6 Squarespace Payment details I wish I knew before getting started
About this Squarespace video tutorial
I love Squarespace websites. Squarespace Payments? Not always. Here are six details about Squarespace’s internal payment processor that I wished I knew before starting so I could manage them or use them to make a more informed choice about payment processors moving forward.
Timestamps
0:00 - Intro
1:03 – Reserve Funds & Squarespace Balance
2:20 – Payouts & Squarespace Balance
3:13 – Transferring Payment Processors
4:09 – Klarna/Afterpay/Others
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Let’s talk about Squarespace payments and the things that I wish I knew before I was setting clients up on Squarespace payments. This will help you decide which payment plan you want to use on your Squarespace site.
Keep in mind that I am a “Squarespace expert” (their words, not mine) and have over 10 years of experience with the platform at this point. I’m a huge fan.
I will almost always vote to do something through Squarespace’s internal systems if possible. In the case of payments, though…that’s not always the case.
I recently set up a site for a client, moving them over from a Wordpress site to a Squarespace site, and he already had an existing system that was getting him a lot of orders online, so keep that in mind.
When we launched the new site, orders started coming in.
Reserve Funds & Squarespace Balance
Reserve funds is what happened when orders started coming in. Squarespace flagged my client’s account and put money into Reserve Funds, seeming to panic at all the new orders and the large amount of money coming in suspiciously.
“A temporary hold to cover refunds and chargebacks.” So they don’t trust my client’s new website and is holding on to a portion of the money to prepare for what they see as inevitable unhappy customers. Now he doesn’t have the access to a decent chunk of his money for 60 days.
When looking through these reserve funds, you should note that Squarespace breaks your funds into two categories: ‘Amount Stored on Squarespace’ and ‘Squarespace Balance’. Annoyingly enough, these two numbers are different!
Frankly, I have not found a ton of clarity on what the difference between these two things are, but they’re separate in the Finance tab. Squarespace’s internal information says that the amount stored (Squarespace Payments) is the money collected from customer purchases, where Squarespace Balance is where deposits are held. Even with this information I do not find a ton of clarity!
Payouts & Squarespace Balance
Speaking of confusing money, payouts. When I was reading FAQs about Squarespace Payments beforehand, it said that payouts were automated every day. Payouts to the Squarespace balance don’t automatically go to your bank account; they’re stuck in holding and will just sit there until you manually move your money from your Squarespace balance to your bank account.
Also, you cannot automate the movement from Squarespace Balance to your bank account. It must be done manually and is unhelpful for online businesses.
Transferring Payment Processors
With my client, I decided to move him over to Stripe as a result of these problems, and in the back end of the payments section, the Stripe option was no longer available.
Support told me that you cannot activate Stripe while you have Squarespace Payments available. I get it, you don’t want two simultaneous payments processors up so a customer couldn’t get charged twice, but this is a hassle.
To switch your payment processor, you have to fully turn of Squarespace Payments before setting up a new one. I have been told that it can be done live with support so there’s no downtime where there’s no active payment processor on the website, but that doesn’t make this an elegant, user-friendly solution.
Klarna/Afterpay/Others
Squarespace Payments does offer support for “buy now pay later” plans like Klarna and Afterpay. This is a great feature for some businesses; I always turn it off for my clients, as my clients are predominantly musicians, and one CD does not need to be broken up into four installments.
It’s great to have, but it is on as a default, which is not great for my clients.
Since I’ve done Squarespace Payments tutorial videos in the past, I wanted to give an update on how my experience with the platform has been, and what quirks of the system business owners should be aware of when starting their website and what to look out for.
Soon I’ll cover how to decide what payment processor to use for your site, so be on the lookout for that more positive video!
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I love Squarespace websites. Squarespace Payments? Not always. Here are six details about Squarespace’s internal payment processor that I wished I knew before starting so I could manage them or use them to make a more informed choice about payment processors moving forward.