Customizing your checkout experience

Edit your checkout settings, then style your checkout and shopping cart pages.

Last updated January 15, 2025

Your site’s checkout page should be simple and streamlined, while still allowing customers to engage with your brand and review your terms and policies. Use this guide to learn about different ways you can customize your checkout experience.

Cart  and checkout settings

In the Cart panel and Checkout panel, you can manage your store policies, require additional information, and adjust other settings.

Checkout includes a gift card field if you've ever sold a gift card, and a promo code field if you have active, scheduled, or inactive discounts. To remove the fields, delete any active gift cards or active, scheduled, or inactive discounts. The Tax and Shipping fields always display at checkout, even for products with no shipping or tax cost.

To open these panels, open the Settings panel, click Selling, then click Cart or Checkout.

Cart settings

Open the Cart panel to access these settings:

Setting Details
"Continue Shopping" link

Choose the page you'd like visitors to return to when they click Continue Shopping on the empty shopping cart page. By default, it links to your home page. To learn more, scroll down in this guide.

Enable express checkout

Send customers directly to a checkout page instead of adding items to a shopping cart.

If this is enabled, products will have Purchase buttons instead of Add to Cart buttons, and customers can't add multiple items to their shopping cart.

Light theme Make the shopping cart display in a lighter color, so it stands out on a site with a dark background. This only affects the shopping cart icon on templates using the Classic store page style.

Checkout settings

Open the Checkout panel to access these settings:

Setting

Details

Checkout on your domain

Direct customers to a custom, secure checkout page on your domain, rather than the default https://secure.squarespace.com URL. To learn more, visit Checkout on your domain.

Abandoned checkout recovery

Send emails to customers who don't complete their order. After enabling this setting, you can customize the email.

Abandoned checkout recovery is available in the Commerce Advanced plan.
Minimum order amount

Set a minimum order amount for the checkout subtotal. Shoppers can't place an order until they meet the minimum.

Quantity for services

Make it possible to check out with multiple service products, and for service products to display limited availability labels after you've enabled them. Leave this disabled to hide the quantity field from service product details pages.

Next order number

Change the automatically-assigned order number, starting with your next order.

This can be helpful if you're transitioning from another Commerce platform or if you want to look like you've placed more orders than you actually have.

The Next Order Number must be higher than your most recent order's number.

Receipt details

Customize the information that appears in your order receipts. Visit our guide on VAT and GST for more for help with editing your receipt details

Checkout page

Scroll down in the Checkout panel to Checkout page to access these settings:

Setting

Details

Email signup

Add a newsletter subscribe option to checkout so you can send shoppers marketing emails with Squarespace Email Campaigns or Mailchimp.

To learn more, visit Adding a newsletter subscribe option to checkout.

Default billing address

Automatically check Use Shipping Address at the Payment information step of checkout. When it's enabled, customers can still uncheck this option and enter a different billing address.

Default country in address fields 

Set a country to be pre-selected for billing and shipping address fields. This is required. You need to have at least one shipping rule for the country you choose, or else the United States will be the default.

Additional fields

Collect phone numbers at checkout and create custom checkout forms.

Store policies

Add and format these policies:

  • Return Policy
  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy

After filling in these fields, your checkout page will have links that open these policies in a pop-up window.

For tips on what to include in your Privacy Policy, visit Sample messages for your Privacy Policy.

Style the checkout page

Customize the look and feel of your checkout page by making style changes. Your checkout page should have consistent branding with the rest of your site. To learn more, visit Styling your checkout page.

Style the shopping cart page

Before checkout, customers review their orders on the shopping cart page. The shopping cart page follows your site's global styles. It's not possible to customize this page without affecting the colors that appear across your site. To preview how style changes affect the shopping cart page while you make edits:

  1. Add an item to your cart, then go to your cart. 
  2. Open site styles

Fonts

To edit fonts:

  1. In site styles, click Fonts.
  2. Style your fonts.
  3. Click Save to save your changes and keep editing, or click Exit and then Save to close the editor.

Colors

To change the background, button, and text colors on the shopping cart page, edit your site's default color theme. You can't assign a different theme to the shopping cart page, but you can make changes to the default theme to customize the page.

Follow these steps to find your site's default color theme. Then, use these tweaks to change the shopping cart page colors:

  • Background - Sitewide: Section background
  • Button - Primary button tweaks
  • Text Heading (large), Paragraph (medium)

If these tweaks don't appear, you may need to click Show all at the top of the panel.

If you have coding knowledge, you can also customize this page using custom code. If you're a Squarespace Circle member and you're adding custom code to your site, review this list of static class names for the shopping cart page.

Note

Adding code to your site is an advanced modification that falls outside of the scope of Squarespace support.

Change your Continue Shopping button

The Continue Shopping button appears on the empty cart page. By default, this button directs to your homepage, but you can change the Continue Shopping destination to any page on your site. It's not possible to link to an event, or pages in dropdowns. Here's an example of the Continue Shopping button:

ContinueShoppingButton.png

To edit the Continue Shopping button: 

  1. Open the Cart panel.
  2. Beneath Continue shopping link, click the drop-down menu and select a new destination.

The Continue shopping button color follows your site's button style tweaks.

To style the Shopping cart header text: 

  • Color - In version 7.1, use the Heading (Large) color tweak. In version 7.0, use the Heading style tweaks. In the Brine template, click away from the shopping cart page before opening site styles, then use the Heading 2 style tweak.
  • Font - In both versions, this font follows your site's font settings in Site Styles.
  • Size - It's not possible to change the size of the text.

What you can't edit

When customizing your checkout settings, keep in mind that it's not possible to edit:

  • The direct link to an individual collection item.
  • The direct link to a page within an index.
  • The Continue Shopping button text.
  • The Checkout button text.
  • The default text in the checkout fields.

The Continue Shopping button can't be removed.

Customize emails after checkout

Customers receive automated emails related to their order after they make a purchase, and as you take action to fulfill it. You can customize these emails in the Customer Notifications panel.

You can also create automated campaigns to send marketing emails to customers after they make a purchase. They'll receive these in addition to the standard Order Confirmed email. To learn more integrating Email Campaigns with your online store, visit Using Email Campaigns with Squarespace Commerce.

Use extensions to send customer feedback surveys

You can send branded customer feedback surveys and get crucial insight from your customers by connecting the Delighted extension. While we work with third-party services to ensure Squarespace Extensions work properly, extensions fall outside our scope of support. We can help with connecting or disconnecting your extensions. For all other questions, contact the extensions provider directly.

Next steps

Footer Image
  • Get help from our community

  • Get help from our community on advanced customizations.

  • Hire a Squarespace Expert

  • Stand out online with the help of an experienced designer or developer.

Customizing your checkout experience