Squarespace now lets merchants accept PayPal payments in their online stores

Website builder Squarespace has introduced PayPal integration, meaning merchants can now sell their wares to customers in more than 200 markets across 100 currencies.

Above: PayPal: Squarespace

Founded in 2004, New York-based Squarespace serves up a DIY platform for building and hosting websites and a content-management system (CMS) for bloggers. Part of this includes enabling businesses to launch online stores, but so far merchants have only been able to accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover (U.S. only). This is fine in markets where such bank cards are in widespread use, but not everyone has compatible bank cards for online spending. And that’s why opening to PayPal is a key move for the company.

Squarespace itself has been looking to expand its international appeal of late, recently translating its own website into Spanish. And it says that 30 percent of its customers are already outside the U.S., with a “significant portion” of its broader user base selling goods internationally. Even in markets where Visa and MasterCard are widespread, PayPal is a popular payment mechanism, so providing more options can only be a good thing.

Perhaps more importantly, competitors such as Wix and Weebly already offer PayPal as an option, so at the very least this brings Squarespace onto more equal footing.

Today’s news comes eight months after Squarespace added an extra string to its bow with the launch of Squarespace Domains, a service that helps users sidestep third-party services such as GoDaddy and procure top-level domain names directly through Squarespace.