Squarespace and Shopify are the leading eCommerce website builders in the market. If you are confused between the two, read this guide.
Both these platforms are known for their ability to create beautiful websites without any technical skills. With simple drag & drop, anyone with zero programming knowledge can also build websites.
To help you select between Squarespace and Shopify, we have compared various factors, including price, usability, eCommerce functionality, and other features.
What is Squarespace?
Squarespace is a hosted CMS (content management system) platform. Depending on your requirement, you can create blogs, business websites, portfolio websites, and online stores using Squarespace.
The good thing is you don’t need to be a programmer, in order to create different types of websites using Squarespace. With its pre-built templates and drag-and-drop functionality, you can create a beautiful website in no time.
Squarespace offers great features for blogging. If you want to create a content-driven website, Squarespace is the right choice.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is a hosted platform for eCommerce development. The platform has a ton of pre-built themes and templates.
Using Shopify, you can create a beautiful, fully-functional online store with no technical skills. Its user-friendliness is the reason why more and more businesses have started switching to it.
Shopify is the leading eCommerce platform across the globe. According to BuiltWith, currently, there are nearly 4 million live eCommerce websites using Shopify. In the USA, Shopify holds a market share of 32% in the eCommerce industry.
Squarespace Vs Shopify
Though both are hosted platforms, they differ in terms of eCommerce features, usability, pricing, etc.
Ease of use
Both platforms are user-friendly and easy to use. Whether it’s Shopify or Squarespace, you don’t need to learn to code for creating an online store as both platforms provide drag & drop features.
By selecting the easy-to-use eCommerce builder, you can pay proper attention to other important stuff in the business.
While Shopify does offer easy to use interface, it can’t beat Squarespace. Shopify has a learning curve. To get started with Shopify, you need to have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS.
That’s not the case with Squarespace. With Squarespace, you can build an eye-pleasing store even if you don’t know anything about HTML and CSS. Therefore, in terms of usability, Squarespace is the winner.
eCommerce features
Before selecting a platform for eCommerce website development, you need to look for features like shipping, payments, types of products you want to sell, etc.
Whether you choose Shopify or Squarespace, both platforms allow the selling of physical as well as digital products. Also, both platforms let you sell unlimited products.
In terms of shipping, Shopify is better than Squarespace. Shopify is partnered with leading carriers, offering the best shipping rates.
Talking about payment methods, Shopify supports all major payment methods including PayPal, Amazon Pay, Square, Shopify Payments, cryptocurrencies, and over 100 other options. On the other hand, Squarespace’s supported payment methods are PayPal, Square, and Stripe.
Selling offline
If you want to sell your products offline, the Shopify POS (point of sale) app can be very useful. It offers a POS system on all the pricing plans. Talking about fees, it charges 2.7% on the Basic plan, 2.5% on the Shopify plan, and 2.4% on the Advanced plan.
Squarespace, on the other hand, does not offer a POS system. To use a POS system with Squarespace, you need to use a third-party tool like Square. The feature is available on Commerce Basic and Commerce Advanced plans only.
Pricing
Both platforms offer various plans for unique business needs.
Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial. Depending on your eCommerce requirements, you can select from four plans: Personal, Business, Basic Commerce, and Advanced Commerce, costing $16/month, $23/month, $27/month, and $49/month respectively.
Shopify also offers a 14-day free trial. It has five plans: Shopify Starter ($5/month), Shopify Basic ($14.44/month), Shopify ($39.44/month), Shopify Advanced ($147.78/month), and Shopify Plus (starting at $2000/month).
Squarespace’s plans are ideal for small-to-medium-sized businesses. For large eCommerce stores, Shopify is the right choice.
Marketing features
Marketing features include SEO (search engine optimization), SMM (social media marketing), email marketing, and blogging. Let’s compare each marketing feature of both these platforms:
SEO: SEO features like title, meta description, sitemap, 301 redirections, etc. help to optimize the store and make it search engine friendly. Both platforms offer all essential features for proper optimization.
Social media marketing: Shopify lets you integrate and sell on major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Squarespace, on the other hand, lets you sell on Instagram only, however, it can publish content on other social media channels.
Email marketing: For email marketing, Squarespace offers a wide range of features to stay connected with email subscribers. Shopify also offers email marketing features, but they are basic, and can’t beat Squarespace.
Blogging: Blogging is a nice way to inform and educate the audience. Squarespace has amazing blogging features, while with Shopify, blogging features are limited.
Analytics
Your store’s performance can be measured by looking at data like total visitors, traffic acquisition, behavior, average time spent on the website, etc.
Both platforms offer robust analytics dashboard. On the Squarespace analytics dashboard, you can monitor metrics like sales, abandoned cart, traffic acquisition, engagement, etc. Shopify also provides an in-depth overview of different metrics like sales, acquisition, profit, orders, etc.
You can even integrate your Shopify or Squarespace store with Google Analytics and monitor performance from there.
Support
As Squarespace and Shopify are hosted platforms, both offer amazing support to their clients. When facing technical or any other issue, you have a support team to connect to.
If we compare the support quality of both, Shopify is better than Squarespace. While Squarespace provides support via live chat and email, while Shopify provides extended support options, including 24/7 phone support, live chat, and email support.
Final Thoughts: Squarespace Vs Shopify
Whether you should use Squarespace or Shopify for website development is based on many factors. Mainly, it’s based on your business needs.
Squarespace is ideal for small & medium businesses and for those who want to build content-based websites.
Shopify, on the other hand, offers extra features. With Shopify, you can manage a large eCommerce store with advanced functionality.
If you are still confused about whether you should build a Shopify store or Squarespace store, feel free to contact us: support@encircletechnologies.com
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support@encircletechnologies.com
Encircle Technologies is an IT company specialising in the Web and Mobile app development services for all types of businesses; small or large, for all business verticals, across the world. We’re proud to say that our team has worked with some truly incredible partners over a short period of time.
