Shopify and Squarespace are among the largest e-commerce platforms on the market today. Thus, they both provide an opportunity for small business owners to create their own online stores or websites. With all this, no programming experience is required. In order to find out what is more suitable for a particular business, you need to study both platforms in detail.
Before making an assessment of each of the platforms, it is necessary to learn what each of them offers. Only after careful comparison is it possible to more accurately understand which of the features and price points of these platforms will best meet the digital needs of a particular business.
Overview of Shopify.
Shopify is a cloud-based trading platform. It, in turn, helps business owners easily create and manage various online stores. Shopify is very famous for scalable full-service eCommerce store solutions. It’s worth noting that with Shopify POS and its range of physical POS hardware, retailers can also process payments in person.
Shopify Features.
He has the ability to load both external and internal functions. Such functions, in turn, provide the ability to do much more than just create an online store. Here are the top hits of the platform:
Shop.
To get started, choose from a list of over 90 professionally designed templates. This must be done in order to create a branded website. In the future, it can be edited and also configured with full control. Thus, it provides the ability for customers to navigate the site quite easily, both on their desktop computers and on mobile devices. Also highly appreciated is the fact that it is possible to use your own domain name or buy it from Shopify. Another point to take into account is the addition to the e-commerce store. Sites that are hosted on Shopify come with blogging platforms.
Shopping cart.
It is possible to accept all major credit and debit cards through Shopify Payments. It is also possible to integrate the site with more than 100 third-party payment gateways. There is also a built-in Shopify shopping cart. Such a basket has many different functions, which in turn can help you make settings and greatly simplify the checkout process. It also includes features such as tax calculation, customizable shipping rates, and abandoned cart emails from customers. It is also highly appreciated that Shopify Shipping Shopify works with many carriers. Thus, customers can have a fairly low price for delivery. There are other things to pay attention to. Not least an important fact is that they provide business owners with such advantages as the ability to print labels from a phone or computer, as well as calculate shipping costs.
Store management.
Once you’ve set up your website, there’s a pretty long list of Shopify features to take advantage of. They, in turn, are able to optimize and automate the management of an online store and customer information. Shopify is also capable of working in conjunction with major dropshipping apps.
Products.
​​Shopify has one control panel today when it comes to sales, be it specific products or digital. With the help of such a panel, he is able to monitor, manage, and organize stocks from a single toolbar. It is worth noting that this platform does not have any restrictions in terms of the number of products.
Marketing and SEO.
In order to significantly increase the position of your website on the search results pages, you first need to apply Shopify’s built-in SEO tactics when creating all the content that is on the site. Shopify provides the ability to sell on Facebook and Instagram, and in turn, also offers Google Adwords credit. Therefore, it further has the ability to integrate with social media channels. All this is necessary for the audience to be able to easily navigate to the site. Therefore, after customer acquisition has taken place, it is possible to present them with discounts or gift cards. Reviews are important, therefore it is necessary to encourage customers to write good reviews, over time this will help attract a new audience of customers.
An overview of Squarespace.
Squarespace is one of the leading names in the world of e-commerce. In turn, it has a fairly large number of popular entrepreneurs who implement it in order to maintain its site.
Squarespace is a good solution for those who need a fairly simple website builder application, for those who need a digital landing pad. Thus, it does not have to be a full-fledged online store. Therefore, Squarespace can be a good solution for those who need a fairly simple the online store from scratch.
Website Design.
So Squarespace is quite popular for its award-winning website design. Hence it is possible to choose from a large number of website templates, all of which can be viewed according to a specific industry of interest. After defining with a template, you need to make layout settings. Only the Squarespace drag-and-drop functionality needs to be applied, as well as the text and color options. Therefore, based on the needs of the site, you can configure the portfolio, blog, and so on. It all depends on the needs of the site, whether it is a demonstration or the sale of certain products.
Online Stores.
With the help of Squarespace, not only is it easy to create an online store but also to customize it. Thus, in order to implement this into work, you must first apply several product options, then embed the necessary images, videos, or other related products. This is necessary so that customers have as much information as possible about the products that are provided on the site. Checkout is limited to one page and optimized for mobile devices (just like the rest of your online store). Depending on what the tariff plan will be, you can carry out different offers for customers, it can be either a discount or free shipping.
Marketing Tools.
Squarespace provides its users with a set of online marketing tools. This is important because in this way it is possible to stimulate interaction with customers and in turn make it much easier for business owners to collect information about customers and their behavior.
Squarespace’s content creation fields are preloaded with SEO best practices in mind. The website is able to sync with social media channels so updates will happen at the same time. There are other tools for interacting with customers. This includes an analytics dashboard, MailChimp integration, Google Maps embedding, a mobile dashboard, full-featured blogging, and a customizable calendar that can be uploaded with events and shared on social media.
Squarespace pricing.
Squarespace offers two account levels today for both the website-only service and the online store service. Like Shopify, Squarespace provides a free trial. This version exists for those who have not decided on the choice of service that will be most suitable.
Conclusion
When conducting a survey among business owners, the majority choose Shopify over Squarespace. This is because the first one is more multifunctional, which in turn can also explain the rather high price. It’s important to note here that this doesn’t necessarily make Shopify better than Squarespace.
If we are talking about a business that is expanding rapidly, you need to turn your attention to Shopify. It was created specifically for creating and managing online stores, and also has a wonderful Shopify development company that is ready to answer all your questions. Speaking of Squarespace, it’s more likely to be a good solution for very small or new businesses with limited digital store functionality or those that need a digital content manager.
The advantage of both platforms is the availability of a free trial period, so you can always try to create a website using any service. Thus, it needs to be intuitive, to begin with, as well as to figure out if its service plans are in line with the business budget before moving on to a paid plan.