How to Set Up Squarespace Product Options for Better Order Management

Squarespace gives you a lot of flexibility when building out products. You can create Product Option fields for things like pick-up location, color variation, size, or anything else a customer needs to choose at checkout. You can create a Form and add Form Fields to capture custom information (e.g. design notes, delivery dates, personalization details).

The problem with this flexibility shows up later, when you need to actually work with those orders.

What happens to your product options at export

When you export your Squarespace orders to CSV, all of your Product Option fields get condensed into a single column called "Lineitem variant." A customer who selected a pick-up location for one item, and size for another, doesn't give you two clean columns, the CSV gives you one column with everything mixed together.

If you're trying to sort orders by pick-up location, or pull all orders for a specific size, you're now doing spreadsheet manipulation on top of whatever actual work you were trying to do. For stores with any meaningful order volume or product complexity, that CSV export becomes a 20-minute chore that you repeat every time your order list changes (or you get distracted mid-sort and have to start all over again!)

Before you fix the export problem, fix your naming

Here's something worth doing regardless of what order management tools you use: be ruthlessly consistent with how you name your fields.

If you have a Product Option called "Pick-up Location" on one product, every product that has that same option needs to use the exact same label - same spelling, same capitalization, same punctuation. Not "Pick up location." Not "Pickup Location." Not "pick-up location." Exactly "Pick-up Location," every time.

The same rule applies to Form Fields. If you create a text field called "Design Notes" on one form, every form that collects design notes needs to call it "Design Notes." Not "design notes." Not "Design Notes for Us." The label needs to be identical across every product and form that uses it.

This matters because any tool that tries to read and organize your order data (including Yay Orders) relies on field names to group and display information correctly. Inconsistent naming means the tool sees "Pick-up Location" and "Pickup Location" as two different fields. Your data fragments instead of consolidating.

It takes a few minutes to audit your products and standardize names. It saves significant headaches later.

What organized product options actually look like

Once your fields are named consistently, a tool like Yay Orders can surface them the way they should have been all along - as separate, sortable columns in your order table rather than one collapsed cell.

Instead of seeing a "Lineitem variant" column with everything mixed together, you see individual columns for each field: Location, Size, Color, Design Notes, whatever you've set up. You can sort by any of them, filter by any of them, and actually see what you're working with at a glance.

You can also build “Saved Views” which are combinations of fields that match how you actually fulfill orders. If your workflow requires you to see Location, Delivery Date, and Size together, you save that as a View and it's one click away every time you open your orders. No re-building the same spreadsheet filter from scratch.

The short version

Squarespace's product option flexibility is useful. The gap is in how those options carry through to order management - a single condensed export column doesn't scale once your products have any complexity.

Two things that help: standardize your field names now (before your order history makes it painful to fix), and use an order management tool that treats each field as its own column rather than collapsing everything together.

Yay Orders is free to start — connect your store and see your product option fields the way they should look.