If you’re an entrepreneur looking to start an online business or take your existing brick-and-mortar store online, you’re likely weighing your options for the best e-commerce platform. Two of the most popular choices are Shopify and Squarespace. Both make it relatively easy to create a professional online store without needing advanced technical skills.
However, Shopify and Squarespace have some key differences in terms of pricing, features, ease of use, and suitability for different business needs.
In this in-depth comparison, we’ll take a look at how these two e-commerce giants stack up in 2024 to help you decide which one is the better fit.
Overview of Shopify and Squarespace
Shopify is a hosted e-commerce platform that enables businesses of all sizes to create online stores. It eliminates the need to buy web hosting or install any software, making it an appealing option for those with little technical expertise.
Founded in 2006, Shopify has grown to become one of the most popular e-commerce solutions, powering over 1.7 million online businesses across 175 countries as of 2024. The platform offers a vast app store, numerous free and premium themes, built-in marketing tools, and support for multiple payment gateways.
Squarespace, on the other hand, started out in 2004 as a platform for creating visually stunning websites through its intuitive drag-and-drop page builder. In recent years, Squarespace has expanded its offerings to include e-commerce capabilities, allowing users to create online stores within their websites.
Unlike Shopify which is dedicated solely to e-commerce, Squarespace is a more general website builder that provides online selling tools as part of its platform.
Ease of Use
One of the biggest selling points of both Shopify and Squarespace is their user-friendly nature, which makes them accessible to users without any coding or design expertise.
Shopify provides a simple online store builder with a straightforward interface and step-by-step guidance for adding products, configuring shipping and taxes, choosing a theme, and launching your store. Its drag-and-drop page editor allows you to customize your storefront without touching any code.
That said, Shopify’s interface can feel a bit cluttered and overwhelming for complete beginners, especially when navigating the numerous advanced settings and add-ons available.
Squarespace, on the other hand, is renowned for its exceptionally clean and modern design aesthetic. Its drag-and-drop page builder is arguably the most intuitive and visually appealing of any website builder on the market.
Creating beautiful product pages and integrating e-commerce into your Squarespace website is a relatively seamless process. However, managing the back-end of a large online store with hundreds or thousands of products can become cumbersome due to Squarespace’s limited inventory management capabilities compared to Shopify.
Overall, both platforms are fairly easy to use, but Squarespace has a slight edge in terms of its more streamlined and visually-appealing interface, while Shopify offers more robust e-commerce management tools.
Features and Functionality
As a dedicated e-commerce solution, it’s no surprise that Shopify outshines Squarespace when it comes to the depth and breadth of its online selling features.
Product Management
Shopify provides far more advanced product management tools than Squarespace. With Shopify, you can:
- Organize an unlimited number of products into multiple collections and categories
• Create product variants (e.g., different sizes, colors) with variant pricing/SKUs
• Track inventory levels in real-time across multiple locations
• Generate professional reports on inventory, sales, and other key metrics
While Squarespace also allows you to sell physical and digital products through your site, its product organization and inventory tracking capabilities are more rudimentary, making it less suitable for larger catalogs or multi-location businesses.
Payments and Checkout
Both platforms integrate with popular payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe, but Shopify provides more checkout customization options. You can create one-page checkout experiences, allow customers to checkout on your store without an account, and save their payment details for future purchases.
Shopify also has the edge when it comes to handling different types of payment methods, including digital wallets, buy-now-pay-later services, and cryptocurrency in certain regions.
Dropshipping and POD
For entrepreneurs interested in dropshipping or setting up a print-on-demand business, Shopify is the clear winner. It has deep integrations with top dropshipping apps like Oberlo and POD services like Printful, making it easy to connect your online store with suppliers and fulfill orders.
Squarespace does offer some 3rd party integrations for dropshipping and POD, but the options are more limited.
Sales Channels
While both platforms allow you to sell across multiple channels beyond your core website (e.g., social media, online marketplaces), Shopify has a significant advantage here. Its sales channel integrations are far more extensive, enabling you to sync inventory and sell consistently everywhere your customers are – including Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and more.
Shopify also has additional sales channels not available on Squarespace like the ability to power in-person sales with Shopify POS (point-of-sale).
Marketing and SEO Tools
When it comes to marketing and driving traffic to your online store, both Shopify and Squarespace provide some built-in SEO tools, blogging capabilities, abandoned cart recovery features, and integrations for email marketing services like MailChimp.
However, Shopify takes the lead by offering more advanced marketing functions like:
- Gift card creation and distribution
• Automatic shipping rate calculation
• Integrated Google Smart Shopping campaigns
• Numerous upselling and cross-selling opportunities via apps
• Robust reporting and analytics on marketing and conversion metrics
Squarespace’s marketing toolset, while capable for many businesses, isn’t as comprehensive as what you get with Shopify’s suite of built-in and third-party app integrations.
Apps and Integrations
When it comes to third-party app integrations and overall extensibility, Shopify is the undisputed winner compared to Squarespace.
Shopify’s App Store has over 7,000 apps and integrations across categories like shipping, accounting, upselling, reporting, customer service, and more. This gives Shopify users an incredible amount of flexibility to customize their stores and integrate with the tools and services they need as their business scales.
Squarespace has a much smaller app ecosystem made up of mostly basic integrations for payment gateways, email marketing providers, and basic shipping/inventory management.
Themes and Design Flexibility
On the design front, both Shopify and Squarespace have mobile-responsive theme stores with a variety of free and premium templates to choose from. However, Squarespace has the edge in terms of design quality and flexibility.
Squarespace’s themes are universally sleek and modern, offering an incredible degree of customization through the platform’s brilliant page builder and design tools. You can tweak virtually every pixel and element on the page for a highly unique, on-brand look without touching code.
Shopify’s theme store also has many premium, professionally-designed options. But its design customization capabilities aren’t as robust as Squarespace’s. While you can tweak colors, fonts, and certain page elements, it’s more difficult to achieve truly custom page layouts without hiring a developer.
Plans and Pricing
Shopify has a wider range of pricing plans to accommodate businesses of various sizes and needs:
Basic Shopify ($29/month): All essential e-commerce features like unlimited products, online/social sales channels, shipping and tax rates calculators
Shopify ($79/month): Adds professional reports, international pricing and domains
Advanced Shopify ($299/month): Provides advanced reporting, shipping rates calculators, and staff accounts
There are also Shopify Lite ($9/month) and Shopify Plus ($2000+/month) plans at opposing ends for very small or large/enterprise-level businesses.
All paid plans have a 2.9% + 30¢ transaction fee if you use a third-party payment provider. This fee is waived if you use Shopify’s own payment processing.
Squarespace’s pricing is less confusing, but less flexible:
Personal ($16/month): For basic personal websites or simple portfolios
Business ($23/month): For small businesses, online stores, client management
Basic Commerce ($27/month): Enables selling through your Squarespace site
Advanced Commerce ($49/month): Adds more advanced commerce features like abandoned cart recovery, gift cards, etc.
There are no transaction fees beyond standard payment processing charges for things like credit cards.
For small to medium-sized e-commerce businesses with modest sales volumes, Squarespace’s pricing can be more cost-effective than Shopify in the short-term. However, as your business grows and requires more advanced selling features, Shopify’s scalable pricing plans become increasingly worthwhile investments.
Customer Support and Reliability
When you’re running an online business, having reliable support is crucial in case any issues arise with your store, transactions, or website uptime. Both Shopify and Squarespace have solid customer support offerings, but there are some key differences.
Shopify provides 24/7 support via phone, live chat, and email no matter which pricing plan you’re on. They also have an extensive library of tutorials, guides, and community forums.
Squarespace’s support resources are more limited on lower pricing tiers. 24/7 phone and live chat support is only available on the pricier Advanced Commerce plan. Those on cheaper plans have to rely on email support during business hours and self-serve resources.
In terms of reliability and uptime, Shopify and Squarespace have excellent track records overall. However, Shopify does have an edge as a fully-hosted e-commerce platform optimized for selling online. Some Squarespace users have reported occasional site slowdowns, especially on higher traffic days.
Conclusion
Both Shopify and Squarespace have their unique strengths as online selling platforms in 2024. Which one is “best” ultimately depends on your specific business requirements and future growth plans.
For the vast majority of online retailers and product companies, Shopify is the more robust, scalable e-commerce solution. Its extensive feature set for inventory management, multi-channel selling, shipping/fulfillment, and built-in marketing tools are unmatched compared to Squarespace.
However, Squarespace can still be a great choice, especially for smaller businesses that are light on product catalogs but want an extremely intuitive, visually-driven platform for their main website with integrated e-commerce capabilities.
Ultimately, there is no objectively “best” e-commerce platform since every business has different resources and needs. But this in-depth guide should give you a clear sense of how Shopify and Squarespace stack up so you can make the most informed choice moving forward.
