Question
I saw this post on your website:
It must be quite dated by now because Squarespace now has a fairly robust developer platform. Very much related, their commerce platform is now much more robust. The one big thing missing is the ability for a business to have a “click & mortar” business model.
My client is actually personal, my brother in-law. He's an artist who has a storefront in South Street Seaport. He has a website as well (with Volusion). But that's certainly not justification for creating such a linkage. The reason to do it is that it's the next logical (and very big) step for retailers. The mindset is to not only think of a retail store as a showroom, but a miniature warehouse. For the mom & pop retailer, it would likely be "the" warehouse.
A few large retailers have done this very successfully. Notables include: Best Buy, Macy's (along with their Bloomingdales division), Sephora and Williams Sonoma. It is viewed by many as a big threat to Amazon if they do not make a big push in this direction because their shipping costs are not sustainable.
This interview by Barry Rhitholtz of Bloomberg and his show "Masters in Business" would be well worth your while. It's with Scott Galloway, a professor at New York University. He teaches Digital Brand and Marketing at NYU Stern. He is definitely one of the eminent authorities on this subject and has piles of research and insight to back up these predictions.
In a nutshell, it's simply a matter of the "feature" trickling down to the masses. It's a matter of who does this first and gets a jump on it.
Squarespace makes sense because they got off to slow start with eCommerrce to begin with but have made great strides over the past 2+ years to catch up. Something big like this would help Anthony catapult Squarespace past Shopify. Hence, I see them having such motivation. That's at least how I would pitch it, if they saw this as more long-term rather than short.
My 2¢. Happy Holidays and best of luck for a successful 2016!
Answer
I really appreciate your thoughtful reply and will most certainly listen to the interview with Scott Galloway. I agree with your assessment about Squarespace, they currently have 6% of the market when looking at the top million websites out there.
What POS system is your brother-in-law using? Do you think you can get us in contact with someone at Squarespace regarding this integration? We’d love to tackle this integration for you and your brother-in-law, but getting some assistance from Squarespace would really help to "jump start" our integration efforts. Do you know someone at Squarespace who could help us with the integration?
Thanks and Happy Holidays to you as well.