Squarespace vs. Shopify
Note: This blog post contains affiliate links, however, I only recommend brands that I use and love.
There are so many platforms out there to sell your services and products, so how do you choose? The most popular ones are Squarespace and Shopify. They are both powerful platforms that offer new business owners an easy way to start their website to sell their products and services. How do you understand which platform is better for you? There are so many different aspects that go into choosing a platform that is perfect to suit your needs. We’ll give you an overview of these platforms and things to consider when it comes to making this decision.
First, you need to understand your business and the purpose of what you’ll be using your website for. Here are some questions to ask yourself:
What do I want the design to look like?
How much support do I get?
What features and benefits do these platforms have?
How is their analytics tool?
Does this platform make sense for my short-term and long-term goals?
How is the ease of use?
What are the integration capabilities?
Which currencies or payment systems do they support?
Overview of Squarespace + Pricing
Squarespace is an intuitive and straightforward all-in-one platform that allows all types of professional businesses to create websites, online stores, blogs, and portfolios through pre-made templates and drag-and-drop elements. Their focus is to allow business owners of all skill levels to create beautifully designed websites that are easy to customize without a web developer. It’s extremely user-friendly and the website can be customized to include everything that you would want to add to a fully developed website, so you can have your portfolio, blog, online store, content, and more all on one website. The possibilities are endless! Since Squarespace offers the ability to offer content and an e-commerce store all on one website, Squarespace is a great option for service-based businesses. The content can support the services that are offered.
When it comes to building an online store on Squarespace you’re able to list up to 200 products or services per page. It’s easy and quick to upload your inventory using CSV files and it’s quick to update any product’s SKUs. Being able to update SKUs easily is helpful if you sell multiple variations of one single item/product.
Squarespace offers an internal analytics system and this a great tool to utilize if you want to understand different aspects of your website or online sales.
The major cons when it comes to having an e-commerce store on Squarespace is that there are limited payment options for customers, there is no auto-save when you are making edits (Squarespace, we would love this), while the interface may be simple it may be TOO simple if you want to organize and sort your inventories in multiple ways, not great if you have an extremely large inventory, and you do need to be at least on the Business plan to have an online store on Squarespace.
Here are the options for pricing:
Business plan $26/monthly ($18/monthly on annual subscription)
Basic commerce plan $35/monthly ($26/monthly on annual subscription)
Advanced commerce plan $54/monthly ($40/monthly on annual subscription)
Check out the pricing page for further details on each plan!
Overview of Shopify + Pricing
While Squarespace is an all-in-one platform, Shopify is mainly focused on being an e-commerce platform that sells products and services, so this may be a great option if you want more features and capabilities for an e-commerce store.
The first major difference from Squarespace is that you can hold a larger inventory on Shopify. So much so that you can do wholesale. Wholesale customers can create their accounts to purchase bulk orders from your Shopify online store. Another great feature that Shopify offers is having multiple payment options and the ability to pay in multiple currencies using Stripe or PayPal. Not to mention there are multiple shipping options too. Great when you have a lot of international customers! A thing to note is while there are alternative payment options, there will be more transaction fees for these payment options.
Shopify has multi-channel selling capabilities to allow you to sell your services and products on Facebook and Instagram.
When it comes to integrations and plug-ins capabilities you can integrate an extensive selection of apps to help run and manage your e-commerce store. The advanced capabilities can help support brick-and-mortar stores too if you want to manage both a brick-and-mortar store and an online e-commerce store simultaneously. Keep in mind that the monthly costs can add up with these apps.
Unfortunately in comparison to Squarespace’s user-friendly interface, Shopify does have a learning curve and the design templates on Shopify are more simple than Squarespace. There is less flexibility when it comes to the design, however, they are still reliable and will give your store a good foundation to start your e-commerce website. There are extensive options when it comes to organizing your inventory and web pages depending on the template that you choose on Shopify.
Here are the options for pricing:
Basic Shopify: $29/monthly
Shopify: $79/monthly
Advanced Shopify: $299/monthly
Check out the pricing page for further details on each plan. Also, Shopify offers Shopify Lite and Shopify Plus for those that need less or more features and benefits from the regular Shopify plans.
In conclusion, if your focus is having a website on an all-in-one platform that is user-friendly and offers beautiful design templates for an online portfolio, blog, a small e-commerce store (better for service-based businesses), then Squarespace is for you.
Want a website that is more focused on e-commerce and has more advanced capabilities that can help support brick and mortar stores too? Shopify is the best choice for your business.
Both are great platforms but choose the platform that best suits your business models and needs. Which platform are you going to choose and why? We would love to learn more about your business!
