Are you confused between Shopify and Squarespace, don’t know which one to choose. Let us help you in choosing the best platform, Shopify and Squarespace have a lot of similar features but they are completely different with distinct customers. we have compared both of their features head to head so you can take an exact decision, firstly let’s understand both Platforms.
Quick Summary
Shopify and Squarespace are well-known and famous website builder platforms, Below is a quick summary of both platforms.
Shopify
Shopify provides a 14-day free trial and price ranges from ($29 – $299)
100+ themes to support a wide range of businesses(9+ free themes) and pricing ranges from ($180 – $350)
Shopify has 6000+ applications
Shopify is good for small to large businesses.
Shopify provides support through live chat, email, and phone
Shopify exclusively started as an e-commerce building platform to Facilitate the creation of online stores and selling products. Shopify over the years has improved its e-commerce features and integrated a lot of third-party applications to deliver all necessary features required to operate small to large enterprise-level e-commerce businesses.
What Is Squarespace?
Squarespace started as a general website builder to facilitate the creations of websites like business portfolios, personal blogs, arts & designs, Business services, booking websites, etc. they later added basic eCommerce features to create an online store, and over the years Squarespace improved its features and offered an advanced e-commerce plan to support large business.
Shopify is easy to use and set up as it has ready-made pages and can be customized with a WYSIWYG editor. Amazon isn’t easy to set up and use. Winner: Squarespace
2. Ecommerce Features
Shopify’s eCommerce strength lies in third-party applications to provide all kinds of eCommerce functions, Whereas Squarespace offers lots of inbuilt features and selling methods than Shopify. Winner: Tie
3. Themes & Editor
Squarespace offers over 100+ Free templates for all kinds of business, Whereas Shopify offers only 13 free themes & a lot of third-party premium themes. Squarespace themes are beautiful and heavily customizable. Winner: Squarespace
4. Support:
Both Shopify and Amazon offer 24*7 phone, live chat, and email support. Amazon support varies from country to country. Winner: Shopify
5. Pricing:
Amazon plans are cheaper than Shopify, Squarespace eCommerce price ranges from $33 – $65 Whereas Amazon Price ranges from $0-$39.99 per month. Winner: Squarespace
6. Payments and Charges
Amazon offers 100+ payment gateways whereas Squarespace offers less than 5 payment gateways, Squarespace doesn’t charge on sales but Shopify charges on store transactions if Customers pay using payment providers other than the “Shopify payments” gateway. (Shopify payments are limited to a few countries) Winner: Shopify
7. App store
Apps help in automation and adding new features to your store, Shopify has over 6000+ apps to assist in online business, Whereas Squarespace has only 50+ apps. Winner: Shopify
Comparison: Shopify vs Squarespace
Features
Shopify
Squarespace
Free Trial
(14 days Free Trial Available)
(14 days Free Trial Available)
Product Variations
(Less inbuilt product options,However you can enable more product options through third party apps )
Zero Transaction charges
For non-Shopify payment users.
(2% store fees+ 3% payment gateway charge)
For Shopify Payment user 3% processing fee.
( There is a 3% sales charge on the $33 plan )
Free Themes and Templates
(Only 13 Free Themes)
(40+ free themes available)
Hosting and SSL
Multiple Sales Channels
(Only social media channels)
Real Time Shipping rate
(Available at $299/mo advanced Plan)
(Available at $65/mo Advanced commercce plan)
Shipping and Fullfillment Service
(only For USA & Cannada )
App Store
(Limited Apps Only)
Help & Support
(Livechat, Email, Phone)
(Livechat,Email)
POS
(Shopify POS lite is free & Shopify POS Pro is Paid)
(Square POS is Free)
Mobile App
Easy setup
Integration with other Websites
Shopify Lite{$9/month} Feature with a buy button integrates with WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, etc. It doesn't have an online store building feature
FAQ: Shopify vs Squarespace
Is Squarespace a competitor of Shopify?
Squarespace is not a direct competitor to Shopify. There is no match between them when it comes to advanced eCommerce features, Shopify wins. But when the target audiences are single owners who just want to build a quick, hassle-free online store for cheaper prices, then Squarespace is the biggest competitor to Shopify!
Can you use both Shopify and Squarespace?
Both Shopify and Squarespace can be worked together, You can connect Shopify with Squarespace through Shopify lite, which lets you sell on the Squarespace platform. You can also integrate both platforms through Zapier, API2cart, Openpatch etc.
How much does Shopify take per sale?
If you are using payment providers other than Shopify Payments then Shopify charges 2% ($29 plan),1%($79 plan), and 0.5%($299 plan) as transaction fees on each sale, that fee will be added with your store plan for the next billing period.
Can Shopify handle 1 million products?
Yes, Shopify can handle more than 1 million products, you can upload unlimited products on all three plans.
Can Squarespace handle 1 million products?
Yes, Squarespace can handle more than 1 million products.
Is Squarespace a good website?
Squarespace is one of the website builders, it allows you to host and create different types of websites like online stores, portfolios, landing pages, business services, blogs, etc.
Can I dropship with Squarespace?
Yes, you can dropship on Squarespace. You can integrate with extensions like Spocket, Syncee for dropshipping. You can also find extensions of Printful, Printique for print on demand
Is it worth it to sell on Squarespace?
Yes, Squarespace allows you to sell products and services on its Platform, Squarespace is one of the cheapest e-commerce solutions and it doesn’t charge transaction charges on store sales, they provide ready-made templates as per the business needs.
What are the cons of Squarespace?
1. Only five Payment gateways are provided. 2. It’s not good for Multichannel selling 3. Limited extensions available 4. No support on the Phone.
Can you use Squarespace for eCommerce?
Yes, Squarespace provides a fully-fledged e-commerce solution and it is cheaper than all the major eCommerce website builders including Shopify, BigCommerce, etc. most of the eCommerce features are inbuilted and it is a hassle-free platform.
How easy is Shopify?
Shopify is one of the easy and beginner-friendly e-commerce platforms, it has provided all those features to facilitate small to enterprise business, its app store includes all types of apps to add advance features to your shop.
E-commerce and Cart Features
Shopify as its an e-commerce focused platform has essential eCommerce features, One of its new features “Shopify Lite” which costs $9/month, lets you sell on existing websites and offline stores with a buy button, This lite feature doesn’t let you build an online store.
Squarespace goes an extra step as it lets you offer services along with selling products, You can offer Subscriptions, Donations, and Bookings to your customers. You can customize add to cart button and Collect Feedback through custom forms while customers checkout. You can sell digital products with Squarespace’s inbuilt feature but Shopify requires a third-party app to enable the selling of digital products.
“As we compared some of the e-commerce and cart features, Both Shopify and Squarespace ticked the boxes, but Shopify does need apps to operate these functions, hence Squarespace wins the round”
Winner Of E-commerce and Cart feature: Squarespace
Squarespace: 1-0 : Shopify
Templates and Customization
Shopify
Squarespace
Themes
80+
100+
Free Themes
10+
100+
Mobile-Friendly
Yes
Yes
Theme Customization level
Basic
Good
Prebuilt Sections
No
Yes
Shopify’s theme store provides 13 Free themes and 70+ premium themes which cost from ($150 to $350) for all kinds of businesses, you can also get premium themes from third-party marketplaces such as ThemeForest, Creativemarket, Template Monster, etc. They have beginner-friendly theme editors that allow easy customization to build beautiful stores, by adding and rearranging the sections users build a beautiful homepage. You can customize sections by clicking on them, However, Shopify theme customization needs third-party apps or coding skills to add special functions to it. All Shopify themes are mobile responsive.
Shopify Theme Editor
In the theme setting, you can access various styles of themes and can also customize the sections for different colors, fonts, styles,s and more.
Shopify Sitewide styling
Sitewide font styling
If you want to make custom changes to the theme, sections it can be done in the code editor or custom liquid section which requires a bit of coding.
Squarespace is considered one of the best in designing beautiful theme templates, Squarespace has 100+ free themes.Squarespace templates are beautiful and creative for DIY, Home Decor, Photography, etc. You can edit these theme sections by double-tapping them and customizing them for different styles and elements. All Shopify themes are mobile responsive.
Squarespace templates
Squarespace Theme Editor
Squarespace has made it easy for customers to build an online store by providing ready-made template designs for over 25 categories of sections, just clicking on them to insert them and you can change the design of a section by WYSIWYG editor.
Adding a Sectionto Squarespace
Squarespace sitewide styling
Adding custom code to Squarespace
“Squarespace has more number of themes and can be customized easily, so Squarespace wins this round”
Winner Of Templates and Customization: Squarespace
Squarespace: 2-0 : Shopify
Ease of Use and Setup-Which is easy to use?
Shopify is easy to operate and manage, it’s a platform that is flexible for all types of businesses. Shopify channel integration with other e-commerce and social channels allows you to sell on multiple platforms. Some of the popular sales channels are Amazon, eBay, Etsy, etc. You can sell digital products on Shopify using the digital downloads app
Squarespace is easy to use and set up, it’s a platform that has integration with Instagram, and Etsy, for multi-channel selling, However, you can use API2Cart, and Openpatch to integrate with other multi-channels. it provides lots of selling options like offering subscriptions, donations, gifting, etc. you can sell digital products with Squarespace’s inbuilt feature.
“Shopify Enables multichannel selling, It’s also easy to set up, so Shopify wins this round“
Product and Inventory option: Who has better Product options?
Shopify product section has basic features that let you write about the products, and add images, and videos. Shopify has provided product fields to add information like price, inventory, and shipping. You can add variations and edit each variation for different prices, SKUs, etc
In Shopify, you can organize your products by type, tags, and vendor. This will allow you to create collections and categories., you can also create manual collections by adding products.
Shopify Product options
In Squarespace, you can write information about the product in the Inventory section. You can edit fields like Image, inventory, visibility, marketing, checkout, etc. Squarespace provides more product fields.
Squarespace Product options
“Both Shopify and Squarespace have good product editing options, Shopify requires Third-party apps to add more product options, but Squarespace gives more inbuilt options so Squarespace wins the round“
(Prices in the Bracket are applicable when you buy a year plan)
You can get 10% off on annual, and 20% on biennial plans.
Shopify Pricing
Shopify lite plan that lets you sell with a buy button costs $9/month, but this plan in my opinion is simply useless because most of the major payment gateways such as stripe, PayPal, and Square provide the buy button for free you can easily share on social media or in-person that is similar Shopify’s 9$ feature.
Shopify has Enterprise Plan “Shopify plus” which starts onwards at $2000/month. It offers Advance features like Priority Support, a customizable store, and more
In Squarespace plans the first two plans personal and business are best to build websites, While, the business plan is good for creating a small online store, it doesn’t provide enough eCommerce features, we recommend you choose either basic or advanced eCommerce Plan to build a good online store.
“Squarespace has cheaper Plans and it offers a 15% discount on its annual plan which saves your money, hence Squarespace wins this round“
Transaction charges (2%,1%,0.5%) on sales value respectively on 3 plans for non Shopify payment users.
3% only on business plan
Credit Card Charges
✔
✔
Shopify has provided all types of payment options possible to support both domestic and international businesses. It integrates with popular payment methods like Paypal, Stripe, 2checkout, etc. Shopify’s official payment method “Shopify payments” is supported only in 15+ countries, By using it as a payment method you can avoid charges on store transactions.
Shopify Payments supported countries
Australia
Austria
Belgium
Canada
Denmark
Germany
Hong Kong SAR
Ireland
Italy
Japan
Netherlands
New Zealand
Singapore
Spain
Sweden
United Kingdom
United States
If your business is not in the country where Shopify Payments are supported Then Shopify charges 2% ($ 29 plan),1% ($ 79 plan), and 0.5% ($ 299 plan) as transaction fees that will be added to the next billing period.
Squarespace is not near Shopify when it comes to payment options, as of now Squarespace only provides PayPal, Stripe, and Square. As a store owner, you would want to provide more payment options to customers so you don’t miss any sales. Squarespace charges 3% only on business plans, there are no fees charged on the other two eCommerce plans.
If you haven’t understood the charges let me explain with a scenario. if you don’t use Shopify payments then you would be related to the following story,
"Tom and Jack have clothing business, they took their business online. Tom chooses Shopify and Jack chooses Squarespace. they do business is in Mexico where Shopify payments is not supported .They both sell the same T-shirt worth 20$ that gets 100 sales to both of them, but at the end of the month Jack remains Profitable as he only paid $27annual plan + 3% credit card processing fee which was 87$. Whereas Tom paid $26 annual plan +3% credit card processing Fee+ 2% on 100 sales which was $129 at the end of the month"
“Shopify is a clear winner as it has more payment options though it has charges associated with it, if you use Shopify payments you can minimize them”
Marketing Features: Who is best for Marketing Campaigns?
Features
Shopify
Squarespace
Email Campaigns
Shopify has its own email automation software called “Shopify email”, which helps you in building email automation, you can send up to 2500 free mails. Shopify app store has 100+ email automation apps like Omnisend, Klaviyo, etc to give flexibility in email campaigns.
Squarespace has its email automation feature which lets you build campaigns with pre-existing templates, it’s not free but offers a trial that enables you to send 3 campaigns & up to 50000+ emails. its basic plans start from $7/month
Multichannel selling
Shopify has integration with social and eCommerce channels like Amazon,eBay, Etsy, etc to sell across these platforms.
Squarespace doesn’t integrate with eCommerce channels, it integrates with Instagram, Etsy, and Twitter. you can use API2Cart, openpatch to facilitate this feature but it’s paid.
SEO
Shopify has a box-type layout at the end of every product and collection to do on-page SEO, Shopify was considered to be good at speed when it was compared with Squarespace on a speed test.
Squarespace also provides a basic SEO layout after every product, but it’s not that effective in technical SEO in comparison to Shopify.
Blogging
Shopify has an inbuilt blogging section to write about the product and services. This process will enhance the SEO process,
Squarespace provides better blogging features as it’s one of the best CMS, it has beautiful templates and tools for blogging with the online store
Marketing tools
Shopify has some inbuilt marketing tools like gift cards, discounts, etc. Shopify marketing automation lets you run ads on Facebook, Google, and Snapchat so you can view the performance of your campaign from its dashboard. Shopify’s strength lies in its apps store which houses more than 1400+ marketing apps. it has a POS feature that lets you sell in-store.
Squarespace has more inbuilt marketing features than Shopify features like Customer Profiles, notifications, stock alerts, gift cards, custom checkout, etc. Squarespace extension store has 9 apps to assist marketing. it has a Square POS feature to sell in-store
“Shopify has better, SEO and multichannel selling features, So Shopify is the Winner“
Both Shopify and Squarespace have an inbuilt shipping option that lets you display real-time carrier rates for FedEx, DHL, and UPS at customer checkouts in the US Region, However, Shopify can track Cannada, Australia, and UK Carrier’s real-time checkout but Squarespace is for US Stores only. In Shopify, you can print shipping labels directly from the order dashboard. In Squarespace to print shipping labels, you have chosen third-party extension Easyship or ShipStation.
Shopify has its shipping and fulfillment service for the USA and Canadian customers, they also offer extra features like overnight delivery, pick up, & international shipping.
“Shopify and both Squarespace are best at shipping but Shopify has slightly better service, so Shopify wins this round“
Both Shopify and Squarespace provide hosting and SSL Security, They also offer unlimited storage and bandwidth to your site, Shopify has an uptime of 99.98% also Squarespace has an average uptime of 99.96%. both of them provide DDOS security which protects your site from external threats.
We used the following two websites and used wappalyzer to check which platform they are using to build an eCommerce store,
Firstly, we will analyze these two websites’ response times using bytecheck and find their speed response
Source:ByteCheck Source:ByteCheck
We further analyzed the Top 10 Websites of both platforms for their server response and we found that most of Shopify’s website’s average server response time is 350-400 ms, Whereas the Squarespace website’s avg speed response time is 190-230 ms. that means websites hosted on Squarespace load faster in comparison to Shopify.
“When both compared both of their Server speeds, Squarespace had a better result than Shopify, This round was won by Squarespace“
Winner Of Hostings and Security Feature: Squarespace
Squarespace: 5-4 : Shopify
Support and Resources
Shopify
Squarespace
Email
✔
✔
Live chat
✔
✔
Phone
✔
❌
Both Shopify and Squarespace provide the same form of support, to get the support you need to type in their search box, and if you didn’t get the solution then you can contact them, Shopify has an edge over Squarespace as they provide phone solutions along with LiveChat and email support. users can also find resources such as blogs, videos, testimonials, webinars, and Forums for both platforms.
Shopify Support
Squarespace Support
“Shopify has a better support team and resources so this round won by Shopify“
Shopify analytics provides a Dashboard, Reports, and Live view features. Shopify dashboard gives complete data around total sales, most sold, returning customers, traffic source, customer location, etc. Shopify provides reports around inventory, sales, checkout, orders, Profit, marketing, etc. you can also unlock advance reporting by upgrading to the advance plan.
Shopify Analytics
Shopify Live view is a globe-shaped visual that lets you track your visitors turning into your customers, you can have a glimpse of your visitors adding to the cart, checking out, and purchasing from all parts of the world.
Shopify Live View
Squarespace analytics gives an overview of sales, traffic, and geography. it provides e-commerce data around customer acquisition, traffic sources, and searched keywords. Track users’ engagement through site content, Form and button, site search keywords, etc. Squarespace customer profiles provide you data about customers’ relationships with your store and also help you in retaining them as a lifetime customer
Squarespace Analytics
“Both Shopify and Squarespace provide good analytics features, this round goes to both hence, it’s a tie“
If your business requires a lot of automation, and you are ready to invest in third-party apps, Then Shopify is the best choice than Squarespace as it has more automation features.
If you are looking to scale your business, Shopify is better than Squarespace as it provides more scalability features.
If you are planning to do dropshipping business then Shopify is for you, as it has more integration than Squarespace with Global suppliers and shipment companies.
If you sell globally Shopify is better than Squarespace as it has multiple payment options and multilingual and multicurrency options.
If You are tight on budget & your business is in a country that doesn’t support Shopify payments, as Shopify charges 2% on each sale that would minimize your profits, You can use Squarespace which charges 0% for any payment gateway for its $36/month basic & $65/month advanced commerce plans.
If you want a simple & quick platform to build an online store as Squarespace provides easy setup then Shopify.
If you like to write a lot about your products and provide services Squarespace is better than Shopify.
Squarespace is much cheaper than Shopify, you can customize checkout just for a $36/month basic commerce plan (In Shopify, it is $299/month). You can get an inbuilt advance feature at $65 which is($299 in Shopify)
Declan Kingston mainly works around strong Data to create powerful visuals, complex graphs to make the right decision for companies. He has been working in this field for over 8 years, has a strong knowledge of eCommerce platforms and website builders. He has worked with Ethereum and Looker Data Sciences, Inc. (now part of Google Cloud).
