Shopify vs Squarespace - which platform do you need to win the tough ecommerce competition in 2022?

Shopify or Squarespace 一 which platform would be ideal to set up an ecommerce online store for your business? Comparing Shopify vs Squarespace is the best way to divulge the best ecommerce features and usability for ecommerce growth. 

Read on to understand the key differences between these two platforms. With insights into these platforms, it will help you decide if you should migrate Squarespace to Shopify or choose Shopify for your online store when starting out with your ecommerce aspirations. 

Let’s dive in! 

Shopify vs Squarespace: a quick run through interesting differences

In the ecommerce space, none is unaware of the facts of how the Canadian ecommerce giant has disrupted the SaaS-based ecommerce ecosystem. Squarespace has made a mark in the space of website building.

Source: Shopify* & Squarespace**

At first glance, Shopify vs Squarespace seems pretty uneven matchup. 

Shopify from its true core offers a dedicated and a wider range of ecommerce tools to sell online anywhere. It has advanced architecture and underlying technologies to help any size of business, small or large. 

Unlike Shopify, Squarespace is a top-rated website builder, especially for the creative industry, while supporting online selling for small-scale businesses with less advanced ecommerce tools. 

When it comes to Shopify vs Squarespace, it boils down to your exact business requirement, budget, and your business persona to determine the perfect platform for your needs. If one fits a particular requirement, the other suits just a different business model. 

To test the suitability of your business, the free trial is a cost-saving option. Try it out and decide which one you need: Shopify or Squarespace. 

But, before we deep dive more into their strengths and weaknesses, let us give you some important heads up into their similarities. 

Shopify vs Squarespace 一 what are the similarities between the two?

Shopify vs Squarespace ecommerce: all-round difference

Ease of use for customizability

Shopify or Squarespace - what do you think which platform provides an easy learning curve for your objective.

Shopify solely caters to ecommerce website development, while Squarespace can build all types of websites including an online store.

Users generally want to see how much are their page editors intuitive and beginner-friendly for customization.

Squarespace page editor

When you build a content-specific website, Squarespace provides excellent templates, more than 100 free templates. Its CMS is intuitive and the blogging engine is attractive too. Its drag-and-drop page editor is intuitive and easy for beginners.

• Content blocks allow for an extreme level of customization. You can use it to add different elements like forms, maps, buttons, charts, and many more to pages.
• Within content blocks, are sections. These sections are designed from scratch.
• Find more than 100 templates, which are easy to customize. A color palette appears automatically across your website editor to preview it and see live which tone best fits your requirement.
• Basic tweaks to colors and typefaces can be easy to achieve.
• Squarespace page editor also allows you to turn any website into an ecommerce site. However, it is suitable for small stores only.

Closed source builder. Squarespace does not allow seamless integration with third-party apps in case you don’t get access to site full code access. To extend the customization level, you remain stuck with HTML only.

Shopify Page Editor

Shopify contains a page editor similar to Microsoft. Its WYSIWYG-based editor enables you to add videos, images, text within the text. For many users, it is a painful experience to create layouts within an editor.

• Shopify has fewer templates compared to Squarespace. However, using its HTML and CSS you can easily make customization, which suits your online store.
• Shopify’s section-based editor helps you play around with sections within the homepage.
• Many Shopify themes may have or not have the Customizer tool. In that case, you need to edit the CSS code.
• With continuous engineering of ecommerce technology, Shopify Online Store 2.0-specific templates are best to customize to add more blocks and sections to any page you like.

Note: If you cannot jump to CSS code for customizing your theme, hiring a Shopify theme expert can be the best choice.

Verdict:

Both use drag-and-drop editors and provide intuitiveness. But in terms of templates, Squarespace remains the best choice with lots of templates to add aesthetic appeal.

However, we must not forget that Squarespace and Shopify have theme marketplace.

Ecommerce tools and features

Being able to help merchants sell online, an ecommerce platform must facilitate different functionality. Let’s see who’s winning in this segment.

Squarespace sales tools

Squarespace has leveled up its ecommerce capabilities for online selling of physical and digital products. Basic functionalities include sales tax, inventory management, product management. However, the downside is that it offers only 3 payment gateway options. It can certainly impact your selling opportunities in many countries. Notably, Squarespace does not support Google Pay.

Shopify ecommerce tools

Squarespace is improving its ecommerce stature, but, Shopify ensures merchants do not experience a single scope for shopping cart abandonment.

Shopify comes with more than 100 payment gateways to help visitors to convert. Starting from Google Pay Apple Pay to Bitcoin, it ensures shoppers can shop on its stores globally with ease. Along with this, Shopify Payments does not incur any transaction fees while it integrates with major payment options. The best thing about this payment method is that it supports accelerated checkout with Shop Pay and gives customers extended flexibility to shop friction-free.

Unlike Squarespace, Shopify has more social channels to promote the online selling of physical and digital products.

Shopify has a robust app store with 7000 third-party apps to support your scaling. It is bigger than Squarespace, with only 20 extensions.

Verdict:

Here in this Shopify vs. Squarespace battle, Shopify is a winner if it comes down to building an ecommerce store and growing fast.

Squarespace steadily makes its ecommerce arsenal strong, but it still lags behind Shopify.

Search engine optimization in Shopify and Squarespace

Squarespace and Shopify have in place the best SEO practices. They give you better control over on-page SEO elements.

With both the platform, you can control,

• Page URLs
• Page titles
• Meta description
• Alt text
• 301 redirects

With Shopify, SEO is little more than easier on Squarespace. You can have automated suggestions for the page titles and meta descriptions. This automated aid helps products be visible in the search engines, thus improving ranking and conversion. Squarespace rarely does this for your ecommerce store.

Also, if you look deeper into Squarespace aspects, it does not have advanced features nor has any guide that could suggest better tricks to improve your store SEO.

Alternatively, Shopify allows its users to apply the best SEO practices to their fullest and improve conversion.

Verdict:

Shopify has social media solutions and email marketing within its architecture, enabling merchants to achieve advanced marketing leads which improve user experience and earn new income as compared to Squarespace.

Shopify is a clear winner here.

Selling in person through Shopify and Squarespace

When you have the power of the Point of Sale tool or POS functionality, it gives you an edge to connect your online store with your offline retail. The advantage is it allows your customers to purchase an item online and enables them for a curb-side or retail pickup. You need this powerful technology during festive sales or flash sales to pump up your revenue streams.

Squarespace has just started its POS system with Square integration. Unfortunately, users do not have the flexibility of advanced POS technologies beyond an essential card reader.

As we compare Shopify vs Squarespace, Shopify offers the best capabilities to sell offline. Shopify has advanced POS hardware to keep track of your store inventory, making you aware of the store stock and keeping your sales intact.

Also, Shopify Point of Sale has more features than Squarespace. It includes a card reader, barcode scanner, and cash drawer.

With staff accounts and pin numbers, you can also allow other team members to manage inventory and sales.

Verdict:

It is nothing as challenging as you think to decide which POS solution could be right for you. It has comprehensive features that improve your sales results.

Marketing features in Shopify vs Squarespace

What exciting and leading marketing features do Shopify and Squarespace have stacked up? Yes, these platforms incorporated useful and dynamic features. But, you cannot drive profitable sales, unless you have methods that you can utilize to promote your online store.

When using Shopify vs Squarespace, product tracking is so easy and then preparing metrics for marketing performances.

Merchants can easily leverage automatic open graphs, metadata, product schema. In addition, you can also make use of integrated header scripts.

Social media integration

With social media integration, you can add up to 10 social media channels, including Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Unlike Squarespace, Shopify has multiple social media advertising channels and tools in the market place to help you promote and drive traffic to your online site. Shopify’s app store also allows you to connect with more than 10 social media apps and add integrations to sell with more customers.

On the other hand, Squarespace has limited social media and integration benefits for merchants. You won’t have the flexibility to integrate the best of social media marketing apps to your site due to the absence of a robust marketplace.

So, you are left with no choice to add buttons to your Squarespace store, which is a downside for you as you are likely to outgrow very soon.

Squarespace enables you to sell only on Facebook and Instagram.

Email marketing

With Squarespace and Shopify, you can leverage better email marketing solutions using third-party apps. Fetching customer details and then using data to create an enhanced marketing campaign is a convenient process to personalize the user experience. Effective email marketing is useful in getting customers to signup for newsletters, which is crucial for business growth.

Both Shopify and Squarespace integrate with tools like MailChimp, GetResponse, AWeber, Campaign Monitor, and so on.

But, the drawback of Squarespace is that it allows easy integration with MailChimp only 一 and to integrate other apps, you have to rely on Zapier. It adds to extra costs and effort for setting up the integration.

To add more specific custom fields, built-in email marketing features are effective on both platforms.

Squarespace Email Campaigns and Shopify Email are two native features. The former has four different plans to send newsletters to subscribers up to 250,000.

With Shopify Email, you don’t need to worry about monthly fees. You can send as many as 25000 newsletters to your subscribers with no extra cost at all. At the same time, you just need to pay $1 each month for every additional 1000 recipients.

Analytics in Shopify vs Squarespace

Extensive analytics and monitoring make sure that your business is performing as per your expectations.

With Squarespace, you can take advantage of its built-in analytics software to keep track of the total number of orders, revenue, and decline in sales. Although Squarespace does not match up with Shopify with its advanced analytics capabilities, both platforms integrate with Google Analytics. Also, Squarespace does not allow its merchants to receive stock monitoring alerts.

Shopify is always the best choice when it comes to making the best use of analytics and reporting for your online business. It comes loaded with advanced reporting performance. It is easier to track every bit of customer activity and traffic sources. With Shopify reporting and analytics, you are guaranteed with 一

• Finance reporting
• Sales reporting
• Customer reporting
• Acquisition reporting
• Activity analytics

The best part of Shopify’s analytics is that it dedicatedly allows you to create custom reports. The report clearly shows customer behavior, their demographics. Stock level emails and notifications are great assets of the reporting and analytics from Shopify which you can use to keep your inventory well-stocked.

Pricing: Shopify or Squarespace

Squarespace pricing plans

Squarespace has four monthly plans, including,

• Personal - $16
• Business -$26
• Basic Commerce - $30
• Advanced Commerce - $46

Shopify pricing plans

• Basic Shopify - $29
• Shopify -$79
• Advanced Shopify -$299

Squarespace seems affordable compared to Shopify. When you sign up for an annual plan, you shell out less than the actual price. It becomes $12, $18, $26, $40 respectively.

Similarly, Shopify reduces the pricing plans when you purchase a yearly subscription. It comes down to $26.10, $71.10, $269.10 respectively.

Verdict

Squarespace is comparatively cheaper than Shopify. But, sometimes, being affordable does not affirm that it is capable of handling your diverse ecommerce needs. Squarespace has a limited number of ecommerce tools and this is probably the reason why it is affordable.

If Shopify is slightly expensive, it is due to its wider range of ecommerce tools and ecommerce functionality.

Squarespace is suitable for ecommerce when you have a small store to manage. From that perspective, this ecommerce platform gets a slight edge in the pricing list.

Shopify vs Squarespace: Pros & Cons

Should you migrate Squarespace to Shopify?

When your online store on Squarespace has limited capabilities to expand and scale, you can certainly decide to move out of Squarespace. If you think this comparison of Shopify vs. Squarespace has given you enough insights, decide to migrate Squarespace to Shopify.

Conclusion

Shopify or Squarespace 一 which one to choose as you think to migrate from another platform depends on your take on these two platforms if you are new to both these platforms. However, for existing Squarespace merchants, you can discover why the Canadian ecommerce platform is staying ahead in the competition of Shopify vs. Squarespace.

Even it is Shopify vs Square, we certainly say the former provides ecommerce benefits to the core level for your unique business needs and gives you a better edge.

Aside from the migration needs, if you think you need to start out with your online business, we would recommend checking your personal business objectives and their suitability with the respected platform. Shopify vs Squarespace - both have their ups and downs, but their capabilities certainly match specific requirements to push through your objectives.

Decide and choose your platform wisely to win the toughest ecommerce battle in 2022.