If you’re wondering how to accept recurring payments using Squarespace, you’ve come to the right place. In this post, we’ll give you a step-by-step tutorial.
A word of caution. Squarespace’s focus is on selling physical products vs. digital products or services. It’s a bit cumbersome to use if you’re selling consulting/coaching services, creating a membership site, or offering a digital product. Yes, you can do it, but it’s not super intuitive and may take you a bit of time to set up.
Which is why we want to give you a tutorial on how to do it and then offer a slightly simpler way of doing it as well.
First things first though… recurring payments are a paid feature in Squarespace, so you’ll need to:
- Be on the “Advanced Commerce” plan, which costs $46/month.
- If you’re reading this to collecting donations, the first part of this tutorial won’t be of much use; recurring payments do not work for donations in Squarespace.
- You need to use Stripe as your payment processor, which is good because we love Stripe.
Cons: Squarespace has become increasingly expensive, moving more and more features to higher and higher tiers. – Capterra Review
Ok, so with those things out of the way, here’s how to do it:
Squarespace
Step 1: Enable Customer Accounts
The first thing you’ll need to do is to enable “Customer Accounts.” You won’t be able to collect recurring payments without enabling this feature. Customer accounts allow your customers to sign-in and see (and edit) their recent payments and subscription details and allow you to do the same thing in your dashboard.
From the Home screen, go to “Commerce > Customer Accounts,” click “Enable Customer Accounts” and then “Save.”
Step 2: Add a Store Page
This is where it gets a bit confusing. Since Squarespace began as a place to sell physical products, the nomenclature they use to describe selling digital goods or services is still part of that world.
In order to add a digital product, you have to create a “Store.” The templates they have available for service-based businesses have no actual built-in way to sell services, so you have to go through the process of adding a store.
To do that, go to “Pages” and click the little plus sign next to “Main Navigation.” Select “Store” and go through the process of saving your store.
Step 3: Add a Subscription Product
Once you have a Store created, you’ll need to add a new product.
NOTE: Be careful to not just edit the dummy physical products that are part of your store. Squarespace allows you to add a “Subscription Product” to a physical product. If you do that, the screen and checkout will look like this:
Squarespace automatically adds shipping address as a checkout field for physical products and that’s obviously not something you want if you’re selling a service-based product; there’s no customer address to ship stuff to.
So instead, make sure to add a new product and in the following popup window, select “Service.”
Step 4: Add Product Details
On the next screen, define the recurring options for your product and click “Save.”
Notice that even the “service” products have the physical-product nomenclature, such as a “SKU.” Why exactly Squarespace thinks a service-based product like a coaching class needs a SKU, we may never know.
ChargeKeep
There you have it, folks. That’s how you can accept recurring payments in Squarespace. Is it doable? Yes. Is it also a bit cumbersome? For sure.
Unlike Squarespace, ChargeKeep was built with only one thing in mind: recurring payments. Which means you can use it to sell recurring products, memberships, classes, and any sort of subscription-based product you can think of.
Because ChargeKeep is not a “store,” you can use it to quickly set up a one-page checkout that you can then embed in Squarespace, WordPress, Wix, Weebly, or any other website builder. And your customers don’t have to add items to a cart in order to checkout.
Here are the steps:
Step 1: Set up a new payment form
Click on “New Payment Form” and go through the steps of creating your recurring payment form.
You can choose to preset a subscription plan, have your customer or client choose from different options, add additional fees, etc. All things that you can’t do with the native Squarespace recurring payments integration.
Step 2: Embed your payment form
Head over to the page where you want to embed your payment form and click on one of these little teardrop thingies (Squarespace calls them “insert points’) and select “Code.”
Paste in your ChargeKeep script (in this case, we’re going to paste in a script that creates a button that opens a popup checkout page) and click “Apply” and “Done” to save your page.
A button will be pasted into your Squarespace page that opens a popup checkout page like this one:
And that’s it! You can also put in a script that embeds the form into a page (vs. having a button open it) or directs users to a separate page for payment. And remember, you can style the form itself however you want to match your brand.
Now that you’re here…
You know that ChargeKeep is a really simple way to collect recurring payments in Squarespace. Why not give it a try?