Shopify Vs. Squarespace: Strength and Weakness of Ecommerce Builders

With steady growth in online shopping, total Ecommerce sales are expected to exceed $7 trillion by 2025. Increasing ROI makes Ecommerce businesses sell their offerings globally by creating an online store. However, the exciting opportunity is accompanied by the challenge of Ecommerce platform selection.

With a myriad of Ecommerce platforms like- Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, Squarespace, and others leading the charge with their unique strength and weaknesses, it takes work to make the right choice. Shopify has grabbed the wider market share of 28% in the USA by powering 4.4 billion Ecommerce stores. On the contrary, Squarespace boasts of backing up 4.6 billion online shops.

Both giants are serving online stores at scale. Comparing Ecommerce platforms’ capabilities with business-specific needs for Ecommerce development helps discerning the best platform.

Realizing this need, the guide compares the top two Ecommerce platforms- Shopify and Squarespace for launching a new Ecommerce store. Hopefully, the one-to-one comparison makes things easier for your business.

The Head-To-Head Comparison of Shopify and Squarespace- Which Is the Best?

The two e-commerce platforms, Shopify and Squarespace, are the prominent platforms that stack up against one another with their features, integration, customization capability, and pricing plans. The detailed overview of each platform simplifies the selection.

Simplify the usage

Non-technical geeks can build online e-commerce stores using Ecommerce development platforms, but ease of use lets them give preference to one over another.

Shopify allows users to build online stores by choosing one of the 100 themes that support animation. Businesses can choose paid themes with unlimited customizations that offer specialized designs. With a simple drag-and-drop facility, the design elements are placed on various pages. There's AI functionality that enables the creation of a full-fledged store after getting answers to some of the questions. Domain selection helps with hosting online stores securely, which gives complete control over the website. It concludes that Shopify is a better investment than custom ecommerce website development for online sales.

“Shopify let us build an Ecommerce platform without having prior knowledge or allocating significant resources.” Fred — Luca + Danni

Squarespace provides a range of templates that users can select to get a custom domain name to start creating an online store. Businesses can opt to add photos and text of their choice or customize fonts, colors, and stock photos to make the store visually appealing. The online tool to create logos is an add-on that reduces the learning curve for designers.

Customization capability

Crafting the online store in your way is possible when the Ecommerce platform facilitates extensive customization.

Shopify offers unlimited customization with customizable templates from world-class Shopify designers. Shopify themes are tweaked the way users want, from functionalities to design components using the visual editor. The free updates ensure that tailored designs always have the latest version available.

Squarespace platform gains an upper hand with flexible designer templates that are customized to fit online store needs. Users will get a theme by answering a couple of questions or providing a brief description of store needs. It also facilitates a hybrid approach wherein users can select themes and fonts and add the pages.

Product display organization

Ecommerce platforms provide unique functionalities with drag-and-drop editors to organize and display the products/services optimally.

Shopify is packed with dozens of functionalities to improve product display and make it easier for users to browse and buy the offerings. Businesses can add product videos and branding to the product page to help gain users’ attention. New types of structured content such as lookbooks, think banners, influencer profiles, and unique information additions to product listings help deliver what the users are looking for. Shopify developers help you harness the Shopify functionalities and integrate apps from the Shopify app store to enhance product display.

Squarespace allows businesses to display products that are easy for customers to browse, add to their cart, and then checkout efficiently. Businesses can list unlimited products under different categories that users can search and find easily. Several layout designs enable showcasing products with product descriptions, images, videos, and related products. Product quick view and 360-degree zoom make it easy to access product details without leaving the page. Visibility and scheduling ensure the product appears on a specific date and time, thereby getting ahead of promotions.

Marketing tools

Marketing is essential to drive traffic to the website, increase conversion, and grow ROI at scale. Ecommerce platforms provide a range of marketing tools that help businesses promote and sell their offerings online.

Shopify helps in reaching out to potential users with integrated marketing tools. Built-in blogging tools help with content marketing to drive traffic to the store. Social media ad usage enables a growing targeted audience. Customer segmentation builds unique customer groups that will allow automated and personalized marketing, which strengthens customer relationships. Strategic email marketing campaigns help connect with every customer using ready-made designs.

“Shopify makes it really easy to run a campaign... all I have to do is set my daily budget.” Ryan — Longboard Living

Squarespace email marketing campaign enables the creation of consistent and effective email content that improves email opening rate. Artificial intelligence helps get customized content quickly when the required input for marketing content is provided. Built-in SEO tools allow configuring meta titles, creating custom URLs, and other tools that maximize search result performance. Social media integrations facilitate buying directly from social channels without back-and-forth. Analytics provide a holistic view of the website, including- page views and sales.

Pricing structure

Budget is a vital consideration before selecting an e-commerce platform. Both platforms offer a wide range of pricing plans with distinct sets of features to accommodate various business needs.

Shopify offers four different plans- basics, Shopify, plus, and Advanced, with a free trial. All four plans include the best checkout, in-person selling, multiple sales channels, in-depth analytics, and commerce apps to sell online at scale. There are alternative solutions—starter and retail for businesses with limited budgets and are billed in the selected currency.

Squarespace lets businesses create beautiful online Ecommerce stores with a free 14-day trial period. There are two plans for building a website and two for building Ecommerce stores. The basic plan starts at $28 per month, including all the basic features and the advanced commerce plan costs $52 per month, having all the basic and advanced features to launch giant stores painlessly.

The last word

Shopify is a big name in online ecommerce development platforms and BigCommerce, Magento, Squarespace, and other Ecommerce platforms are trending to power Ecommerce stores. That’s why businesses are entangled in the Ecommerce builder wars such as Shopify Vs. BigCommerce, Magento Vs. Shopify, or Squarespace Vs. Shopify, which makes the selection difficult. This blog sheds light on Shopify Vs. Squarespace with attention to detail.

The one-to-one comparison of Shopify and Squarespace ensures that no one wins in the selection battle as it boils down to the business needs. When customization, multiple payment gateway integration, scalability, POS, and app ecosystem are your needs, Shopify must be your choice. Squarespace is the best selection when you are looking for several designs and templates, advanced functionalities, content creation, and pricing transparency. Both Ecommerce development platforms have an edge over one another in different aspects. So check out the comparison to find out the ideal choice for an Ecommerce builder and build the online Ecommerce store efficiently.