Let's dive into the website-building stuff first. And from an SEO point of view, a domain is hugely important to a business (particularly established ones). Let’s look at how Squarespace and Shopify stack up on this front. If you just want to build a content-driven website — i.e., you don’t intend to sell anything — then on the surface of things, Squarespace offers a considerably cheaper way to do this, with its $16 per month ‘Personal’ plan. In an era of responsive websites, this focal point feature is important because it helps ensure that the main part of your image is foregrounded whenever your image is automatically cropped for viewing on smaller screens. 10232963Quick links: E-commerce Reviews | WordPress Web Design | Squarespace Web Design | Squarespace Plugins, Advice, Tutorials, SEO, Advice - SEO, Advice - Squarespace, sell goods using Stripe from certain countries, add a GDPR-compliant cookie banner to your Squarespace site, use quality content (blog posts) to drive up traffic, spat between the two companies over data protection, embed a Mailchimp form on your site or use a third-party integration, how to add a GDPR-compliant cookie banner to a Squarespace site, A free trial of Shopify is available here, A free trial of Squarespace is available here, view a full list of the products we receive commission on here. Trust that there is definitely going to be more content like this on the site but from a 30,000 foot view here are the pros and cons of each CMS: Wix and Squarespace, on the other hand, are general website builders with e-commerce tacked on. For a start, there are quite a few apps in Shopify's app store which provide GDPR-compliant banners and cookie consent functionality. Functionality and Ease of Use. And speaking of which…. There are limitations to watch out for when it comes to products however. Shopify Email is currently very basic, only allowing you to send simple e-newsletters at the moment (there’s no automation features — not even scheduling). Additional costs with Shopify can add up. You see, most ecommerce websites have unique needs— think of all the unusual edge cases in ecommerce: gift wrapping, inventory integrations, product reviews and up-sell recommendations. With Shopify, unless all your images have a consistent aspect ratio, they will be laid out in a pretty incoherent manner: visitors to your site will see a mish-mash of differently sized image photos in the product catalogues (see video below). Also, if you've found this post useful, it'd be wonderful if you could consider sharing it on social media or creating a link to it on your blog / website. Squarespace was initially created to build blogs but added ecommerce in 2013. So to finance this, we sometimes include affiliate advertising links in our posts. Despite this, many users will find Squarespace a really good website builder for creating a content-driven site, because: basic tweaks to colours and typefaces are easy to make. Mailchimp and Google Drive users will find it easier to integrate these products into a Squarespace site. So, if abandoned cart saving is an important feature for you, it's a bit of a win here for Shopify. However, if you're serious about your content-driven website, you'll quickly find that the Squarespace ‘Personal’ plan isn't all that great — it lacks quite a lot of very important functionality. You can also add both categories and tags to posts in Squarespace; Shopify just permits tags. And as you can see from Google Trends, Shopify has risen to the top of this market over the last ten years: Over the last ten years, Shopify has risen to become the industry leader. Ultimately however, if POS is important to you, Shopify is currently the better option (especially if you live outside the US). It lets you drag content blocks and drop them into columns and rows. Instead it’s just that Shopify is really, really powerful for online stores. I am not a lawyer, so please note that the below observations should not be interpreted as legal advice, but I'm going to do my best to spell out some of the key GDPR issues facing Squarespace and Shopify site owners in this section. Squarespace has put a lot of thought into their template customization— which makes sense, Squarespace is all about beautiful websites. What’s nice about Shopify is that you can use its ‘Buy Button’ feature to embed products on any sort of online presence that permits you to add a snippet of code to it. If your decision has come down to Shopify vs Squarespace, it’s about what you’re looking for and what you’re selling. But you can also go deeper and create custom palettes and themes. First, for all products and pages, Shopify generates a page title and meta description automatically based on the content of your page, which a lot of the time — particularly where products are concerned — often provides a very good SEO starting point. So what can you actually sell in Squarespace and Shopify? Neither allows you to create truly ‘clean’ URLs — something that Google prefers — because they stick prefixes into some URLs which can't be removed (for example, /blog/, /products/ and so on). Click here to subscribe for free today. In fact, I recently started a new ecommerce store and ended up using Squarespace for it instead of Shopify— why? For example, my friend and I started a Shopify store selling toilet paper with a local politicians face on it (don’t worry— he deserved it). Shopify has a WYSIWYG editor similar to Microsoft Word and can occasionally require coding for style tweaks. This product export limit is fairly large, so for most users, this isn’t going to be a massive issue — but if you’re planning on hosting a huge product inventory, you might find that Shopify is a better option for you. It’s a bit of a time-consuming thing to set up, and a slightly complex process is involved, but it does work nicely — for a full overview of the steps involved, check out our guide on how to add a GDPR-compliant cookie banner to a Squarespace site. Basically you can easily apply your own brand colors and fonts— while also being able to get into the details of how it’s applied. Professional reporting features only become available on the $79 Shopify plans and up. The ‘Squarespace’ app is a relatively new addition to the range of mobile apps provided by Squarespace. You tend to get more online sales if you sell in the currency used by your site visitors. Mar 11. Blogging features in Squarespace are better than the Shopify equivalents. Squarespace provides a better approach: you pick an aspect ratio for your product images and the system will automatically crop all your pictures to that ratio. Credit card fees are a percentage fee of your sales charged by the company you choose to process your credit card payments (otherwise known as a payment gateway — we'll discuss these in more depth below). I’ll go through all the above in depth later on in the comparison. Using Shopify’s ‘Buy Button’ to sell on an existing website. These add a drag-and-drop interface to your Shopify store. With Shopify, you can apply the correct tax rules for the US, Canada and the European Union automatically. They take the same approach with colors. Shopify also offers a few other POS features that are not available with Squarespace yet, namely staff accounts, pins and multiple location options. A very important feature of running a website is capturing email addresses: your ability to communicate effectively with leads via e-newsletters is vital to business growth. In terms of what domains are available to buy direct from either Squarespace or Shopify, you'll find that they don't offer as many top level domain (TLD) options as you'd find with a dedicated domain name provider (for example, you might not find that your country's TLD domain is catered for). I would much prefer it both website builders took followed the example of BigCommerce and offered cookie consent tools as a built-in feature. Another area where Squarespace has an edge over Shopify involves product options. Squarespace is a little bit more flexible on this — static pages don't involve these prefixes. For excellent free resources on all aspects of running an online business — from website building to SEO to email marketing — make sure you subscribe to our updates via email. However, what you have to bear in mind with Squarespace is that it very much takes a ‘walled garden’ approach to website building. Google also occasionally prioritises AMP pages in search, by featuring them in carousels above standard search results. Both Shopify and Squarespace allow you to buy apps — or avail of free ones — which add functionality to your site. Shopify Payments — Online stores require a payment processor to accept credit cards. More appealing is the year's free account — this offers a reasonably good saving, particularly for solopreneurs who only need one email account. Squarespace by contrast provides you with a drag-and-drop editor that lets you place or move content where you please. To get around this problem, you will need to either: It’s probably fair to say that most Shopify and Squarespace users (people who are probably using code-free store builders for a reason!) Each of the interfaces is also very attractive. Please do contact us for more information on how you can get a Shopify or Squarespace project off the ground quickly and professionally with us. However, the built-in subscription feature in Squarespace is only for use with physical goods — if you want to run a subscription to provide regular access to digital goods, you’ll need to either: pay extra for Squarespace’s new members’ area feature (this starts at $9 per month and lets you charge users to access a gated area on your site). Squarespace’s apps come in the form of ‘extensions.’ These represent a new development for the company, so at time of writing there is only a limited number available ( but you can expect this to grow over time). Wix comes as the easiest and would be great for beginners. However, when you consider that Squarespace charges 3% transaction fees on its 'Business' plan, and offers a very limited range of payment processing options with it, it's hard not to conclude that the Basic Shopify plan represents better value as far as e-commerce is concerned, even if the monthly fee is a little bit higher. In terms of what to watch out for in terms of the differences between Shopify plans, you should note that: The Shopify Lite plan doesn't actually let you build a standalone online store; rather, it allows you to sell on your existing website or a Facebook page (thanks to the 'Shopify Buy' button) or at 'point of sale' (a physical location; more on that below). CONTACTStyle Factory, Kemp House152 City RoadLondon EC1V 2NXUnited Kingdom, An important note about affiliate advertising: writing and updating the reviews in our blog involves a lot of time and effort! ), but the key ones for prospective Shopify and Squarespace users are probably as follows: Display adequate privacy and cookie notices on your website, Get explicit consent from people signing up to mailing lists that it is okay to send them e-newsletters. In terms of functionality, although it’s nice to see autoresponder functionality being included with Email Campaigns, it’s are currently very basic by comparison to that provided by dedicated email marketing tools like Mailchimp or Getresponse (we’re talking simple ‘drip’ campaigns only). And with VAT MOSS functionality available, Shopify is better for selling digital goods. Shopify vs Squarespace: which is best? With Squarespace, you can edit the CSS and certain bits of HTML (you can insert code blocks onto pages, or inject HTML into the header of your site). With Shopify the only way to do that is to edit CSS code— there’s no other way. Shopify, however, has features that make it the undisputed king of eCommerce. Differences Between Shopify vs Squarespace. There are more template variations available in Shopify (but you will have to pay a premium to use many of them). The pre-defined reports are available on the $79 'Shopify' plan and up; and to avail of custom reporting you'll need to purchase an 'Advanced Shopify' or 'Shopify Plus' plan. Spacers are used for margins. This app makes it easier to manage queries and share your product details with customers when chatting with them over Facebook Messenger, Shopify’s own chat service (‘Shopify Chat’) or Apple Business Chat. What is Squarespace best used for? We are going to review the pros and cons. As discussed above, Squarespace templates are gorgeous. Shopify does themes a little bit differently from Squarespace. Shopify and Squarespace both provide users with mobile apps for managing their sites or stores on the go. Squarespace is all about building beautiful websites— while Shopify is purely focussed on powering ecommerce. I’ve used Squarespace for stores in the past and have always been pleased with how simple and intuitive it is— all while still including all the features you need (custom notifications, taxes, shipping integrations etc.). The Shopify Buy Button is a solution that allows you to basically embed/link to your Shopify shop anywhere - including on another website platform like Squarespace. Although both platforms could perform much better where GDPR is concerned, it’s fair to say that merchants wishing to have a high level of compliance on their website will find that this is considerably easier to achieve with Shopify, especially in the area of cookie consent. Shopify offers more options when it comes to importing and exporting products and content. Reporting in Shopify is significantly more comprehensive than in Squarespace (click to enlarge). We were able find several apps in Shopify’s app store that showed our orders on a map so we could pick and choose which orders we would deliver ourselves. The key benefit of using Squarespace Email Campaigns is that you can manage both your website and mailing list — arguably the two most important online assets of any business — in one place; and, to a degree, your emails will be consistent with your brand (depending on which typeface you use on your site — not all will be available in Squarespace-created e-newsletters). Editing an image's focal point in Squarespace. It showcases the website by elevating it above the interface— a subtle signal that Squarespace websites are meant to be beautiful. On the whole I would say that Squarespace's interface is the more elegant of the two, and is easier to use than Shopify’s, particularly where general content management is concerned. Shopify automatically creates a title page and meta description for each product and page made through its platform. Reporting is considerably better in Shopify than in Squarespace, although you'll need to be on a more expensive plan to access this functionality. In Shopify, you're dealing with page titles, meta descriptions, alt text etc.— all the standard terminology you'd expect. You will pay 3% transaction fees on any sales generated using the 'Business' plan (in addition to any credit card processing fees). But first, let’s take a quick look at pricing, because how much e-commerce functionality you get with both Squarespace and Shopify depends very much on how much you’re prepared to pay. Laying out content in Squarespace is really easy, and the options for doing so are extensive. In Squarespace, if you change a page URL, you will have to manually create the 301 redirect (the process for which is fiddly; and creating 301 redirects is quite easy to forget to do). In Squarespace, you can enable Accelerated Mobile Pages ('AMP') format really easily — it's simply a case of ticking a checkbox in your site's settings - but at time of writing it is only available for blog posts, not products. Both Squarespace and Shopify allow you to set the following rates: Shopify goes one better by allowing you to set price-based weights too, so a bit of a win for Shopify when it comes to shipping options. Point-of-sale functionality allows you to use card readers — and other selling hardware — in conjunction with your online store, to sell in a physical location. One area where both products could improve a bit involves URL creation. the ability to take payments in multiple currencies, integration with a very extensive range of third party apps that extend the functionality of your store significantly (apps include integrations with Quickbooks, Zoho and Zendesk to name just a few), more sophisticated inventory management options, more advanced point-of-sale features (these allow you to sell goods in a physical location using your online store to process payments and manage inventory), more comprehensive tax calculation functionality. Remember that you can only add CSS to your site and inject code into your page headers if you're on a Squarespace 'Business' plan or higher however — the 'Personal' plan disables this functionality. Finished Squarespace websites almost always look better than competitors— just compare live examples of Squarespace websites vs Weebly websites vs Wix websites— you’ll see the difference. Whilst by no means difficult to use, Shopify’s user interface is arguably not quite as slick or intuitive, and setting up pages and products can take a bit longer than in Squarespace. One thing worth being aware of is that the kind of customer support you can expect from both Shopify and Squarespace might become a bit limited depending on the custom CSS or HTML you add (more on support shortly). It’s cheaper than Shopify, with its four tiers clocking in at $12, $18, $26, and $40/month. For some stores these features will be important but for most stores they will not be. Helpful ‘wizards’ are provided to help you import pages, posts and other content from Wordpress, Blogger and Tumblr; and, so long as you are on a ‘Commerce’ plan, you can import products via CSV or, using an import tool, via from Shopify, Etsy or Big Cartel. Squarespace’s email marketing tool is a bit more advanced than the Shopify equivalent. 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