While forming the roadmap of your business and prepping up to start a new venture towards success, the one point where most of the men fall into confusion is to choose the best ecommerce platform, when there appears so many big names. Shopify is the one name that bagged so much popularity and secured a top rated badge but it isn’t so simple to choose when there is another big fish present in the market, i.e., Squarespace.

Shopify is the platform that’s made to support medium to enterprise level businesses. It has simple yet very effective features that enables the merchants to cover up every section of their online business smoothly with the help of the professional tools of Shopify. Many big companies such as Tesla, Nescafe, Sephora are built on Shopify and are ruling the world currently.

Squarespace on the other hand is another successful platform providing software as a service (SaaS) for website building and hosting and enables the customers to use Squarespace’s very well designed templates and easy drag-and-drop service to build the website with ease. Although Squarespace is quite popular but it is not for someone who’s about to start a big business and would expand eventually as the tools of Squarespace are not advanced enough as Shopify’s but are cost effective.

It majorly depends on the requirements of yours, the fund you have and the size of your business would be, that will decide which one of the platforms is for you. And to lead you to the epilogue we will do an in-depth analysis of both the platforms and compare so that you are able to make up your mind by the end of this blog.

The platform should make sure apart from having good features it must not make them taxing enough to use them. Let’s find out which one among Shopify and Squarespace provides easy usage.

Shopify having so many professional tools, features and apps must not puzzle you in thinking that they are intricate setups. The interface of Shopify is smooth having divided each category in arrays which makes things easier for beginners to get used to it. The instructions are clear cut and not used stilted teams so that when a person who is unaware of technical terms uses Shopify they easily get the instructions and are able to set up a basic store on his own. It requires to call a professional only when building and customizing a big ecommerce site. Yet Shopify is easy to manage and the website can be launched quickly.

Squarespace’s one of the biggest advantages is it’s templates. They are so creative and well designed but not so easy to use. It though has a drag-and-drop system which makes things a bit easier yet things can get very problematic sometimes especially in the editor homepage.

If you would ask, do themes and designs are really that important to consider and include in the check list of other features? Well yes so important to get a position somewhere at the top of the chart. And why not? The simple answer is chic and premium graphics is loved by everyone and attracts the customers a lot. The first impression should be alluring enough to captivate the visitors and start building trust on your website. Let’s compare and find out which goes better with themes.

Shopify has themes that are designed by professionals essentially for ecommerce sites. It is open to customization but a novice would not be able to do high changes according to the requirements but requires a website designer to set it up. Shopify theme store has over 100 premium themes out of which few are free and most of it are paid themes. They are mobile responsive hence would look awesome even when viewed from mobile. The cost of themes in Shopify range up to $ 180 but it is a one time investment that makes it a good deal.

When it comes to templates, Squarespace just rules over it. It has really brilliant themes and designs. The templates have modern touch to it making it more appealing. It is free to customize. There are a total of 110 templates available on Squarespace and all of it are mobile responsive. You will get vertical scrolling single-page formats to massive multi-block options. The templates of Squarespace are basically for the creative industry but it can be customized and cover pretty much every other industry.

Sales tools play a pivotal role in the ecommerce building platform. Without having these features one would be unable to execute their plan into action, as sales is the ultimate goal of having all the discussion and building the ecommerce site. Both Squarespace and Shopify have good sales features but which one turns out to be better? Let’s find out.

Below mentioned some of the best sales tools of Shopify:

• Inventory Management- Stock management is very essential while running an ecommerce business. It is a systematic planning of sourcing, storing and selling goods. Shopify has well built inventory allowing to add unlimited products, adding plenty of items at once and so much more.
• Offline Selling- Shopify enables you to sell offline apart from selling online. Shopify POS needs an internet connection to sync with your Shopify admin, send receipts by email and take card payments.
• Multi-channel selling- Multi-channel selling helps companies to integrate their ecommerce site to various social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Amazon. It helps the company to reach out to billions.
• Partnerships- Shopify is courier partnered with USPS, DHL Express, Ups and Canada post.

Mentioning here some of the best sales tools of Squarespace:

• Type of Product- Squarespace allows you to sell physical, digital as well as service products and the tools are natively given and one doesn’t have to integrate any app for this.
• Product Presentation- Customer’s satisfaction matters a lot when it comes to the product and giving many viewing angles of the product is an edge to gain their satisfaction. In Squarespace you will get an inbuilt zoom feature as well as 360° viewing.
• Configuring Sales Tax- Squarespace allows you to set tax rules for the place you ship the product.
• Automatic Email- Squarespace sends automatic order confirmation emails to customers who place the orders so that the customers do not worry if their order is confirmed or not.

Marketing is another vital component of a platform. Having a well built ecommerce site with lots of good products and functionally wouldn’t fetch the merchants anything if no-one would know about your store. Marketing features is that essential which lays out powerful plans to drive the traffic towards your online store.

Shopify has powerful marketing tools. It supports native ad formats. In Shopify you can link your ecommerce site to Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, eBay and many other social media platforms so that your store appears more to a wide range of people worldwide. Shopify runs email campaigns as well. In Shopify all these are made very simple to take advantage of.

Squarespace in comparison has fewer apps to integrate with your ecommerce site. In the area of blogging, Squarespace has an edge providing all the necessary features for blogging for your website. Squarespace similar to Shopify creates emails campaigns to attract the customers.

No one likes to be bound by limits and wish for having versatility when they think of building a website, as this would be beneficial to both the company and the customers and would help in the organic growth of the company. Apps and extensions is the icing of a platform which makes it more appealing to have the website built on it. Let’s bring out what Shopify and Squarespace have in store.

Shopify here beats Squarespace in having such a wide range of impressive apps. Shopify has in its app store over 4000 apps both free and paid which are easy to integrate with your ecommerce site to add multifaceted purpose to your online store. For speed optimization, shipment, email campaign, multi-channel functionality and what not. In Shopify you will get exactly what you are looking for.

Squarespace has limited third-party service in comparison to Shopify. It although has high quality apps which might be enough for a simple online store but to have an expanded business requires strong versatile tools which is one of the drawbacks of Squarespace.

The performance of your ecommerce business should be tracked time and again. This critical evaluation is very crucial in order to find the loopholes and to take the necessary measures in the fixation of it for the smooth running of the company.

Shopify has an inbuilt analytics and dashboard powerful enough to monitor and keep track of every activity happening in your store and keeps you up-to-date with it. It helps in inventory management, gives you a real time view of the traffic in your store, analyses the customers returning in your website, sales reports, analyses the transactions, likewise gives you a detailed insight of all the activities and saves you from the loss in business.

Squarespace also has native Squarespace analytics which helps in tracking the performance of your store. It lacks few of the features which Shopify has such as stock monitoring, but gives an insight into the behavior of the visitor, gives visual reports on statistics such as pageview, referrers, popular content etc.

An assistance is always required while using a platform and both Shopify and Squarespace provides good customer service. Let’s find out the similarities and key differences regarding help center and support of Shopify and Squarespace.

Shopify has excellent customer help and support with 24/7 phone, live chat support as well as email. Shopify has good video tutorials as well as Shopify community. You can ask for Shopify experts as well. Shopify has a dedicated support system which takes prompt action to the issues arising.

Squarespace similar to Shopify has live chat support but only available in specific time slots from Monday to Friday. It has a forum from which you can take the help. But it has not many options available like Shopify which is another downside of Squarespace.

It all comes down to money at the end which you will invest and you should be conscious about which one will be cost effective and would be beneficial in the long run. And to help you make up your mind we will run a parallel comparison of the prices of both Shopify and Squarespace.

As we have seen the monthly plans of both the platforms, we know that Squarespace is comparatively cheaper than Shopify but the features Shopify provides is value for money and the powerful tools it has is needed to run a big ecommerce business.

Squarespace lacks many features such as limited apps and sales tools that we already discussed broadly above. For a simple online store you can go with Squarespace but if you are aiming for big, Shopify should be your go to platform. A little more investment and you are sorted for everything.

Let’s reiterate what we have learnt so far:

• Shopify is for big enterprise level businesses whereas Squarespace is limited to only basic stores.
• Both the platforms support drag-and-drop service and have impressive themes but Shopify’s themes are made for ecommerce websites while Squarespace’s templates are more for the creative industry.
• Shopify has brilliant sales tools in which Squarespace lacks the point in not able to provide many options in payment gateways, better shipping features etc.
• In the customer service, Shopify has the edge in having dedicated support as well as multiple options in the help center.
• Shopify has impressive apps and ample amounts of it are available whereas Squarespace has good quality apps but is in limited numbers.

By now we got the idea who is the winner and it’s none other than Shopify. Shopify won most of our rounds and proved it to be the best value for money platform. Squarespace is also a good choice if you have a shortage of funds and are not aiming for a big business. All in all Shopify is the champion.