Hacker News Reader

Comment by JaggedJax | Hacker News Reader

Squarespace is way too locked down. They advertise it as a great eCommerce platform and people come to us all the time already having setup a Squarespace store asking if we can pull their orders for fulfillment. It either has to be done manually or they force you to use ShipStation. Terribly inflexible for a webstore and I always steer people away as soon as possible. But hey, they got that sweet sweet exclusivity agreement so who actually cares about usability or the paying customer, right?

View on HN

Hey --

Regarding the eCommerce integrations, Jason is right that early on we wanted to partner with a few companies where we felt like we could deeply integrate and provide a controlled/polished experience for consumers. There is no exclusivity agreement with ShipStation (though they're a great choice for many) and we're actively working on APIs that will allow larger merchants to integrate with our order/inventory systems more deeply.

(Disclosure: I'm the founder/CEO of Squarespace)

Thanks for commenting. It's good to know that there are options for some merchants. A lot of small to medium size merchants use third party fulfillment services or want CRM functionality and it's just not practical for them currently. I hope the bar can be lowered at some point as we and our customers have hit a brick wall any time we've tried to pull order information out of Squarespace. We'd love to be able to do it though and help those merchants who need it and like the platform.

I don't see any benefit of having an exclusive, ShipStation wants Squarespace as much as Sqaurespace wants ShipStation

Squarespace typically integrates with best-in-class services for optimal onboarding, setup and UX. ShipStation is best in class for fulfillment, which is why I think they partnered with them.

But I agree with some of the comments. The restricted API kills all workflow-related processes. Regardless of shipping and fulfillment, there's tons of business processes that need to be done with orders and you can't do any of it with Squarespace. I've worked with dozens of clients who started on Squarespace and moved to other platforms simply because of Commerce restrictions.

I don't understand it either really. It's a one way exclusivity agreement so it's making ShipStation money by bringing them new accounts, but I don't see how it helps Squarespace to only offer one fulfillment option. I assume ShipStation is paying Squarespace. I see this type of decision and it makes me very wary of using a platform that would do such a thing to a seemingly critical component.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com