The way businesses are done today have dramatically changed by the presence of online stores. For selling products now having the presence of brick and mortar physical stores is no more a necessity. With more number of users inclined towards using the online stores for the purpose of shopping, it is important for your business to choose the right eCommerce platform for the purpose of building online presence. When it comes to building eCommerce solutions and you compare the available eCommerce platforms, Shopify and Squarespace are considered as the two major players.
Now this seems to be bit confusing for the people who are planning to use one of these platforms. The only question that first comes in the mind is – which is the best eCommerce platform?
To help you out, here we have explained the two platforms in detail so that you can make the right choice.
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The Difference – Shopify vs. Squarespace
At the first glance both Shopify and Squarespace look almost similar as by using any of them you can build your eCommerce store and start selling products without actually having any prior knowledge of design or coding. But then, both these platforms come with unique features which make them different from each other.
Here in this blog we have listed the factors where the platforms differ from each other and explained well about which one to use in case of getting best value for money.
If you are not satisfied with Shopify or Squarespace can try different eCommerce Platforms like Pinnacle Cart, 3D Cart, BigCommerce and other popular online store builders to check what matches your personal demands.
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Creating a website or an eCommerce store
The first and the foremost thing that you need to do is to decide whether you wish to have a website that is content-driven or have an online store. In actual sense an online store is also a website but its primary focus is to sell products. If you wish to just have a website you should think about choosing Squarespace as it comes with a number of templates, have inbuilt CMS and comes with amazing blogging capabilities. However, when it comes to customization there is no much scope and the technical support is limited too.
If you are planning to have an online store developed you should think about Shopify as the best eCommerce platform to choose from. The platform is exclusively designed in a way so as to offer best eCommerce solutions. Compared to Squarespace, Shopify comes with distinct features like third-party app integration, point of sale technology, better reporting features, dropshipping capabilities and easy access to different payment gateways.
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Pricing matters
You can find different plans of different prices from both platforms. Squarespace comes with the cheapest plan called the Personal plan which comes for $16 per month but does not allow you to make any sales. If you want to use your website to make sales you will have to go for Business plan which is $26 per month. While on the other side, the cheapest plan from Shopify is called Shopify Lite which is available for $9 per month and using that you can sell products on your existing website or on the Facebook page.
For those businesses which are opting for Shopify to sell products can make the process of payment quite easier by integration of Shopify Payments. Shopify Payments are currently available only in few countries but they have link with more than 100 third-party payment gateways which means that the shoppers will have smoother and hassle-free transactions. On the other side, Squarespace only offers integration with two payment gateways which means the users will have limited payment options.
When it comes to pricing, Squarespace offers you ‘Business plan’ for a higher rate to sell products. It offers lesser payment options and comes with higher transaction fees which mean the expense will get added. While Shopify offers a Basic Plan for $29 with a complete online store and so turns out to be the cheaper option without decreasing the value of the money you spent.
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Important features of Shopify and Squarespace
To begin with it has to be said that Shopify has helped many businesses in the past by setting up online store in the process of offering effective eCommerce solutions. Again, you can call it as the revenue progressive platform for small businesses. There are some distinctive differences between both the platforms and the same have been explained below.
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User-friendly interface
When it comes to interfaces, both the platforms have similar ones. Squarespace comes with a beautiful and easy to use interface but it crashes and lags often. Shopify has more of a responsive user interface and is more consistent and stronger platform.
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Themes and visuals
In case of Squarespace you will have large number of templates to use while in case of Shopify it is limited to 10. The sad part is that you cannot use those templates easily to build your online store. Shopify offers you different styles within those 10 templates which helps the users to use them in a better manner. Moreover, if you are ready to spend more, you can check out the 55 paid themes that come from the third-party developers of Shopify.
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Importing and exporting product data
We can say that both the platform perform well when it comes to importing and exporting the product data. However, Shopify performs better in case of exporting product data while Squarespace does well in terms of importing.
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Search engine optimization
Compared to Squarespace, Shopify offers better search engine optimization capabilities as it comes with the ability to automatically generate page title and meta description and has better URL redirection.
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Point of Sale
Shopify offers ‘Point of Sale’ kit to the businesses which includes devices like card reader, cash drawer, barcode scanner and receipt printer. This way Shopify can be used by pop-up stall or a retail store with ease. This is something that you will not find in case of Squarespace.
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Which is the better choice – Shopify or Squarespace?
When you take a look at the features like better analytics reporting, higher number of payment gateways, strong support for various communication paths like email, chat support and phone, better coding control of the website – make Shopify a better option compared to Squarespace and can be called better eCommerce platform to be used.
Conclusion
Shopify takes the lead against Squarespace for a number of reasons. The large inventory storage, easy navigation and better store functionality that it offers makes it an excellent choice when it comes to value for money. Again, we should not forget that Shopify has been exclusively developed to meet the requirements of the eCommerce businesses.