How to Set Up Shipping on Squarespace
Flat rate, weight-based, carrier calculated, and how to test it all before you launch
A lot of people get confused by the shipping options in the Squarespace admin, and it's easy to see why. You've built your store, added your products, configured them, and now you have to decide what happens after somebody actually buys something. Do you charge them for shipping? How much? Does it change depending on where they live?
All of that lives in one place, and once you know what the options do, it takes about twenty minutes to set up.
Where the Shipping Settings Live
Go to Settings → Selling → Shipping.
The first thing you'll see on that page is ads. You'll probably get several of them, from different shipping extensions, and they're the main reason this page looks more complicated than it is. Ignore them. None of them are required, and you don't need any of them to start shipping.
What you actually need is on the same page: Add shipping option. You'll add several, one for each situation you want to handle.
Flat Rate
Flat rate is the simplest, and for most small stores it's all you need.
Say you're based in the UK and you want to ship free within England. Add a shipping option, choose flat rate, name it something like Free Shipping, set the rate to zero, and select England as the region. Save. Now anyone in England who starts a checkout sees free shipping.
Then add another one for somewhere you do charge. Name it Germany, set the country to Germany, and set a per-item rate — say $2.50 per item. On the same option you can add a markup, which is a handling fee on top of the shipping itself. Add $2 and save. Now a customer in Germany sees that rate at checkout instead.
That's the pattern for the whole page: one option per region, each with its own rate.
Weight-Based Shipping
Weight-based shipping charges by how heavy the order is. Under Set weight ranges you give each bracket a cost: orders up to 10 lb cost $5, say, and orders over 10 lb cost something higher. You can add as many brackets in between as you need.
This one only works if your products have weights configured. If they don't, Squarespace will tell you so when you save.
It also isn't always worth it. If you sell jewelry, for instance, everything you ship weighs roughly nothing and the brackets never really come into play. A flat rate per item does the same job with less setup.
Carrier Calculated Shipping
This is the one where the carrier quotes the real rate at checkout, based on what's in the cart and where it's going.
Add a shipping option and choose carrier calculated. Name it, pick the country, and enter the address you ship from, including the zip or postcode. Then choose your carrier. In the US you'll see USPS, UPS and FedEx.
Once you pick one, the carrier gives you its service options — different speeds and price points. You can include all of them, and the customer chooses which they want at checkout.
Containers are part of the same setup, and they're the boxes you actually ship in. The carrier can't quote a rate without knowing what size box the order is going in, which is why this step only appears here and not on the other shipping types. Click Add custom container, give it dimensions, and repeat for each box you use. If you sell jewelry and most orders go out in the same standard box, that's one container, plus a second one for your gift box. You can also tick the carrier's own containers alongside your custom ones.
Two more fields worth filling in:
Markup. A handling fee added on top of the carrier's rate. $5 is a reasonable starting point if you're paying for packaging and your own time.
Backup rate. What happens if the carrier's rates don't come through at checkout. You can set a flat rate (say $8), ship free, or hide the option entirely. Pick one, because without it a customer can get stuck at checkout with nothing to select.
Where to Add Weights and Dimensions
Both weight-based and carrier calculated shipping need product weights, and carrier calculated needs dimensions too.
Go to Website → Pages, open your store page and click Edit, then open a product and click Edit product. Under Fulfillment you'll find length, width, height and weight. Fill those in for every product you ship, and Squarespace can calculate the cost automatically once something's in the cart.
Cover Everywhere Else
Once your specific regions are set up, you need two more options so nobody falls through the gaps.
A domestic one for the rest of your own country. If you've already set free shipping for England, add a flat rate for the United Kingdom covering everything except England, at say £8.
And an international catch-all. Add a flat rate, name it something like Flat Rate International, set it to $20, and for the region choose all locations not defined by other shipping options. That's the setting that makes sure a customer anywhere in the world still sees a shipping price.
How to Test It Before You Launch
Configuring shipping is one thing. Knowing it works is another, and there are two tricks that make testing much easier.
Test on the Squarespace URL before connecting a domain. You can buy your Squarespace subscription, publish the site on its internal Squarespace link without pointing a domain at it, and run your tests there. It behaves like the live site, so you can put something in a cart and go through a real checkout, but nobody is going to stumble across it.
If you bought one of our templates, you already have a one-year trial site set up with demo products and a demo store, which is the easiest place to practise this before touching your real one.
One limitation worth knowing: customers can create accounts on a test store, but password resets won't work there. Don't let that one confuse you while you're testing.
Give yourself a 100% discount code. Go to Products & Services → Discounts, add a discount, call it something like TEST, and set it to 100% off. Now you can buy your own products as many times as you like without charging yourself, and see exactly what the customer sees at every step.
None of this works until payments are set up, so do that first. Selling → Payments, where you can connect Stripe, PayPal or Square. You'll also almost certainly see a prompt for Squarespace's own payment processor. They make that one hard to miss.
Printing Labels Without an Extension
Someone's bought something. Now you need a label.
Go to Orders and you'll see everything that's come in. Click Export data and download the CSV. Every carrier and every shipping service has a way to take a CSV like that and turn it into labels, usually with a template you map your columns to.
There are extensions that automate this, and they're worth looking at once you're shipping real volume. But at the start they're one more subscription and one more thing to configure. Do it manually first, see how much of your week it actually takes, and add an extension when the manual version starts to hurt.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Squarespace charge me for shipping?
No. You set the rates your customers pay, and you pay your carrier separately. Squarespace just collects the shipping amount at checkout and passes it to you with the order.
Do I need a shipping extension?
Not to start. Everything above works with no extensions at all. They're a time-saver for printing labels in bulk, not a requirement for taking orders.
Why is my carrier calculated shipping showing an error?
Almost always missing product data. Carrier calculated shipping needs weights and dimensions on every product you ship, and the Products panel will flag the ones that are incomplete.
Can one carrier calculated option cover both domestic and international orders?
No. A carrier calculated option is domestic only, so if you ship abroad you'll need a separate flat rate option for international orders.
Which plan do I need for carrier calculated shipping? Core, Plus or Advanced will give you the default carrier options. Connecting your own carrier account requires Advanced, and in some countries that's the only way to use carrier calculated shipping at all.
Which carriers can I use?
In the US, FedEx, UPS and USPS. Elsewhere it varies by country. In the UK, for example, you'll see DPD, Evri, Parcelforce, UPS and DHL.
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