Providing today’s entrepreneurs with all they need to sell anything online: their time, ideas, classes, appointments, reservations, content and more
To support its new brand vision of “Everything To Sell Anything,” Squarespace today announced a series of new product features and improvements focused on helping its customers sell in multiple ways online. Against the backdrop of new business formation over the past 18 months as more people monetize their passions, Squarespace is focused on giving its customers all the tools they need to thrive. This includes selling physical products, digital content, classes, appointments and reservations in one seamless, integrated platform.
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“Squarespace has always supported a diverse array of entrepreneurs on our platform. Today, we are excited to announce a number of new releases and upgrades that help our creators share their stories and sell in a myriad of ways. With Squarespace’s platform, in addition to selling physical products, you can sell access to gated content, manage reservations, take to-go orders, manage an event, take appointments and more. No other online hosting platform provides both the breadth and depth of the services Squarespace offers,” said Squarespace Founder and CEO Anthony Casalena.
As small businesses have more intent to sell services and digital products in the future, these new releases and features were designed to help customers sell more, easily add new revenue streams and earn passive income. With video becoming one of the best means of audience engagement, among the biggest product innovations to be released is Squarespace Video Studio, an app that makes it incredibly simple for businesses to produce professional-quality videos to engage their audiences and help sell their ideas, products and services.
Highlights across Squarespace’s product suite include:
Tools for selling products. Sell anything online with expertly-designed templates that can be populated with products, services, or content, enabling anyone to start taking payments and managing orders instantly.
- Introducing the Squarespace Video Studio App — An app that helps anyone create professional-level videos that promote their business and tell their story effortlessly. Intuitive templates seamlessly pull in Squarespace product images and brand styles, and smart voiceovers powered by AI or your own recordings can be added to narrate. Videos can be easily shared anywhere, including social media, to drive traffic and sales.
- New Marketplace Tools — New tools for marketplace sellers to build their brand and grow their business with integrations to their Etsy shop products and reviews, making it easy for any Etsy user to create their own online store while also continuing to manage their Etsy shop efficiently.
Tools for hospitality, events, and appointment-based businesses. Manage reservations, schedules and more through Squarespace’s existing Tock and Scheduling products, enabling you to spend less time booking and more time serving your customers.
- Take Reservations & Orders— Earlier this year, Squarespace joined forces with Tock, the only fully integrated, end-to-end hospitality management system. Tock provides a seamless experience for time-slotted businesses like restaurants, wineries or bars to manage their reservations, events, and to-go orders from one convenient location.
- Book & Manage Appointments + Classes — Squarespace Scheduling allows businesses to share their availability on their website, social channels, and through email or text for easy management of any kind of appointment or class.
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Tools for selling access to exclusive content. Squarespace provides powerful membership subscription tools that let you create your own private community via Member Areas. Create subscriber areas that give your customers access to private blogs, newsletters and more.
- New Tools for Video Classes — Coming this Fall, expanded ways for educators, content creators, and community leaders to monetize their expertise by allowing them to sell video classes in Member Areas, a Squarespace product designed to help customers sell access to content through memberships. These new tools help businesses to organize, categorize and curate their video content, enabling flexible subscription models and showcasing their videos in beautiful class libraries that fit their brand.
Tools for creators. Make your brand stand out with features powered by Squarespace’s award-winning design tools, which help you drive sales and maintain consistent branding across your entire digital presence.
- New Web Design Tools — Multiple dynamic new features to help businesses customize the design of their site to stand out and establish credibility.
- Background Art that enables customers to choose from a wide variety of eye-catching gradients, shapes, repeating patterns, and other animations to use as a background for their website.
- Auto Layouts that simplify managing sets of related content, while also providing new layout options. Customers can easily turn lists of content such as product reviews, customer testimonials, product features, and more, into interactive carousels and banner slideshows with a single click.
- Stylized Headers that help customers personalize their top navigation bar with gradients, borders, transparency and more—plus Image Masks, which offer more creative freedom for presenting photos with new shapes and modern cropping options.
- New templates with updated expressibility features and built-in tools that are designed to help customers across a variety of industries stand out—whether they’re offering memberships, scheduling appointments, or hosting a podcast.
- Unfold Updates — The Unfold app offers everything for anyone to be successful on social media. With these new updates, Unfold users will be able to schedule their social posts weeks in advance across multiple Instagram accounts, and better optimize their “link in bio” pages with one of Unfold’s beautiful, animated Bio Site templates, enabling them to share their website and social pages, embed videos, and start monetizing—all in one place.
- Updated Brand Consistency Tools — The ability to automatically apply brand elements—like colors and logos—from Squarespace websites to Email Campaigns, Squarespace Video Studio and Unfold Bio Sites to easily achieve brand consistency across multiple customer touchpoints.
These updates were inspired by the trends of the evolving small business landscape and the flourishing creator economy, with services-based businesses poised for increasing levels of online success as the way businesses transact online broadens.
- In a 2021 survey of online sellers, Squarespace found that:
- More businesses have the intent to sell services and digital products rather than just physical products.
- Nearly half of online sellers surveyed are selling in a multi-modal fashion, and an additional 30% that aren’t currently multi-modal intend to be in the next 12 months.
- According to a survey Squarespace conducted with The Harris Poll in 2021, when asked what type of business they would start if they were to start their own, Americans’ #1 response was a service (e.g. teaching a class, offering advice, tutoring) over selling a physical product.
In addition, Squarespace is releasing a brand campaign, “Everything to Sell Anything,” which brings to life the company’s platform vision. The spot features examples of what can be sold or monetized on Squarespace—from ceramics and podcasts, to tarot card readings and voiceover services—and will run across television and digital media, with out-of-home assets on display in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Toronto.