Shopify vs Squarespace: 16 Crucial Factors To Consider

Squarespace is famous for its award-winning attribute designs, with hundreds of templates available. You can find something specific to the industry you are building a website in, and after that, you can customize the look and feel of your website using simple drag and drop functionality. 

You can also customize the text and color options that your site features. Your Squarespace website can also come pre-installed with a portfolio or various collections, a blog and an online store. Each of these can have different interfaces that you can use to showcase your products or services while interacting with your consumers.

Both of these platforms aren't very different regarding ease of use. They both give you a left-hand side menu that allows you to access the offered features.

When it comes to Shopify, you can use this menu to edit your content, add new products and categories, view various reports and data, etc.

The Squarespace interface is also pretty easy to navigate and allows you to set up your site just like you want.

There's also a drag and drop feature that easily allows you to add content to various pages.

Even though Shopify has many more eCommerce features, some say that Squarespace offers slightly easier features to use in the eCommerce field. However, this might also be because there are fewer of them.

Shopify's interface is not as intuitive as Squarespace, and one might need to go through a slight learning curve before pushing their site live. However, once your store is public, the functionality on offer is tough to beat.

The Shopify 2.0 interface (released June 2021)is a much better solution than the previous version. In this update, there's also a focus on improving the site layout with Shopify's platform, and an update to the content blocks functionality.

When it comes to the look and feel of your Shopify or Squarespace themes, both are pretty similar. However, Squarespace templates are slightly more appealing - however, beauty is really in the eye of the beholder.

The consensus is that Squarespace has more varied templates available when compared to the free ones that Shopify offers. As many as 130+ templates come as part of the package deal. Some Squarespace themes also have a wow factor, making them a no-brainer to use.

As I mentioned before, Squarespace can also come with a portfolio included as part of your site. With that said, only a few templates focus on a portfolio design, which means that you might have to play around with various designs to get the look and feel you want when going for a portfolio.

Whether you want to launch a site or build an online store, the ability to market your digital property is critical. With Squarespace, you get email campaigns out of the box, which means you can manage your website and email marketing list in one central location. With that said, you do have to pay extra to use this service.

Integration with the top social media networks such as Facebook and Instagram is relatively straightforward. Shopify allows you to connect up to 10 social media networks to promote your eCommerce site. This is a great way to get more leads through these networks, so you can focus on your marketing activities, including running ads, generating leads, and closing sales.

You can also sync your Shopify products on Amazon, allowing you to take advantage of this site's massive user base. 

When it comes to marketing on social media through Squarespace, website owners that run their site on this platform are somewhat limited. These business owners can only sell on Instagram and deliver content on networks that include LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Pinterest. You might consider this an obstacle if you want to scale your business and get more customers through social networking sites.

You can start a Shopify store that is fully optimized by setting the right SEO properties with built-in features in the system. For example, you can set the sitemap to make sense for your business and update your canonical tags according to the latest and best SEO practices. You can optimize the content on your site, even allowing Shopify to generate titles and meta descriptions for all your products, pages and categories. You can also set up redirects if you were to change site URLs, which is an excellent feature if you want to optimize your site for search engine rankings purposes. 

When it comes to Squarespace, this eCommerce platform also offers many SEO tools that can help you in the search engine game. This platform comes with various features that optimize the process of generating title tags, sitemaps, descriptions etc., through one interface.

One downside of using Squarespace for SEO is related to 301 redirects. If you want to set up these redirects, you will have to do it manually, which can be time-consuming based on the number of pages that need to follow this directive.

When it comes to Squarespace, blogging functionality is one of the top features on this platform. You can have a built-in blog page that comes preset with your site, allowing you to create posts tagged to the correct category from the get-go. You can also accept comments, share your content on social media platforms, etc. There is also a Squarespace app that you can use to push updates on your blog while on the go.

Analytics are essential in any marketing you do. Having the right insights and data available at your fingertips will allow you to see what is working and what needs to change if you want your business to reach its goals.

Both of these platforms have robust features when it comes to analytics. Shopify offers a few more relative to Squarespace since it has about 14 different types of reports divided into various categories. These include production analytics, customer reports, sales reports, finance reports, etc. Based on the subscription plan you are on, Shopify will also give you more advanced reports.

When looking at Squarespace Analytics, one only gets direct data about their website and customers. You can integrate with tools such as Google Analytics for even more in-depth data about your store. The reports that are available out-of-the-box include commerce analytics and traffic trends chatter.

When adding content to your site, Squarespace makes the process easy enough. Various wizards can help you import pages of content posts from WordPress, Tumblr, and Blogger. One important note is that you need to be on the Commerce plan for this to work.

You can also export various types of content to WordPress format, which means that Squarespace is quite a flexible platform if you ever want to migrate from it to another one. One factor to consider when it comes to the potential exporting of data is that you can only export up to 10000 products, and there's a limit of three variants per product.

This can include color, size, material, etc. While this limit is not an issue for many users with small to medium-sized businesses, it can become an issue if you have a massive store with many different products. In that case, I would recommend using Shopify as your platform.

The import and export process is easy when it comes to this software. There's the ability to use a CSV file, and there are no restrictions when it comes to exporting your products. You can also use third-party software to import products effortlessly. 

However, there isn't an out-of-the-box solution that works well for importing blog posts. If you plan on having a blog but then decide to export it to another platform, you might have to do some out-of-the-box thinking. There are third-party apps that can help, but no native ones.

As mentioned at the beginning of this post, Shopify allows you to have a point of sale eCommerce functionality. This means that they have their hardware that works in conjunction with their software for you to accept payments from clients in physical locations. Your hardware will also bill this to your online store's back end. Any reporting and tracking features you have enabled will still work when you make offline sales.

One difference between Squarespace and Shopify is the type of hardware you use when selling. Shopify has a kit that includes a barcode scanner, a cash drawer, a receipt printer, and a card reader. If your inventory level reaches a critical level, this will allow you to get notified so you can order more products. 

Dropshipping is a delivery method that many people who step into the eCommerce world want to get into. It is also the only delivery method that some sellers want to use. In this regard, Shopify is better than Squarespace. There is a wide range of available apps for dropshipping on this platform. When sourcing and selling inventory, you can use Oberlo, which directly integrates with Shopify, offering excellent flexibility and functionality. 

On the flip side, Squarespace is much more limited - while dropshipping is getting better through recent updates, Shopify wins in this area. The same can be said for any Shopify shipping, with many options coming as part of the platform plan itself.

Both Squarespace and Shopify have mobile apps for managing your site or store when not on a desktop computer. When it comes to Squarespace, there are currently three apps: the main Squarespace app, the scheduling app, and the client scheduling app.

With the main app being the only one you need to manage your site, the scheduling app can help you manage appointments with clients, and then you can also use the client app to get clients to book appointments themselves.

There are four different programs and plans when it comes to Squarespace pricing. These are as follows:

The platforms will also add transaction fees on top of the standard pricing. When it comes to Shopify, you can use their integrated Shopify Payments processor, or you can make use of third party payments. If you use Shopify payments, there will be no transaction fees included as Shopify will not take a cut of any sales. There will still be credit card fees, which vary between 2.4% and 2.9% based on your plan.

If you decide to use another payment gateway that is not Shopify payments, you will pay a percentage of each transaction to Shopify. This ranges from 0.5% to 2%. Again, this depends on the plan that you're on.

Shopify is better in this area. There is live chat, phone support, and email, so you are sure to get the answers you need at the time you need them. On the other hand, Squarespace only offers email support and live chat. Shopify also presents its help files in 21 different languages, whereas Squarespace's is only available in six.

Shopify provides a callback system, which means that if their customer support is not available when you need help, they will call you back later. In this instance, there will also be a waiting time provided so you can have an idea of when someone will call you back.

When it comes to the quality of customer support, it depends on the task you need help with. If you're using a standard Shopify template and want to customize it to fit your needs, you can expect to get quite a bit of support. However, if you're using a third-party template that you paid a third-party developer for, you would have to probably deal with the designers of the template rather than get help from Shopify support.

When it comes to Squarespace, you get pretty good assistance for template-related questions. However, if you decide that you need a custom solution and start messing around with the code, support might be more limited. There are also a few hoops to jump through on both platforms when getting help. This means that you first need to go through the various FAQs before getting to the page that allows you to get in touch with their respective teams.

Both of these platforms offer a high level of security for building your store or website. Both platforms provide various SSL certificates, ensuring that customer data is always encrypted and challenging for unauthorized parties to access. Both platforms are PCI compliant, so their security standards are top-notch.