Tips for selling outside the United States

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Tips for selling outside the United States

Last updated August 17, 2026 13:07

Change your store's currency, measurement units, language, and other settings.

Build your site for an international audience. Find the settings you’ll need to sell and ship globally and help you meet data privacy standards around the world.

Localize your site

Use your country’s domain and change your site language to build trust with customers near you.

Use a country-specific domain

Country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), like .au and .de, let visitors know where you are, and can help you establish trust with customers in your area. They may also help boost your site in local searches.

Change your site language

All Squarespace sites have some built-in text to help visitors find their way. Change the language of your site’s built-in text in your language and region settings to support your largest audience. Built-in text appears in places like, the order confirmed page, the checkout page, and customer email notifications.

Build a site with multiple languages

Use Weglot to translate all text on your site, including the text you add yourself to blocks. Sites translated with Weglot have a drop-down menu that visitors use to change the language. If the Weglot integration doesn’t work for you, there are other ways to build a multilingual site using pages.

Use metric measurements

Product weights and dimensions are used to calculate shipping costs. To use meters and kilograms for these measurements, change to metric in your language and region settings.

Change your date formatting

The date and time formatting in blog posts, calendars, summary blocks, and other areas, match the regional formatting for your site’s built-in language. For example, if you change your language to German, your site will use DD.MM.YYYY and a 24-hour clock. To change your date formatting, change your location in your Language and region settings.

Accept global payments

Accept payments from anywhere in the world through most major credit cards and digital wallets.

Connect a payment processor

Choose a payment processing solution based on where you run your business. You can connect Squarespace Payments in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and a number of European countries. You can also connect to Stripe or PayPal.

Change your store’s currency

After you connect a payment processor, your store currency changes to match the bank account linked to your payment processor, if it's a supported currency. If it's not supported, your currency is set to USD. You can always change this in your payment settings panel, but you can only accept one currency at a time.

Set up taxes

Collect VAT and GST, include your tax ID on order receipts, and change your settings to meet your tax requirements.

Note: This guide offers useful information, but it isn't legal or accounting advice. Squarespace doesn't provide advice about laws applicable to your site or business, as stated in our Terms of Service. If you have questions about collecting taxes, consider speaking with a tax advisor.

Automatically calculate tax rates for international customers

Automated tax rates charge the correct local taxes at checkout based on your location, your customer's location, and where you're registered to collect tax. Outside the US, you can use automated tax rates for the EU and UK Value-Added Tax (VAT) and Goods and Services Tax (GST). After you set up automated taxes, you can assign a product tax code (PTC) to your products to improve tax accuracy.

Use tax-inclusive pricing

Include sales tax, VAT, or GST in your product’s price where required, rather than as a line item adding to the order total at checkout.

Display your business address and tax ID or VAT registration number on invoices and order receipts

Add your business address and tax ID or VAT registration number to your business settings to display these details on all order receipts and invoices where required.

Set up shipping

You can ship anywhere in the world as long as your shipping carrier supports it.

Ship across borders

To ship across borders, add flat rate or weight based shipping options. Buy and print shipping labels through Squarespace, the Easyship or Shippo extension, or directly from your shipping carrier.

Use carrier calculated shipping for domestic shipping

Use carrier-calculated shipping to ship domestically in over 25 countries. Carrier calculated shipping uses real-time rates to calculate accurate shipping costs. Link your shipping contract to use your own pre-negotiated rates and pass your savings on to your customers.

Collect a handling fee to cover tariffs

Add a handling fee to flat rate and weight-based shipping options to add a percentage of the cost of each item in an order to the overall shipping cost. This helps cover your fulfillment costs, like Delivered Duty Paid (DDP) tariffs or shipping insurance.

Get discounted international shipping rates with Easyship or Shippo

Access discounted international shipping rates, use your own couriers, offer tracking, and enable automated returns by connecting the Easyship or Shippo extensions.

There are different requirements around the world for collecting and handling personal data, mailing list subscribers, and ongoing customer subscriptions. Squarespace has features to help you meet these requirements.

Note: This guide is a resource, but it’s not legal advice. Squarespace doesn’t give advice on laws applicable to your site or business, as stated in our Terms of Service.

You may enable Squarespace and other third-party services to place cookies on visitors’ browsers. As the website owner, certain laws may require you to inform your visitors of cookies placed by your website and receive visitors’ permission to use certain types of cookies, for example, non-essential cookies. Add a cookie banner to your site to give your visitors consent options.

Create a privacy policy

Sharing policies on your site helps visitors understand how your site collects visitor data, and some countries require this. Add a layout page to post your cookie policy, privacy policy, and terms of use. Use these sample messages for your privacy policy as a starting point.

Disable automatic newsletter opt-ins

Some countries have laws, like the Canada Anti-Spam Legislation, that regulate how websites can collect mailing list subscribers. If you have a newsletter subscribe option at checkout, you can choose to not automatically opt-in customers to your marketing emails.

Send subscription renewal reminders

In some countries, you need to send reminder emails before your customers’ subscriptions renew. If you sell digital products or physical and service products as subscriptions, you can turn on these reminders in the customer notifications panel.

Create an imprint (or impressum) page

Commercial websites need to create an Imprint to display business information in Germany and many other European Union countries.

Add a way for customers in the EU to withdraw from a sale

Online businesses that sell to customers in the European Union may need to display a withdrawal button (also known as an electronic withdrawal function) to let customers undo their purchases. This button needs to be easy to find on your site, so we suggest adding it to your website footer.

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Tips for selling outside the United States