Shopify vs Squarespace: Who is the Ultimate Winner in 2022

1. Shopify Vs Squarespace: Ease to Use

Shopify

Shopify has a very user-friendly dashboard that uses a drag and drop design by which you can simply add, remove or move sections by yourself with just a few clicks. Along with that, Shopify has a clear interface with visual indications and shortcuts to add products, customize themes and add a domain on the main page. Therefore, you never feel lost when designing your online store.
However, since its inception, Shopify has gained a well-deserved reputation for its coherence in setting up, and operating on a day-by-day basis.
Moreover, with Shopify, you can initiate selling in just a few minutes and don’t have to be an expert at building stores efficiently. In case you have no idea about how to set up a Shopify Store, you should consult professional Shopify web developers.

Squarespace

Although Squarespace is also a hosted cart, it is a bit more difficult to get to grips with compared to its competitors effectively., Squarespace offers drag-and-drop sections which makes it easy for beginners to use it. 

However, for individuals who are new to building eCommerce websites, it will take them some extra time to comprehend the system of Squarespace.

2. Shopify and Squarespace: Sales Feature

Both Shopify vs Squarespace for eCommerce allows you to sell physical and digital products. Nonetheless, you will require to install an application to sell digital products on Shopify like Digital Downloads while you can sell any type of product on Squarespace.

Both of these website builders serve you with unlimited products, the ability to add single or bulk items, in-house revenue reports, and direct email alerts for low stock.

Payment options in Shopify and Squarespace

Shopify supports all the major payment gateways such as PayPal, Square, Amazon Pay, or even digital currency as well as more than 100 other options. Moreover, to help store owners enhance the conversion rate, Shopify keeps offering more payment options, especially for local providers.

Users of Shopify payments won’t be charged with any additional transaction fees, which will fall in a range of 0.5% to 2% per transaction for all the other payment methods. Recently, Shopify payments are only available in 17 countries including Australia, Belgium, and much more. In case you are one of the natives of these nations, ensure to take advantage of Shopify payment to avoid this extra cost.

Squarespace Payments

Unlike Shopify, Squarespace limits the payment options as it supports only PayPal, Square, and Stripe. The below infographic will help you understand the feature of each payment processor so that you can get a clear idea of different payment methods processors:

Shipping Options

Everything you require from printable shipping labels to built-in integration with shipping services such as NHL or UPS and dropshipping are available in Shopify. Moreover, they ensure the shipping exposure is as smooth as possible.

Well, Squarespace really can’t compete with Shopify on this one. So far, they have been working with UPS to calculate carrier shipping rates. It allows you to modify shipping costs depending on the country you’re shipping to, or by weight.

Selling Offline – POS

Shopify designed its own POS system for on-the-go sales and brick-and-mortar sales. It is available in every Shopify plan and will sync efficiently with your online stores.

To pursue this, you will require to download the Shopify application and buy some hardware like Shopify chip and Swipe reader or chip card reader. Additionally, you are required to pay a transaction fee that is 2 to 7% for the basic plan, 2 to 5% for Shopify. And if you want to have an advanced plan for every offline sale then you have to pay a 2 to 4% transaction fee. 

However, in the meantime, Squarespace partnered with Square to develop a point of sale. You initiate the Squarespace commerce app and a Square card reader which costs approximately about $49.

3. Shopify and Squarespace: Marketing Features

Here is a list of some marketing features of Shopify and Squarespace that will help you understand what is the difference between Shopify and Squarespace effectively.

Email campaigns

Squarespace offers email campaigns out of the box as it allows you to manage both your website as well as a mailing list in one place. However, you have to pay extra to use it. There are 4 plans available:

Squarespace Email Campaign Pricing

On top of that, the e-newsletter in Squarespace has a drag-and-drop associate that makes it very easy to edit. Besides, you can also drop your blog post or product information into your newsletters effortlessly.

Whereas with Shopify, they have also recently introduced an email marketing tool such as Shopify Email which is easily available on all Shopify plans without choosing any monthly commitments.

Unfortunately, Shopify Email is recently very basic, only allowing you to send simple electronics newsletters. Moreover, the only plus point of this Shopify feature is that you can email up to 2500 subscribers for free. After that, you will have to pay $1 per 1000 additional emails sent.

Social Media Integration

Shopify allows you to sell your products on up to 10 social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, etc. By doing this, Shopify offers its merchants an effective tool to approach more potential customers to their websites.
Now, Let’s take a look at the table below to see how you can find your Shopify niche from the integration with some well-known sales channels:

On the contrary, Squarespace store owners can only sell on Instagram and push content to Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Twitter. This causes multiple hurdles if you desire to scale your business and get closer to your potential customers.

4. Shopify Vs Squarespace: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

We all are aware of Search Engine Optimization, to remind you it is the practice of enhancing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website via organic search engine outcomes. After all, the consequent goal of online merchants is to drive huge traffic and sales to their stories and the best way to achieve this is by optimizing your Shopify SEO.

Shopify SEO

With Shopify, you can efficiently optimize your eCommerce website with its SEO built-in features. Based on the content on your website, Shopify serves you with a feature that allows you to generate a title and description for all products and pages, as well as uses canonical tags and your sitemap for better outcomes.

Moreover, Shopify uses the proper name when referring to the score SEO elements which are respectively page titles, meta descriptions, and images alt text. Shopify also automatically generates 301 redirects when you change your site’s URLs.

Squarespace SEO

Whereas Squarespace provides users with various SEO tools that will help you optimize your website well for search engines. This platform also facilitates the SEO optimization process by undoubtedly generating Meta tags, Sitemaps, etc.

Unlike Shopify, Squarespace will help you deal with multiple things such as “captions” and “descriptions”. However, besides changing your URL, you will have to create the 301 redirects manually, which is quite difficult and time-consuming.

Now, Let’s take a look at what Squarespace and Shopify SEO features have to offer you:

Both Shopify vs Squarespace eCommerce offer basic SEO features to help your online store get a higher rank in Search engines. However, Shopify has some superior SEO features all thanks to decent site speed and stability. In addition, Shopify serves you with a wide range of applications in terms of SEO improvement.
And in case you are seeking an insightful solution for SEO, let’s dig into our recommendation of the best Shopify SEO applications to enhance the organic traffic of your store.

Blogging

Squarespace acquired outstanding blogging features which help you built-in compelling blog Pages, you can create blog posts, tag and categorize posts, implement comments, or push the content to outstanding various social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and much more.

In addition, you can also download the Squarespace App to update your blog instead of using a computer. However, we would bring this to your kind note that you cannot update your blog via an XML-RPC client in Squarespace.

There is a lack of blogging analytics, social bookmarking, categories, and some advanced blogging features to use at your blogging website. Therefore, if you are desiring to create a blogging website, Shopify is not a decent choice for those who pay more attention to content.

Analytics

Analytics is a necessary part of a successful online business as it serves you with great statistics to better understand your audience and business performance. Moreover, based on the in-depth analysis and insights related to customers and business, you can create an excellent development strategy for your business.

Both Shopify vs Squarespace offer various robust analytics features to serve you with better outcomes. However, in this case, Shopify deserves a win as this platform offers users a wide range of reports, divided into multiple categories, such as finances reports, products analytics, sales report, or customers report.

Shopify Analytics features are based on the subscription pricing plans you choose, which means the higher the subscription plan you choose, the more advanced reports Shopify will serve you. Besides that, you can also make use of report services from third-party providers, like Google Analytics.

However, as compared to Shopify, Squarespace Analytics only gives you the basic statistics and the information about your store and customers. Some of the notable reports include Commerce Analytics, Traffic, and trends that help you make healthy business decisions.

5. Shopify and Squarespace: App store

Shopify Apps

It is considered to be one of the best eCommerce app stores around with a total of 2000+ apps available. It’s like a buffet, where you can pick and choose whatever you want from a variety of free and premium applications which start from $15 per month. Although some paid applications on Shopify are costly, as they do bring major significant benefits to the table.

Offering multiple applications to you is overwhelming as you get to choose from thousands of them.

Squarespace Plugins

Squarespace has launched its extensions marketplace in December 2019. Recently, there are about 24 extensions offered by third parties. However, some of them are rarely available in some countries, which is why you are required to review the extensions page before connecting it to your website.

Regardless of the limited selection, all the extensions are designed to help you manage, optimize your website for better results. To do so, you can filter your desired apps by choosing them from 4 different categories including Shipping and Fulfillment, Finance, Inventory and Products, Sales, and Marketing.

6. Shopify and Squarespace: Monitoring Performance with Analytics

Analytics play a vital role in monitoring your website’s performance, as in how many visitors are visiting your websites! How is your website doing? What are the improving areas you should follow? Well, to manage all these points Analytics will be your friend!

Shopify is well-equipped when it comes to the Analytics part as you can easily track your customer behavior and can also receive stock level report emails for making better decisions for better results.  And to get the most perfect outcomes, we would recommend you to integrate your website with Google Analytics. You can also take professional help to maintain or manage your Google Analytics account.

Squarespace also has its own analytics software by which you can track your revenue, total orders, conversions, and the behavior of your customers.

7. Shopify and Squarespace: Customer Support

Having a hosting nature, both Shopify and Squarespace offer outstanding customer service by which you can reach out to your customer via email, phone, live chat, or their community forum. Along with that, Shopify provides you with a special support agent to help you out in purchasing any app.

While Squarespace users can only reach out for help via live chat or email. Unlike Squarespace, Shopify has gone a step further to offer 24/7 phone support to their customers.

8. Shopify and Squarespace: Value for Money

Here are the monthly plans for both the platforms that you should consider, such as:

Shopify’s monthly plans are as follows:

• Basic Shopify ($29)
• Shopify ($79)
• Advanced Shopify ($299)

The above image will help you compare Shopify’s different monthly plans to see which one is best suitable for your store. 

What if we tell you that you could save almost $100 per year on the Shopify plan? That’s right, you can save about 20% on your subscription when you sign up for two continuous years, and a 10% discount when you sign up for one year.

So, if you sign up for an annual plan, the Shopify monthly prices come down to just $26.10, $71.10, and $269.10, respectively.

Squarespace monthly/yearly Plan Details:

Now let’s take a look at Squarespace’s monthly price plans:

• Personal ($16)
• Business ($26)
• Basic Store ($30)
• Advanced Store ($46)

Unlike Shopify, Squarespace has four different pricing plans ranging from $12 to $40 per month, as stated in the above image (billed annually)

Again, as we have mentioned for Shopify, if you sign up for a yearly plan, you can enjoy a discount as the prices would come to $12, $18, $26, and $40, respectively.

What about the Alternatives to Shopify and Squarespace?

If you are not satisfied with both the platforms Shopify and Squarespace, don’t worry. There are multiple other options available for you in the market such as Bigcommerce, Squarespace, and Square. Below, the table is mentioned to showcase their service ratings that will help you choose the best for your business:

NOTE: You can now get a clear image of platforms, which one perfectly suits your business. 

Shopify vs Squarespace: Overall Winner

Depending on the in-depth analysis of Shopify vs Squarespace, we would like to state that your choice of platform depends on multiple factors that are well-explained above and in the below table to give you an overview of what is the difference between Shopify and Squarespace?

Well, we would say that if you are looking for platforms to build a successful website then Squarespace would be the better choice for you. As it allows you to showcase your creativity by building a website with beautiful images and photography.

Shopify on the other hand is a perfect match for business persons who are looking to run a store with advanced eCommerce functionality.

Now, the choice is yours!

Undergoing the above-mentioned table, we have a clear winner but being in the market for years. We would suggest that you should prefer a platform that satisfies your business requirements efficiently.