s a better experience, where they have a single platform to manage everything … sometimes these things might feel like they’re divorced from each other but they are not.” Disparate banking solutions, he said, can be a challenge for merchants to integrate.

“By putting ourselves at the center of the transaction,” he said. “There are a lot of things that we can solve for our customers.”

Value-Added Services

For the company that strives to become a true end-to-end commerce solution and bring payments more fully in-house — as Squarespace seeks to do with its refresh — the opportunity is there to bring a host of value-added services to sellers.

“Right now, regardless of the size of the business,” he said, “there are some things that are really difficult right now.” The difficulties lie with access to capital, and in having enough working capital on hand to navigate macro uncertainty. Those features are on Squarespace’s long-term roadmap, and are natural progressions as it gains traction with existing and new sellers with Squarespace Payments and its dashboard.

For Squarespace, he said, expanding the product and service portfolio will be aided by what he said is “an incredible amount of data at our disposal,” that will only be enriched by transaction level information — providing an onramp to adding different BNPL schemes or local payment methods or access to working capital.

Read more: Squarespace Adds Invoicing Tools in Squarespace Scheduling

“There are a lot of things that we can do that can really differentiate how these merchants are currently engaging with Squarespace,” he said, adding that with the beta testing already in place “we’re seeing everything ‘around’ the merchant, including risk assessment and onboarding, that we will continue to build out.”

Looking ahead, he said, the company will spend October bringing new “trialers” onboard and scaling its payments offering as it readies to bring existing users “over” to the refreshed suite of Squarespace products. Chandre noted that Squarespace Payments will roll out to U.S. customers in the coming months and launch into additional markets in 2024.

“We’ll target the right markets throughout the course of 2024 and into 2025 and unlock those [international] regions,” Chandre said, adding that “These are concurrent swim lanes. We’ve got new trials, international, migration and then-value added services.”