Ecommerce: Squarespace adds new analytics

Even if your business doesn’t see internet-based commerce as a top priority, it’s hard to ignore it as a sizable revenue opportunity regardless of your target market. Content management service (CMS) Squarespace knows exactly how you feel. Long kept as a secondary goal, the popular service will finally make moves to better cater to ecommerce subscribers looking to get more information and ROI out of the platform. If you are thinking about using Squarespace, or already are and see a huge demand for improved customer analytics, this article will clear up the recent announcement for you.

Squarespace publicly admits that their earliest iterations of Commerce, the platform’s ecommerce tool, were targeted at businesses that didn’t see their online sales as their number one objective. Unsurprisingly, that mentality didn’t last long and the website creation company caved in to consumer demands for deeper functionality.

Squarespace Commerce originally did offer some data analysis via a service titled ‘Metrics’, but was recently granted a huge upgrade and the new title of ‘Advanced Analytics’. To access it, simply click ‘Analytics’ from the ‘Home Menu’ on your site. From there, you are taken to a dashboard that displays an overview of seven of your most important data points: Revenue, Units Sold, Orders, Visits, Conversion Rate, Average Order Volume and Revenue per Visit. You can see the performance of these variables over any period of time you set and exact values can be found by clicking on the graph wherever you need more specific information.

So far this isn’t anything that several other CMS platforms can offer you. What begins to set Squarespace Commerce apart is the ability to sift these seven data points by source. You can filter the indicators by sources such as device (desktop, mobile, tablet), site/social network (Google, Facebook, direct, etc.) or by specifying which product produced the data. Although, potentially the most helpful upgrade of all is the ‘Abandoned Checkout’ feature. As one of the biggest problems among ecommerce sites, Squarespace sets its sights on determining why your customers fail to finish their purchase in your online store. It does this by tracking data from all seven of the aforementioned data points and allowing you to create custom followup emails for anyone that has entered their email address and added items to their cart without finishing their purchase. The email can act as a simple reminder or even include a ‘Complete your Order’ call to action in the text of the message.

And since Squarespace is putting such a huge emphasis on data, there’s a whole tab under the Analytics menu titled ‘Purchase Funnel’ that allows you to see how far into the shopping process your customers get. You can compare the number of site visits to the number of users that viewed a product, added an item to a cart and completed a purchase, all in one screen. This will allow you to see where in your sales process you’re losing customer interest.

Of course with any announcement comes all of the finer details like adding templates for ecommerce websites, the addition of a mobile app that allows store managers to keep an eye on their ecommerce from mobile devices and an order delivery calculator.

Although Squarespace promises more availability of customer data is on the way, it still believes that business owners don’t want to be inundated with overly verbose data. Right now they want to focus on simple, key indicators that result in higher profits.

Nowadays the vast majority of SMBs will be offering at least one product or service for sale over the internet. There are a lot of different ways to go about it, but something as simple as improved conversion tracking or mobile management on your ecommerce store could become the reason your company is in the black, or the red. We’re well versed in all of the CMS vendors operating today and we’d love to help you find out which one is best for you -- ask us today!