Squarespace vs BigCommerce: Which Is Best Platform For Your eCommerce Needs?

Squarespace is a general website builder, it lets you build any kind of website, and it offers free beautiful online store templates. you can start an online store with fully-fledged eCommerce from the business plan($23/month)

BigCommerce is focused on building eCommerce websites, their plans can house small, and medium-size businesses to large enterprise businesses starting from ($29/month)

Quick Summary

Squarespace and Bigcommerce are well-known and famous E-commerce platforms, Below is a quick summary of both platforms.

#7 Main Differences

1. Ecommerce Features

BigCommerce is a fully-fledged platform to facilitate building online stores, whereas Squarespace is a website builder which also has eCommerce building plans. Bigcommerce provides all essential store-building features along with third-party apps to provide new eCommerce features
Winner: BigCommerce

2. Domain and Hosting

Both BigCommerceand Squarespace provides inbuilt hosting. Bigcommerce doesn’t provide a custom domain, but Squarespace provides a free custom domain upon registering for the annual plan.
Winner: Squarespace

3. Themes & Editor

Squarespace offers over 50+ eCommerce themes & 150+ Free templates for all kinds of business, Whereas BigCommerce offers only 11 free themes and a lot of paid themes. Squarespace themes are beautiful and heavily customizable.
Winner: Squarespace

4. Support:

BigCommerce offers 24*7 phone, live chat, and email support. Whereas Squarespace offers 24*7 Email support, and Live chat support on weekdays.
Winner: BigCommerce

5. Pricing:

Squarespace plans are cheaper than BigCommerce, Squarespace eCommerce price ranges from $23 to $65 /month Whereas BigCommerce Price ranges from $29 to $299 /month.
Winner: Squarespace

6. Payments and Charges

Bigcommerce offers more payment gateways (70+ payment providers) whereas Squarespace offers less than 5 major payment gateways (Those 5 Gateways accept 98% of all debit/credit cards), Squarespace and Bigcommerce don’t charge on store transactions.
Winner: BigCommerce

7. App store

Apps help in automation and adding new features to your store, BigCommerce has over 1000+ apps to assist in online business, Whereas Squarespace has around 50+ apps.
Winner: BigCommerce

Comparison: Squarespace vs BigCommerce

Features	Squarespace	BigCommerce
Sell Products	5 list and sell unlimited physical and digital products	5 list and sell unlimited physical and digital products
Sell Services	5 you can sell service (portfolio, booking ,business, restaurant, etc) on squarespace	3 bigcommerce doesn't provide essential inbuilt features to sell services on it's platform
Sell Subscriptions	4.3 This feature is available on Squarespace advanced plan ($40).	3.5 No, but you can get this feature through third-party apps from the Bigcommerce app store
Sell Digital Content	5 You can sell digital products on Squarespace.	5 You can sell digital products on bigcommerce by mentioning product type as digital.
Abandoned Cart Recovery	4.8 Abandon cart recovery feature is available for commerce advance plan($40)	4.5 Abandon cart recovery is available for Plus and Pro plans ($71 and $269)
Product Category & Subcategories	5 You can Organize products in categories and subcategories.	5 Here you can also organize the products by category and subcategory
Limited Availability Labels	4.5 You can enable it and notify your customers about low stock and restock, it's available on advanced plan($40)	5 You can set the low stock count, stock level, email alerts in advance setting of bigcommerce
Discounts &Gift Cards	5 You can offer discounts and digital gift cards to each products	5 You can offer discounts and gift cards to each products
Related Products	4.5 You can automatically or manually display related products similar to a product.	5 You can automatically or manually display related products simillar to a product, You can display upto 50 related product.
Flexible Product Variants	4.5 In Squarespace you can have upto 100 Variants per product.	5 In BigCommerce you can have upto 600 Variants for a product
Customizable Checkout	4.5 You can customize checkout settings in commerce section	3.5 you need to add custom CSS,JS to your at checkout to customize checkout
Custom Forms for Products	5 you can create custom forms for product to recieve valuable information from the customers	3 you need to integrate with third party app to add custom forms on product page.
Single Page Checkout	5 Squarespace has single page checkout for all devices	5 Bigcommerce also has single page checkout which cuts off extra steps for purchasing.
Customer Accounts creation	5 Squarespace lets you offer a customer account creation feature.	5 Bigcommerce too has this feature on all of its themes.
Point of Sale	4.5 Squarespace has integration with Square to Facilitate Point of Sale Feature	5 Bigcommerce has lots of POS apps which are free and paid. They have POS System like(Clover,Square.Vend)
Mobile Responive	5 all of it's themes are mobile responsive	5 Bigcommerce themes are also mobile responsive
Donations	5 Squarespace has a donation block to edit and manage the amount of donations.	3 Bigcommerce doesn't have this feature However you can get this feature through third-party applications.
Product Reviews	5 You can enable review feature from product dashboard.	5 you can enable review feature from advance setting
Multiple Payment Methods	3 Squarespace has only 3-4 payment providers.	5 BigCommerce has over 70+ payment providers
Extension and integration	3 Squarespace has 20+ extensions in their store.	5 BigCommerce has 1000+ apps in it's app store
Real time shipping rate	4.5 This feature is available on squarespace advanced plan($40)	5 Bigcommerce has this feature available on all of its plans
Tax Rates	5 you can setup manual tax setting, However if you are from US you can setup automated tax through TaxJar.	5 In BigCommerce you can set up both manual and automated tax, automated tax only displays when the customer puts his address at checkout.
Shipping & pickup	5 You can offer International,Local and curbside shipping to your customer on Squarespace	5 You can offer International, Local and curbside shipping on Bigommerce
Shipping Labels	4.5 Get shipping label through USPS if you are from the US, You can use shipstation for printing shipping label	4.5 you can print shipping label for USPS through endica, you can also use third party apps like ship station, etc. to print labels

FAQ: Squarespace vs BigCommerce

1. Hostings and Security

Squarespace offers inbuilt shared hosting and SSL security, it provides Unlimited storage and bandwidth to your site. They have powerful CDN to back up your data, and Squarespace has DDOS security that protects you against threats.

BigCommerce offers multi-secure hosting servers, It has a really good loading speed and good uptime of 99.99% and BigCommerce provides advanced SSL security for Pro Plan.

We analyzed the following two websites.

We first analyzed these two websites’ response times & found these result

We further analyzed the Top 10 Websites of both platforms for their server response and we found that most of the Squarespace website’s avg server response time is 190-230 ms, Whereas the BigCommerce website’s avg speed response time is 375-430 ms. means websites hosted on Squarespace load faster in comparison to BigCommerce

After comparing both the servers we have found Squarespace has a better response than Bigcommerce hence it’s a winner

Winner Of Hostings and Security: Squarespace

2. Theme Templates and Customization

Squarespace has gorgeous templates, they provide a variety of templates to meet all businesses’ requirements. It has 50+ Free online store themes that include categories like home decor, health & beauty, Baby, Food, etc. All Squarespace themes are easy to customize and design, you can easily customize themes for different layouts, styles, colors, and fonts.

Squarespace Themes

like Godaddy Squarespace too has various prebuilt sections and good these sections can be customized for different styles, colors, fonts, etc. you can do sitewide styling for Squarespace as shown in the below gif, to add a custom design or elements you need to perform manual customization through custom CSS, HTML, etc.

BigCommerce has 12 free themes & over 100+ Paid themes whose price ranges from ($50 to $300), Bigcommerce themes come in different styles, and you can have multiple varieties for the same theme. Themes are organized according to the categories like health & food, fashion, fitness, etc. Themes can be customized in a theme file editor, using Custom HTML, and CSS. Bigcommerc’s drag & drop feature lets you build a store quickly and fast, From its page builder, you can drag different sections to the homepage, and each of the sections can be customized for different layouts, colors, and styles.

BigCommerce Themes

BigCommerce Theme Customization

As Squarespace has more free themes and provides easy interference to customize the web page so it’s a clear winner

Winner Of Theme template and customization: Squarespace

3. Product and Inventory option

Both Squarespace and Bigcommerce offer plenty of inbuilt features for product options and management. Squarespace provides good features to enhance product attributes, here in Squarespace you can add up to 100 variants for each product, and embed product videos. In the product options, you can edit the product for its visibility, SEO, Checkout, forms, etc. you can also sell digital files on Squarespace, which has a separate option to upload digital products In the Product section.

Squarespace product option

BigCommerce offers plenty of product features in the storefront section. Bigcommerce lets you add up to 600 product variations for each product & also lets you select different product types for each product variant. it has several third-party applications to assist in adding new product option features, Bigcommerce storefront feature lets you do SEO of your store homepage which is really helpful if you have a large catalog so users can search.

BigCommerce product option

BigCommerce offers more product variants and options, hence it’s the winner of this feature

Winner Of Product and Inventory option: BigCommerce

4. Marketing

BigCommerce is good at SEO and also offers over 1000+ apps in their app store to facilitate all kinds of eCommerce features

BigCommerce offers excellent marketing features in all aspects, it has an app store that allows you to add new marketing features hence it’s a winner

Winner Of Marketing Feature: BigCommerce

5. Pricing and Plans :

Squarespace has four plans

• Personal:$23/m($16)
• Business:$33/m($23)
• Basic Commerce:$36/m($27)
• Advanced Commerce:$65/m($49)

(Prices in the Bracket are applicable when you buy a year plan)

Squarespace Pricing

In Squarespace plans the personal plan is useful for building websites like (blogs, portfolios, service websites, etc.) later they added business plans to enable building an eCommerce website but it didn’t have enough features to build a professional online store, so they later added eCommerce focused basic and advanced plans.

• Standard:$39/m($29)
• Plus:$105/m ($79)
• Pro: $399/m ($299)
• Enterprise: Custom Pricing

(Prices in the Bracket are applicable when you buy a year plan)

BigCommerce Pricing

As Squarespace has much cheaper plans than BigCommerce, it’s a winner for this round.

Winner Of Pricing and Plans: Squarespace

6. Payment option and Charges

Squarespace doesn’t have an inbuilt feature to display multi-currency at checkout, instead, you can display multiple currency options on the store so the customer can check prices in their currency. As a store owner, you would like to provide multiple payment methods to your customers, but Squarespace has integration only with PayPal, Stripe, and Square. If you are on a basic or advanced eCommerce plan there are no fees on store transactions, However, if you are using the business plan you will be charged 3% on every store transaction.

Bigcommerce has plenty of options when it comes to payment methods, it has provided multicurrency checkout, Buy now pay later options. They have numerous checkout options like single-click checkout, Accelerated checkout, and more. Bigcommerce offers smooth integration with PayPal, stripe, and 70+ other payment providers. BigCommerce doesn’t charge fees on any of its plans.

BigCommerce offers more payment methods and options and also doesn’t charge on any of its plans hence it’s a winner of this feature.

Winner Of Payment option and Charges: Squarespace

7. Support and Resources

Both Squarespace and BigCommere provide excellent support to their customers, Squarespace offers live chat, and email support to its customers, They have an active forum, and community to help resolve your queries. They also have a step by step video tutorials on using Squarespace.

Squarespace support

BigCommerce Offers Live chat, Phone, and Email support to their customers, they have articles on the most commonly asked questions. They too have an active community to solve queries.

BigCommerce Support

BigCommerce provides 24*7 support and also has more forms of support hence it’s a winner

Winner Of Support and Resources: BigCommerce

Squarespace vs BigCommerce Stats

Squarespace undoubtedly is the most used website builder than Bigcommerce as they have 10 times more websites than Bigcommerce, But when it comes to the leading websites in the top 10k,100k,1M websites of the world Bigcommerce is ahead of Squarespace, this indicates that Bigcommerce eCommerce builder offers more scalability than Squarespace

Top Squarespace websites

Top BigCommerce Sites

Top Stories

Pros and Cons: Squarespace vs BigCommerce

Conclusion: Squarespace vs BigCommerce

Use Squarespace over BigCommerce,

• If your business is small and doesn’t want to invest much in apps and expensive plans then Squarespace is better than BigCommerce as it’s cheaper and has plenty of inbuilt features.
• If you are trying to offer services along with selling the product then Squarespace is best as it has service features to aid your business.

Use BigCommerce over Squarespace,

• If you have a business and you are looking for automation to handle your business functionalities then Bigcommerce is great for you.
• If you are looking for extensive scaling globally then Bigcommerce is better as it has all those plans to cover your business scalability and multicurrency feature to sell coss borders.

Declan Kingston

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).