Finished Squarespace websites almost always look better than competitors— just compare live examples of Squarespace websites vs Weebly websites vs Wix websites— you’ll see the difference. You can buy Getty images very cheaply with Squarespace and integrate them easily onto your site. In terms of the the credit card fees, the rate is determined by either Stripe or Paypal (the two options provided by Squarespace for processing credit cards). And from an SEO point of view, a domain is hugely important to a business (particularly established ones). Remember that you can only add CSS to your site and inject code into your page headers if you're on a Squarespace 'Business' plan or higher however — the 'Personal' plan disables this functionality. We were able find several apps in Shopify’s app store that showed our orders on a map so we could pick and choose which orders we would deliver ourselves. You can search for and add Unsplash images directly to pages on your Squarespace site — this is a great (and free!) Let's dive into the website-building stuff first. On this plan you can expect offers advanced advanced security, API and fulfilment features, along with dedicated account management. But Shopify is just in a different class from Squarespace when it comes to ecommerce. Although both platforms could perform much better where GDPR is concerned, it’s fair to say that merchants wishing to have a high level of compliance on their website will find that this is considerably easier to achieve with Shopify, especially in the area of cookie consent. This means new Shopify users can start taking payments immediately— no need to figure out how to integrate with a 3rd party payment processor. The phone support provided by Shopify works using a ‘callback’ system — you request a call from the support team, and they call you back later. You can run a dropshipping business much more easily using a Shopify store. Shopify and Squarespace are both very easy to use. One thing worth being aware of is that the kind of customer support you can expect from both Shopify and Squarespace might become a bit limited depending on the custom CSS or HTML you add (more on support shortly). Shopify provides you with live chat, email and (crucially) phone support — Squarespace offers only live chat and email support. That said, more functionality is promised soon. Verified providers are vetted to ensure they provide proper support— there’s nothing more frustrating than a theme that’s out of date in a year. So, when it comes to sales taxes, it’s a big win for Shopify. Using a small bit of code, you can have that modern Squarespace web design on the front end and the super-powered commerce features offered by Shopify on the back end. This means that many users will end up having to set up their sales taxes manually in Squarespace. This is a fairly straightforward way to start dropshipping on Squarespace. So, if abandoned cart saving is an important feature for you, it's a bit of a win here for Shopify. Changing the font color and size of your navigation will require CSS editing. Overall, both Shopify Email and Squarespace Email are fairly simple email marketing tools, with Squarespace’s offering currently offering more features. In Squarespace, if you change a page URL, you will have to manually create the 301 redirect (the process for which is fiddly; and creating 301 redirects is quite easy to forget to do). Shopify’s new email marketing tool, ‘Shopify Email’. So, if you’re selling in multiple countries, it’s nice to be able to let your potential customers choose their own currency (or, better yet, to present your products in your site visitors’ currency automatically). This functionality can significantly increase the sales from your store. A note of caution is worth sounding regarding the customer support offered with both Shopify and Squarespace — the quality of support you'll get often depends on what you're doing with your template. Squarespace lets you create a far greater number of these (I am not sure of the upper limit, but based on my own tests, it’s definitely possible to create more than 10). Shopify vs Squarespace What’s the best ecommerce platform for you? If your focus is on building an informative website, then design and content management functionality are going to be a priority — and this being the case, it's fair to say that Squarespace is the more obvious choice out of the two products discussed here for that purpose. (Same goes for Google Drive too — you can send your data to a Google Sheet in a similar way). the ability to take payments in multiple currencies, integration with a very extensive range of third party apps that extend the functionality of your store significantly (apps include integrations with Quickbooks, Zoho and Zendesk to name just a few), more sophisticated inventory management options, more advanced point-of-sale features (these allow you to sell goods in a physical location using your online store to process payments and manage inventory), more comprehensive tax calculation functionality. However, what you have to bear in mind with Squarespace is that it very much takes a ‘walled garden’ approach to website building. Both Shopify and Squarespace provide a free SSL certificate which you can use with any domain. They take the same approach with colors. Similarly, Squarespace's customer support team are pretty good at assisting with template related queries...unless you customize your template by adding your own CSS or HTML to it, in which case the Squarespace support team effectively reserve the right not to support you fully. A very important feature of running a website is capturing email addresses: your ability to communicate effectively with leads via e-newsletters is vital to business growth. Shopify provides you with significantly more choices when it comes to payment gateways — over 100 payment options are available. A few things to note about navigating the pricing plans of Squarespace and Shopify: I’ve been building websites for over 20 years and websites have been featured in Wired, The Next Web, Smashing Magazine, The Huffington Post and Forbes. First, for all products and pages, Shopify generates a page title and meta description automatically based on the content of your page, which a lot of the time — particularly where products are concerned — often provides a very good SEO starting point. This is because blogging is absolutely vital to inbound marketing — where you use quality content (blog posts) to drive up traffic, and by extension, sales. It showcases the website by elevating it above the interface— a subtle signal that Squarespace websites are meant to be beautiful. However, when you consider that Squarespace charges 3% transaction fees on its 'Business' plan, and offers a very limited range of payment processing options with it, it's hard not to conclude that the Basic Shopify plan represents better value as far as e-commerce is concerned, even if the monthly fee is a little bit higher. None of this is a knock on Squarespace. In times of the smartphone and mobility, the greatest benefactor has been e-commerce. There are five Squarespace apps available, which work on both Android and iOS: Of the above, most users are realistically going to appreciate the ‘Commerce’ and ‘Squarespace’ apps the most, as these allow you to manage orders and edit content on the go (respectively). All Squarespace templates are created in-house so they also provide customer support for them: One thing I especially love about Squarespace is that the templates continue to look good long after users have customized them. It's important to remember, of course, that there is a lot more to consider than just the monthly fees. As with much else in Shopify, if you want more blogging functionality, you’ll need to resort to an app. If you already have a website (for example a WordPress site), Ecwid’s worth a look — this allows you to add comprehensive e-commerce functionality to an existing online presence. Squarespace’s new Email Campaigns feature. You might also find the below articles / resources on Shopify and Squarespace useful: information about our Squarespace development services, general advice on how to make online stores. Let’s take a look at the options on this front. This means there is arguably a wider range of templates available from Shopify than Squarespace — so long as you are prepared to pay for them (prices vary but typically involve a one-off payment of between $100 and $180). Reporting is considerably better in Shopify than in Squarespace, although you'll need to be on a more expensive plan to access this functionality. With the addition of e-commerce to Squarespace’s feature set, and an increase in the number of content-creation apps available for Shopify, the two tools have become increasingly similar and technically, you can now use either to create a content-driven website or sell products online. In all honesty, both of them are excellent website builders. There are ten themes included by Shopify that you can use. The bottom line is that, used well, Squarespace can help you put a professional-looking site very quickly, and gives you a lot of nice ways to display content — especially blog posts and images — in a way that Shopify arguably doesn't (out of the box, at least). And my own appeals to their support team for help on this issue have proved pretty fruitless! It also means that it’s hard (if not impossible) to add a GDPR-compliant cookie banner to your Squarespace site (I discuss the fun issue of GDPR in more depth later on in this review). Similar functionality isn’t available out of the box with Shopify. If you are hoping to build a content-focused website or a blog and sell a couple of products on the site as well, then Squarespace is probably still your best bet, so long as you are happy to sell in one currency, and aren’t dealing with too many different tax rates. 2. Pricing for this is negotiable and based on requirements.In terms of the key differences between the Squarespace plans, the key things to watch out for are as follows: The 'Personal' plan does not let you sell anything, and prevents you customizing your site with CSS and javascript. On top of the standard pricing plans, there are transaction fees and credit card fees to consider. You can view a full list of the products we receive commission on here. When you enable multi-language selling in Shopify, a language 'folder' is added to your domain. These plans are pretty cheap by comparison to the plans available from dedicated email marketing solutions (especially at the top end of the pricing scale) — and allow you to dip your toes into the world of online direct marketing without a significant outlay being involved. If you're interested in starting a dropshipping business, Shopify is a much better bet than Squarespace. Neither allows you to create truly ‘clean’ URLs — something that Google prefers — because they stick prefixes into some URLs which can't be removed (for example, /blog/, /products/ and so on). Its e-commerce features are also arguably slightly easier to use — but that said, this is probably because there are fewer available. users will have already searched for a solution to their problem before getting to the point where they want to contact a support team — and this approach feels like it’s making customers jump through unnecessary hoops. Notice how Squarespace elevates the website above the interface? Shopify is a convenient and easy to work with platform for eCommerce. Provide a means to opt in or revoke consent to use of non-essential cookies on a website (and to log that consent). In Shopify, you can create just three options for your store products — for example, colour, size or material. This means that if you buy a product or service after clicking on a link to a product featured in one of our reviews, we may receive a commission on the sale. That said, you can get around the product option limitation in Shopify, so long as you are prepared to pay for a third-party app to do so (an example being the Infinite Product Options app). In an era of responsive websites, this focal point feature is important because it helps ensure that the main part of your image is foregrounded whenever your image is automatically cropped for viewing on smaller screens. Shopify’s page editor isn’t as powerful because it’s not as high of a priority for ecommerce websites. In terms of which is better, I'd say Squarespace's blogging functionality has a bit of an edge over Shopify's. Discounts for all of the above are available if you purchase a plan on an annual basis (the above four plans, respectively, work out at $12, $18, $26 and $40 per month when you pay upfront for a year's service). On the ‘Basic Commerce’ and ‘Advanced Commerce’ plans you get point-of-sale functionality. They offer powerful ecommerce feature, and their monthly plans range from $26 to $266. Screenshots from the iOS version of Shopify’s mobile app. There’s a simple interface for swapping between a color palette and theme. For example, let’s say you want to change the font color and size in the navigation. If you have limited products or services to offer, your online store is more in the ‘boutique’ sector, and particularly for those who are in the artistic design arena then Squarespace is a solid choice. Shopify vs Squarespace, 10 Factors to Help You Decide 1. On the surface, Shopify’s Customizer looks similar but it’s not as powerful: Customizer is Shopify's tool for theme customization. Let’s go through the key features of Shopify and Squarespace. Ok. On to the good stuff. And as you can see from Google Trends, Shopify has risen to the top of this market over the last ten years: Over the last ten years, Shopify has risen to become the industry leader. Third, Shopify handles URL redirection better than Squarespace. Shopify’s Customizer lets you adjust a few wide-reaching colors and fonts but other than it tends to mostly about enabling or disabling theme options than it is about serious theme customization. And there’s no split testing or segmentation. If your decision has come down to Shopify vs Squarespace, it’s about what you’re looking for and what you’re selling. Example of a paid-for Shopify theme, ‘Capital’. Credit card fees are a percentage fee of your sales charged by the company you choose to process your credit card payments (otherwise known as a payment gateway — we'll discuss these in more depth below). This resulted in a lot of dissimilarities between these two giants. For example, my friend and I started a Shopify store selling toilet paper with a local politicians face on it (don’t worry— he deserved it). You are also obliged to log EU users' consent to any non-essential cookies being used, and give them the option to revoke that consent at a later stage. Alternatively, you can use another email marketing tool such as Getresponse to handle e-newsletter proceedings in Shopify (for which an official integration still exists). What is Squarespace best used for? Additionally, if the 9 free Shopify templates don't meet your requirements, there is a Shopify template store that you can buy a snazzier template from. (More on ‘buy buttons’ in a moment.). Shopify has a WYSIWYG editor similar to Microsoft Word and can occasionally require coding for style tweaks. There's also another benefit to having SSL installed on your site: Google treats it as a 'positive signal' when ranking your site in search. The Shopify free templates are aesthetically pleasing and arguably better than a lot of the ‘out-of-the-box’ templates provided by competing products such as Volusion or BigCommerce. This platform has many ready-made themes to help you make a beautiful online resource. Unverified themes are for sale on other marketplaces like Theme Forest, which has over 900 Shopify themes. Written By Erica Hartwick . Functionality and Ease of Use. It lets you drag content blocks and drop them into columns and rows. I can’t imagine many stores needing this feature— but ours did! The business and e-commerce plans come with more sophisticated options when it comes to pop-up messages and announcement bars. 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