How To Create a Custom Order Form for Squarespace

Updated May 2022

This is one of my favorite little Squarespace “hacks” because one of the most common reasons why people think they need to have a Shopify website is to be able to add a plugin to manage custom order forms. But what if you didn’t have to give up on your Squarespace site, the awesome design capabilities, your killer blog, and all that you’ve already built to be able to have a custom order form on Squarespace? Solution: Paperform.

What is Paperform? 

At first glance, Paperform is a form builder but it’s really so much more than that. The flexible SaaS Platform allows you to easily create custom forms, build product pages, take payments, automate onboarding, create dedicated landing pages, schedule appointments and put manual processes on autopilot.  it’s as simple as writing a document but a lot more fun.. 

With over 2,000 integrations and 500 templates, there are lots of style and customization options making it a great option for creating things like landing pages, custom quote forms, booking, and reservation forms, and (as you may have guessed) custom order forms. You can collect payments via your forms and either embed them directly on your Squarespace site or link out to them from a text link or button. Perfect for small businesses wanting to build beautiful solutions tailored to their brand.

How to Create a Custom Order Form for Squarespace

You can start your custom order form from one of the 500+ templates they have to offer or choose to create your own from scratch. Personally, I like starting from scratch but there are lots of templates to choose from so if you see one that seems close to what you’re trying to do by all means take the shortcut!

Customize your form to include any questions you need to gather customer and order info. (Remember shorter forms convert best!) Paperform currently has over 26form fields including all the standard stuff like name, email, address but also some really cool fields like file upload, appointments, subscriptions, coupons, price, products, and calculations... Those last few are going to be our secret weapons for your custom order form!

• Price - this field is great for simple fixed prices if you set the field to “read-only”. (Hint: If you want people to be able to name their own price or make a donation, just toggle the “read-only” option off.)

• Products - adding a product field is like adding a little eCommerce shop right to your form! You can add products, set stock limits of various SKUs, set prices, add images to products, and choose how you’d like your products to be displayed in your form. 

• Calculations - these fields are cool because not only can you do simple calculations but you can use your customer’s answers in calculations! This means you can add custom or variable values based on the selections people make. 

• Coupons: Having the option of using coupons not only encourages existing customers to return but also helps to incentivize new ones to engage with your brand. With Paperform, coupons can be disabled or enabled at any time, have an expiration date, and apply to specific payment fields on a form. This feature works really well with the calculations function to automatically work out the price. 

Custom Pricing Rules

Custom Pricing Rules are Magic

These are the backbone of any custom order form! Custom pricing rules are like calculation fields on steroids. You can use these to modify the total price of an order based on inputs. You can use logic to map form answers to specific prices. You can even add a processing fee to the total. Combined with the calculations field, you can create a seriously powerful dynamic pricing form for your Squarespace website.

Other Cool features:

• Logic Rules - determine when questions, pages, sections of pages, and success pages should be displayed

• Custom Emails - use logic to determine which messages are sent after submission

• Discountable Products - on a product-by-product basis

• Shipping - calculate variable shipping costs based on customer answers

• Answer Piping - so that you can display things like customer names and order totals in real-time

• Receipts: Now your customers enter their email address for the receipt in the checkout page, one will be auto-sent via Stripe when it has been successfully being charged.

• Sales Tax - set up simple or complex rates based on user input automatically added

• Analytics: Custom built-in data analytics and powerful data management and automation workflows, including google analytics and Facebook pixel support

• Authorize Payments - charge customers later by only authorizing cards at checkout

• Product Import - via CSV file

• Zapier - connect your form submission info to virtually any other program 

• Custom Summary Emails - send custom emails or even custom PDFs to either your customer, yourself or both

• Custom Confirmation Messages - display custom messages that correspond to answers

• Custom Redirects - send customers to another page back on your website based on their answers

• Form Sharing - essentially, once you’ve created your beautiful yet intelligent form, custom pdf or custom email, you can send it to the account of your business partner, a colleague or even a client. 

Getting Paid

Paperform integrates with multiple payment gateways depending on your individual preference. You can accept the following payment methods for your custom order form: 

• PayPal

• Stripe

• Braintree

• Square Payments

Embed on Squarespace

Once your form is ready you can either link to it from your site via a button or text link… or embed it right on your site! This means that you can add your custom order form to any page of your Squarespace site. You just copy and paste the code generated by Paperform into a code block where you want your form to appear! Your order form is also automatically mobile-friendly and will work on any device or screen size. 

Take It Further

• Set up recurring payments or subscription products using the built-in subscription field.

• Embed a custom form onto your Squarespace site that allows visitors to upload and submit files along with their forms. 

• If you’re wanting to create a custom quote request form, you can still use all the calculations fields and custom pricing rules to get a total for you. Just turn off the payment processing. 

• Add an appointment field to allow customers to book a meeting or schedule their service with you.

• Accept donations or set up “pay what you want” pricing by making any price field editable by your customers.

• Use the in-app editor to edit anything. From resizing and annotating to adding Insta worthy filters, the Image Editor allows you to control exactly how your images look without needing to open Canva, Figma or PhotoShop.