Back in 2003, sitting in his University of Maryland dorm room, Anthony Casalena began building the web-hosting platform that would become Squarespace.
Soon, Squarespace was advertising as a place to build websites, host photo albums, and publish blogs—all with no coding required. As the web has evolved from a network of deskbound PCs to today’s world of smartphones and tablets, Squarespace has also shifted, focusing for a time on creators hosting portfolios, and now on small businesses in need of an e-commerce solution.
“What we’ve really done is grown from that DIY blogging tool two decades ago to, really, a set of tools and brands that help entrepreneurs,” says Casalena, who still serves as the company’s CEO.
To that end, Squarespace is launching an integrated Squarespace Payments platform that will let its business users collect money for goods and services directly, without having to integrate an external payment processor. Squarespace is also rolling out new features that will allow users to send invoices to customers. It’s also improving support for tracking leads and existing business through an updated customer-relationship management platform. The features were announced today at Squarespace’s annual Refresh event.
The Payment system will work hand-in-hand with other Squarespace offerings, including its email marketing tools and scheduling platform. The ultimate goal is essentially to provide entrepreneurs with a single online hub for all their web-based needs. (To that end, Squarespace recently acquired Google’s domain business, and in 2021 bought the restaurant-and-bar-reservation platform Tock.)
“The more we can put all of that in one place where they can keep their brand consistent, I think, the better,” says Casalena.
Of course, Squarespace isn’t the only platform trying to be a one-stop e-commerce hub. Mailchimp, now owned by Intuit, has made inroads in that direction, as has rival website builder Wix. But Casalena argues that Squarespace still has offerings its competitors can’t match, especially all in one place, as well as an “incredibly design-centric” approach that first helped it gain market share in the days of Geocities.
Customers still can use Squarespace to build a website without code—something made even easier by a growing AI toolkit for quickly generating content—or, as Casalena points out, to not even build a website at all, using Squarespace solely for domain registration, email, scheduling, or reservation management.
“Now, we think that things are better together in our ecosystem, but it’s that interplay and that suite, and our design orientation over the top of that, that is really starting to make us look quite different than, I think, anyone out there,” he says.
Still, the company continues to happily support customers looking for the web experience it’s offered since its early days. Some even continue to use a version of Squarespace’s early software—a direct descendent of the code Casalena began writing in college.
“If you put your site up, we really, really, really do not want that site to look different than how you set it up,” he says. “So we can evolve the backend in many, many different ways; but unless you’re asking your site to visually change, except for the most minor of things, we don’t want to change that on you.”
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