Shopify vs Squarespace (2024): Ecommerce Platform Comparison

Explore the key differences between Shopify and Squarespace in our latest comparative guide.

In this article break down the features, pricing, and user experience of each leading ecommerce platform, providing valuable insights to help entrepreneurs and businesses choose the right solution for their online stores.”

While you have many choices for setting up an online store today, Shopify is a leading player in this arena and Squarespace is a (rapidly) rising star and I'm going to compare these two platforms in this article below.

Shopify vs Squarespace: Overview

In the red corner is Shopify. And right by the blue corner, we have Squarespace. Undoubtedly one of the biggest contests between ecommerce platforms, to say the least.

Shopify

Technically, Squarespace is older since it was founded in New York back in 2013. Shopify, on the other hand, came into existence three years later in Ontario Canada.

Interestingly, Shopify is actually the elder when we shift focus to ecommerce. It hit the ground running as soon as it was launched- consequently making it a 12-year-old veteran in ecommerce hosting.

Certainly explains to some extent how it managed to secure the second biggest global market share by 2017.

Much of this time, Squarespace existed only as a website builder. Well, for at least 10 years, until the company launched the Squarespace Commerce section in 2013.

Squarespace

That makes Squarespace a late entrant, that’s for sure. But they came into the ecommerce space with guns blazing.

A war chest of extensive funding is only part of the story. They also had a decade worth of website building experience up their sleeve.

So, of course, it makes sense that Squarespace was able to turn up the heat on Shopify and other ecommerce platforms from the word go.

And it didn’t leave it at that. It has since recorded exponential growth as users continue joining the bandwagon.

Then boom! Perhaps unsurprisingly, Squarespace is now one of the most popular platforms on the internet today.

But Shopify is not taking this lying down. Each new feature announced by any of the services is met with a counter strategy from the opposing side.

Needless to say, they will never be the same. While some of their features might be identical and they share the same bottom line of facilitating ecommerce stores, Shopify and Squarespace have varying functionalities.

And now the elephant in the room. Which between the two provides superior features?

Well, let’s find out…

Shopify vs Squarespace: Pros and Cons

When comparing Shopify vs Squarespace, or any two ecommerce store options for that matter, it’s often useful to break the two tools down into their most significant pros and cons. After all, every website building solution on the market today will have it’s advantages to offer, and disadvantages too.

Shopify Pros and Cons

Squarespace Pros and Cons

Shopify vs Squarespace: Pricing

By now, you’re probably wondering how deep you’ll dig into your pocket for all these features we’ve reviewed.

The good news is that both Shopify and Squarespace have packages at varying price points suited for different types of businesses. The bad news, sadly, is that crawling through them to compare the features is not as easy as it sounds.

Squarespace Pricing

Squarespace, to begin with, comes with four pricing options. Two classed under “online stores”, while the rest are meant for “websites”.

Under “online store” you can choose between:

• Basic at $26 per month charged annually, or $30 if you choose to pay on a monthly basis.
• Advanced at $40 per month charged annually, or $46 if you prefer paying on a monthly basis.

Over to the other side, you have the following options under “websites”:

• Personal at $12 per month charged yearly, or $16 if you prefer monthly billing.
• Business as $18 per month billed yearly, or $26 if you choose to pay every month.

Now, you might wonder why they have the business package classed under “website”, separate from other “online store” options.

It’s really simple. If you think about it, all online businesses do not exist as ecommerce stores. And this is the type of package that’s best optimized for that selected class of websites.

That said, let’s see the principal differences between these price points:

• It’s impossible to sell online through the Personal
• Additionally, you’ll also not be able to capitalize on developer mode, or add javascript and CSS to your website if you proceed with the Personal
• All sales made through the Business plan are subject to transaction fees of 3%.
• While the number of contributors on all other pricing plans is unlimited, the Personal plan is only open to two.
• Only the Advanced plan comes with the all-important abandoned cart recovery feature.
• Subscribing to the Business, Basic or Advanced plans qualifies you for a free Google Apps account for a period of 12 months.
• All “Online Stores” plans come with dedicated ecommerce reporting.
• Choosing to proceed with annual billing, as opposed to monthly payments, grants you a free custom domain.

Shopify Pricing

While Squarespace limits the options to four, Shopify chooses to add an extra option- consequently making them five. They include:

• Shopify Starter at $5 per month.
• Basic Shopify at $39 per month.
• Shopify at $105 per month.
• Advanced Shopify at $399 per month
• Shopify Plus with extra features for large businesses, starting at $2000 per month.

Just like Squarespace, Shopify also makes it cheaper if you choose to pay upfront for an extended period of time. Subscribing for 12 months attracts a discount of 10% while 24 months qualifies you for 20%.

To help you make an informed choice, here are the primary notable differences between the plans:

• Shopify Starter does not provide features for designing and creating an ecommerce site. It would only be an option if you seek to sell through a Facebook page, point-of-sale, or an existing site.
• Unlike Squarespace, all Shopify plans, apart from Shopify Lite come with the abandoned cart saver feature.
• Shopify, Advanced Shopify, and Shopify Plus plans support gift cards.
• Advanced reporting is only offered on Shopify, Advanced Shopify, and Shopify Plus.

Shopify vs Squarespace: Features

It’s incredibly difficult for many website owners to decide what kind of software they need straight away. Ultimately, there are so many different options to choose from, that business owners end up getting overwhelmed.

However, the decision really just boils down to what you’re looking for.

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While Shopify is for serious sellers, and it’s often regarded as the best platform for selling online, Squarespace is more about design. Squarespace stands out as the eCommerce tool for those who want to capture audience attention with visual elements.

Let’s take a closer look at the features that both tools have.

Creating and Designing an Ecommerce Store

It goes without saying- a website should have a simple but attractive interface, coupled with a straightforward navigation process. Otherwise, you could end up with rather discouraging bounce rates, considering 88% of online customers never go back to a website after a bad experience.

Both Squarespace and Shopify attempt to make this easy through templates. But their individual customization options are not the same at all.

Shopify

One of the things that makes Squarespace so attractive is that it’s specifically created for designers. The templates on Squarespace might not be as extensive as the ones from Shopify, but they are gorgeous. Compared to the templates that you get from Shopify, they’re also a bit more varied and contemporary too.

Shopify, for instance, utilizes drag-and-drop. After creating a layout component, you basically move it to the preferred position.

The editing process is also pleasantly straightforward. Simply choose any section of the site, then click and edit accordingly.

Unfortunately, content and design are treated as two separate entities. You cannot work on both at the same time.

On the bright side, however, at least Shopify allows you to design virtually anything by editing HTML/CSS.

Squarespace

When it comes to visuals and templates for your website design, Shopify doesn’t exactly skimp on performance. The free templates available from Shopify are eye-catching and a lot more attractive than many of the out-of-the-box templates that you would get from other companies like BigCommerce or Wix.

Although there are fewer free templates from Shopify than you get from Squarespace, there is a template store that you can visit where you can find some snazzier template options. There are more than 60 different paid themes to choose from, and there are several variations to most of these templates too.

In the battle of Shopify vs Squarespace, Shopify does offer a few more templates than Squarespace, the difference is that you need to be willing to pay for most of them.

Notably, the paid-for themes on Shopify are similar in standard to the ones that you get on Squarespace, with a lot of modern design built-in, parallax scrolling and access to video backgrounds. On top of that, the theme store from Shopify is very simple to access and use. You can even sort through different design options using filters.

Squarespace, on the hand, is seemingly fond of using a hybrid system. It’s known for its wide array of pre-created themes.

Additionally, unlike Shopify, it combines both content and design. You can conveniently work on both simultaneously.

But, you’ll need to have a solid collection of high-quality images to achieve a seamless design with Squarespace’s themes.

When it comes to templates and design, Squarespace definitely delivers a lot more options to choose from. You can choose from more than 20 different “families” of templates, and they all come with a number of variations to choose from.

The good thing about Squarespace, is that the company knows that it’s dealing with designers and creative brands. This means that the templates that you get come with a distinctive wow factor to set them apart from similar solutions on the market. However, a lot of the Squarespace templates are specifically created for people who want to use a lot of photography on their website.

You might have a hard time finding a lot of dedicated ecommerce templates on this store builder, the same goes if you’re looking for a blog-based solution. Still, there are a lot of fantastic visual effects in place to help you capture audience attention. Additionally, you can extend the functionality of Squarespace’s templates even further with integrations with Getty Images and UnSplash included.

The visual integrations available are very helpful for bloggers who need strong images embedded to accompany their posts. Additionally Squarespace designers working on sites for clients that haven’t included a lot of photos will benefit from these integrations too.

To make the whole experience even more compelling, Squarespace also includes support for video backgrounds on any page. You can use YouTube video backgrounds on the banners for your pages, and the results are fantastic. It’s as simple as copy/pasting a YouTube URL into your page settings, and Squarespace will start using it as your background. You can even choose filters and playback speeds too.

Facilitating Ecommerce Processes

This is where we usually separate actual ecommerce platforms from generic website builders.

Naturally, an online store comes with five fundamental ecommerce elements- order database, payment processor, checkout page, shopping cart, and a product database.

Of course, by now, there’s a lot more that can go into a store. But these pretty much summarize what you should expect in a typical ecommerce site.

Thankfully, both Shopify and Squarespace are quite comprehensive when it comes to these core features. But, they seemingly have varying approaches to the whole concept of facilitating ecommerce.

Squarespace

Squarespace is all about helping you sell digital and physical products easily. You’ll be able to manage sales taxes, shipping cost options, couponing engine, inventory, product upload and product editing.

Squarespace is the best platform around for design, and when it comes to selling sensational products online, you need to be able to capture your customer’s attention. The sales tools that you need to attract and engage audience members are already built-in, which means that you don’t need to find the tools that you need, like with Shopify.

Squarespace focuses on making sure that your products take the center stage on your website, with a wide range of fantastic options to choose from. You can add zoom features to your images and transform pictures into slide-shows. There’s even the option for 360-degree visuals too.

The biggest disappointment for many shop owners, at least up until December 2016, was the fact that Squarespace only provided one payment gateway.

Well, you’d expect it to be PayPal considering its global reach. But no. They had a different idea. Only Stripe was supported, subsequently locking out business in many countries.

It might have taken some time, but Squarespace ultimately came to its senses and integrated PayPal. It’s now possible to conduct transactions with customers from most countries.

Shopify

Fair enough, Squarespace might be improving, but it still falls behind Shopify in payment facilitation. You see, Shopify has been in the commerce niche for over a decade now. They know that globally, 6% of abandoned carts are caused by lack of adequate payment options.

So, of course, it’s so refreshing to see that Shopify offers a much wider variety of payment options. While Squarespace only supports two, Shopify comes with more than 100 integrations. Consequently facilitating transactions from possibly every web-linked corner on earth.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it doesn’t stop there. As a platform that has strictly dealt with ecommerce all along, Shopify is seemingly not letting a new kid school it on facilitating business.

Shopify might make you work a little harder to get all the tools that you need to sell your physical and digital products online, but the extensions that you want are already right there.

Additionally, Shopify, like Squarespace, makes sure that you can showcase your products in style too. There’s no built-in zoom function for Shopify, but you will get an option to install apps like Magic Zoom Plus.

With Shopify, you can sell products virtually anywhere, and in most currencies, with countless payment options to explore. Compared to Squarespace’s selection of just PayPal and Stripe, it’s clear who wins in this battle.

Shopify is by far the more attractive option if you need a lot of different payment choices, or you just want to connect with customers from different countries. Additionally, you can even get rid of your transaction fees with Shopify if you decide to switch to the company’s own payment method, Shopify Payments.

Further reading:

• Shopify POS Review: Is it the Best Point of Sale System & Retail POS?
• Shopify Payments Review: The Most Elementary Alternative To 3rd Party Gateways

Shipping and Inventory Management

When it comes to selling products and services online, Shopify remains to be the most attractive and flexible option when it comes to payment processing, and ecommerce features. However, how do Shopify and Squarespace compare when it comes to shipping and delivering your items to customers?

Shipping and inventory management are two of the most essential features of running an online store, but they’re often overlooked by a lot of business owners.

Squarespace

Shipping with Squarespace is simple enough, but the company can’t really compete with Shopify when it comes to ecommerce fulfilment. Sure, Squarespace is catching up in terms of the number of relationships that it has with fulfillment companies like USP. However, Shopify is much more advanced.

On the plus side, Squarespace does allow you to amend your shipping fees according to things like weight, or the country that you’re shipping to.

Additionally, from an inventory management point of view, Squarespace really shines. It’s much better and more intuitive when it comes to helping you manage your inventory than rivals like Weebly and Wix. That might be surprising when you consider the fact that Squarespace is really just a website builder with an eCommerce functionality extra built-in.

Shopify

Shipping and managing your products with Shopify is a truly fantastic experience. Everything you need is seamlessly embedded into the solution for you, with options for delivering your products that include printable shipping labels, built-in UPS and NHL integrations, and even dropshipping tools too.

Dropshipping means that you can deliver your products to your customers straight from your supplier, which can save you a lot of time and effort.

From an inventory management perspective, Shopify was designed specifically as an ecommerce tool, so it makes sense that it’s also one of the easiest options around for managing your inventory. However, in this particular case, Shopify doesn’t quite out-perform Squarespace. Both items perform really just as well.

Ultimately, Shopify might be better than Squarespace for shipping options, but SquareSpace holds its own with inventory management.

Shopify vs Squarespace: Selling Offline

Even if your company is largely based online, it’s always good to have the option to sell in an offline capacity. After all, you never know when a pop-up store or festival could give you an excellent chance to make some extra cash.

However, if you do decide to sell offline every once in a while, then you’re going to want to make sure that you can continue to use the tools that you feel comfortable with. Fortunately, both Squarespace and Shopify can give you options in this area.

Thanks to point-of-sale functionality, both Squarespace and Shopify are ready to handle your online and offline sales.

Squarespace

Squarespace spent a long time not offering anything for offline sales, allowing Shopify to get far ahead in the game, along with a number of other ecommerce tools like Wix. However, Squarespace joined the POS party in recent years, and allows companies in the USA to sell offline too.

Thanks to an integration with Square, one of the best point of sale systems in the marketplace, Squarespace can ensure that selling offline is quick and easy. Unfortunately, while Shopify’s point of sale kit comes with everything from a card reader, to a barcode scanner and cash drawer, Squarespace only allows you to use a basic Square card reader. That means that there is a lot of work still to be done.

Shopify

When discussing the options for Squarespace vs Shopify, it’s clear that Shopify is a lot more accessible and advanced for offline selling. Shopify has offered POS hardware and functionality for a lot longer than Squarespace. Shopify makes it easy to link hardware to your store, and your inventory, so that you know exactly how many products you have left.

The Shopify Point of Sale solution also comes with a bunch of extra hardware to use compared to Squarespace too. On top of the hardware extras, there are also POS features available from Shopify that you can’t get from Squarespace, including options for staff accounts and pin numbers.

Shopify definitely offers a much more comprehensive option if you’re looking for a number of ways to sell online and offline. Squarespace is trying to keep up the pace with its competitors, but it has a lot of work to do still.

Dropshipping on Shopify vs Squarespace

If you’re keen to start running an online store, but you’re worried about things like inventory management and order fulfillment, then dropshipping is definitely the way to go. Dropshipping products allows you to take some of the stress and worry out of sending your products to customers around the world.

Rather than keeping specific items in stock, you simply take the order and transfer it to a supplier, and your supplier delivers the goods. This means that your online store is more of a “middleman” in the selling journey. It also means that you don’t have to keep a lot of stock on your person.

The best thing about this business model is that you don’t have to invest much into your business to get started. However, the margins can be lower because there’s a lot of competition out there.

For dropshipping, Shopify is definitely a much better option than Squarespace. Shopify comes with it’s own app store, where you can find a wide range of dedicated dropshipping apps that will help you to collect inventory and sell it to your customers. DSers is one of the most popular choice.

Ultimately, there is no alternative option available on Squarespace. The only real option is to install a Shopify lite plan onto your website and add a dropshipping app so that you can dropship through Squarespace, but that’s a very complicated work-around.

Alternatively, you could always consider using something like Printful or ShipStation with your Squarespace website if you’re keen to try dropshipping for yourself.

Shopify vs Squarespace: Marketing

Now hold it right there.

Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. While those are some exciting ecommerce features we’ve looked into, there will be no selling if you cannot promote your online store.

This is where things like landing pages, share buttons, email signups, schema markups, open graph information, and custom metadata come in.

So far, both Squarespace and Shopify have been doing really well when it comes to marketing features. In addition to automatic open graphs, product schema, and metadata, they also provide integrated header scripts.

And to cap it all, both have integrated core analytics. Quite handy for tracking your products and overall market performance.

Let’s take a closer look at what you can accomplish with marketing when using Squarespace vs Shopify.

Social Media

Social media is one of the best ways to capture attention for your website online. Squarespace, unfortunately, doesn’t make it easy for you to combine your website with your social strategy.

There’s no app market available where you can add buttons to your website, which means that you might outgrow Squarespace very quickly if you’re looking to sell with multi-channel social integrations. The only option you have is to sell on Instagram.

Alternatively, Shopify has a wide range of apps and social media advertising tools to select from within the app market.

You can easily add a huge selection of fantastic tools for marketing, and accounting in seconds. Shopify’s app store also includes the option to add integrations so that you can sell across no less than 10 social media platforms.

Email Marketing

SquareSpace and Shopify both allow business owners to capture crucial email addresses from their customers and add them to a third-party solution for email marketing.

If you use Mailchimp, then Squarespace is likely to be the option that you choose. You can link your forms on Squarespace directly to Mailchimp, which means that there’s no need to worry about creating links on your own. All you need to do is click on Mailchimp as your form solution, and then choose the authorize account button.

Squarespace also recently introduced an add-on feature for users named Email Campaigns. This comes with a free trial option which allows businesses to send up to 50,000 email campaigns per month.

Once your trial has ended, you’ll need to pay $8 per month to continue with your email marketing efforts.

Shopify also allows you to create email campaigns to connect with your audience from within your admin page. However, there are also some apps that you can implement for more flexibility and greater performance. For instance, Omnisend Email marketing is available, as is Privy email.

Blogging on Shopify vs Squarespace

Blogging may be frequently overlooked as a marketing solution for today’s business owners when they’re first choosing from Shopify vs Squarespace. However, once you get your business up and running, you’re likely to remember how important blogging is for driving traffic to your online store.

Both Squarespace and Shopify come with blogging functionality. This isn’t the case with other eCommerce providers, such as BigCommerce, which require you to add your blogging platform in separately. However, in terms of performance, Squarespace is often recommended as the better platform for blogging.

You can do more with your blog content with Squarespace than you can with Shopify. This includes having the option to drop your content easily into any sidebar or page on your website using summary blocks.

Additionally, the blogging features include built-in analytics, as well as a custom search feature for your readers, and archiving functionality.

Unfortunately, when it comes to blogging, Shopify just doesn’t add up when you compare it to all the features that Squarespace has to offer. However, Shopify does come with a few blog-specific SEO features that you don’t get with Squarespace.

SEO

Ensuring that your site can rank properly on Google is essential if you want to accomplish great things in the online world. Ultimately, the better you perform on Google, the more money you’re going to earn in the long-term.

Squarespace is pretty average when it comes to SEO functionality. You can do the basics, like adding meta titles and editing descriptions. However, there are no advanced features available from Squarespace, and you don’t get any advice on how to organize your store to suit the needs of the search engine.

Alternatively, Shopify is designed to help your online store rank as high as possible. There are plenty of SEO apps to choose from in the Shopify marketplace, and you even get best-practice prompts when you’re loading things onto your store.

Further reading:

• Squarespace Alternatives – What Is The Best Alternative to Squarespace?
• Top 9 Shopify Alternatives – Best Solutions Reviewed
• Selz vs. Squarespace – What’s the Right Choice for Your eCommerce Store?
• WooCommerce vs Shopify – Which One Is the Absolute Best?

Shopify vs Squarespace: Ease of Use

Well, here’s one element that Squarespace and Shopify are not miles apart in- the user interface. They both provide a streamlined menu on the left side of the dashboard, from where you can conveniently navigate to all the core features.

Over to the dashboard’s right-hand side, and you have options like add products, view data, edit content and so forth.

Quite neat, to be honest. But they can’t be exactly identical, right?

Frankly, I‘m a huge fan of simplicity. If it takes me ages to learn the ropes, what’s the point of using it? That said, I’ll admit that both are pleasantly simple and straightforward.

But, while we’re at the whole simplicity advocacy, let’s remember that a simple interface doesn’t have to be painfully dull. A good design is simple. But a great one achieves a seamless balance between simplicity and captivation.

Squarespace

That’s why Squarespace, in my opinion, wins hands down. Its interface is arguably sleeker and helps create products and pages much faster than Shopify.

Shopify

It’s not all gloom for Shopify though. It might take longer to design and create pages, but overall responsiveness is much better than Squarespace. The latter can be quite sluggish at times, and occasionally throw in a bug or two when you’re working on the layout engine.

SquareSpace vs Shopify: Mobile Apps

Shopify and Squarespace both offer their users mobile apps that you can use to maintain your online websites and stores from a distance. Squarespace give you access to different apps for commerce, analytics, and Squarespace site management.

Generally, you’re going to probably use the Commerce and Squarespace apps the most. That’s because although Analytics is useful, you can’t do much other than check your stats from your Smartphone.

The Squarespace overall app is a bit of a new addition to the marketplace. It allows you to edit things like the content on your website and respond to comments.

Shopify, on the other hand, also has a selection of apps to offer. However, there are two main ones that are likely to come in handy the most. The main Shopify app allows you to edit and change aspects of your Shopify store from a distance. You can also use this app to check basic stats.

You can also find a Shopify app that’s specifically designed to support point of sale functionality. This means that you can take orders and payments for goods in a range of locations.

These two Shopify apps are really all you’re going to need if you want to keep up to date with your Shopify store from a mobile device.

However, you can also access things like logo maker and business card maker apps too. There’s also an app for iOS only called Ping, which helps with managing queries and sharing product details too.

Another big bonus from Shopify from an app perspective is that it also has its own app store. Apps are great for extending the functionality and performance of your website. These tools come with everything from finance and marketing tools, to shipping and analytics.

Shopify vs Squarespace: Analytics

No matter what kind of business website you’re running, the only way to make sure that you’re actually achieving your goals, is with extensive analytics and monitoring.

Squarespace

If you need something with a lot of advanced reporting performance, then Shopify is probably the best choice. The tool comes with a lot of extra features compared to SquareSpace, although Squarespace is starting to catch up.

Squarespace comes with it’s own analytics software built-in, which you can use to track things like total order numbers, revenue, and even the behavior of customers too. However, there aren’t any stock monitoring alerts for the inventory side of your business.

The good news is that both Squarespace and Shopify integrate with Google Analytics, so you can take your stats to the next level that way.

Shopify

As mentioned above, Shopify is a lot more advanced than Squarespace when it comes to reporting and analytics. You can check out everything from traffic sources and site visitors, to:

• Sales reports
• Financial reports
• Customer reports
• Behavior reports
• Acquisition tracking

Shopify vs Squarespace: Domains and SSL

There are a few other components that might come into play when you’re deciding whether to build your website with Shopify or Squarespace.

For instance, SSL is the standard security tech available to help with establishing encrypted links between browsers and web servers. You can use it to ensure that all of the data moving between a web server and browser can stay private.

Both Shopify and Squarespace come with a free SSL certificate that you can use on any domain.

Speaking of domains, one of the biggest benefits of Squarespace is that you get a custom domain whenever you purchase one of the company’s plans – and it’s totally free. Although you can still use Shopify to register a domain, you need to pay for it.

Squarespace also gives you the option to buy domain names separately too if you prefer.

Sourcing your domain name from Shopify or Squarespace when you’re using one of the tools to host your site, means that you don’t have to worry about things like DNS settings. Connecting your domain to your Shopify or Squarespace site is a straightforward and simple process, with all of the settings already pre-configured for you.

Of course, this also means that you’re placing your eggs in a single basket. If you weren’t able to access your eCommerce site store for instance, and you have a domain from the same company, then you’ll be locked out of both your domain and your CMS. From a SEO perspective, a domain is massively important to your business.

Ultimately, it’s much safer overall to buy a domain using a third-party provider and tweak the DNS settings as a result. You can then map your domain to the website of your choice.

Shopify vs Squarespace: Customer Support

From my experience, both Shopify and Squarespace have pretty solid customer support systems.

If you experience trouble building your site, for instance, you could make use of their comprehensive knowledge bases. They provide adequate documentation and tutorials on all features they offer.

And the best part is? Navigating around them is very simple and straightforward. They are well-categorized to help you find your way around the dense forest of information.

However, even with that, you might still find it completely necessary to contact the support team from time to time.

Verdict

Now, this is where Shopify has a slight edge over Squarespace in terms of support channels. While Squarespace can only be contacted via live chat or email, Shopify has gone a step further to include 24/7 phone support.

When it comes to actual helpfulness, well, I’ll leave that you to compare and decide. That’s a subjective factor because experience varies from one user to another.

Further reading:

• Squarespace review – Learn everything you need to know about Squarespace by reading this comprehensive Squarespace review. We even have a video if you're in a hurry.
• Squarespace Pricing – A simple overview of all the Squarespace pricing plans.
• Shopify Reviews – Read real Shopify reviews on costs, functionality, SEO, security, and more to get a quick idea!
• Shopify Pricing – How much does Shopify cost? A super quick guide to choose the best Shopify pricing plan.

Choosing Shopify or Squarespace

Any successful business owner knows that it takes several factors to build an impressive company. You can’t just have a great idea and start making money overnight.

In the same way, it takes more than just a great website builder to ensure that your venture is going to be a success.

Just like a good business idea drives you towards your goal by keeping you focused on your mission, a website builder pushes you further to your target by giving you a powerful online presence.

Even if you’re already selling a handful of your products through external sales systems like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, or even the Facebook marketplace, making the decision to build a comprehensive online store can take your small business to the next level.

In fact, you could find that your small business becomes larger, because you have more avenues available for sales now.

Remember, many of the leading eCommerce tools, including Shopify and Squarespace, allow you to connect your external sales platforms to your website and store.

Unfortunately, choosing the ideal website builder isn’t an easy process. You’ll need to spend some time figuring out what features are most lucrative to your company, and what you can compromise on.

Even if you’ve finished this article with a feeling that you’re better off with Shopify, or Squarespace, you’ve still got more decisions to make.

For instance, can you get by with the basic plan that the software offers, or do you need something more advanced?

Will you be able to rely exclusively on the built-in technology that comes with your site builder, or do you want to enhance your product pages and landing pages with plugins? If you’re thinking of getting more in-depth with your website, Shopify definitely offers more plugins and third-party apps.

On top of that, there are payment options to consider. Which service gives you access to the best shipping rates, and which support advanced payment choices like Apple Pay or Google Pay?

Shopify vs Squarespace: Bottom Line

And now for the ultimate verdict.

Who takes the title between the red and blue corners?

Two things….

Firstly, by now you’ve figured that Shopify has a much comprehensive list of advanced ecommerce features. That’s good enough.

But, to be fair, that’s not enough to edge out Squarespace, which alternatively seeks to make ecommerce easy through simpler, more accessible tools.

Some people will automatically fall in love with Shopify and it’s incredible flexibility as a website building and sales tool.

Others will prefer Squarespace for it’s simplicity and user-friendly design. There’s also the chance that you’ll find that neither of these products are suitable for you. Some small business owners opt for an alternative like Wix, or WordPress and WooCommerce instead.

So, what am I driving at?

The secret is evaluating your needs and subsequently comprehending the best features for your ecommerce site. That’s the only way to pick a clear winner that’s well-suited to your specific business.

Only you know what’s going to deliver the most success for your company, and it’s up to you to track down the software that delivers those results.

As you embark on this, we’d love to hear about your experience. Feel free to share the story in the comments section.