ChannelOnline vs. Squarespace

It would be ideal for a small solution provider looking for an entry level option to handle many of the company's functions at the same time. If customer relationship management, sales reporting, having a indexed eCommerce site, or having the ability to connect to 3rd party solutions is important to you; I would not go with ChannelOnline

Squarespace is one of the best solutions out there for building a website or web experience that looks good, has great functionality and is cost-effective, even for smaller businesses. Although most people in marketing will find most of the elements intuitive, if the creator is struggling with any of the functionality, there are many, many support options and other users who can offer assistance.

Incentivized

• Detailed product information
• Product reviews
• Supplier Relationships

• Stupid simple to use. I know very creative people who cannot code and this is probably the easiest ever platform for them!
• Pretty website templates and great functionality with showing off portfolios.
• They've already figured out what are the problems that non-coding people have when creating websites and they've figured out a simple solution for all of it.

Incentivized

• Sales Reporting Features
• Product Documentation and Training
• Customer Relationship Management
• Account Management
• Supplier Integration
• New Release Information
• Search Engine Indexing
• Custom Solutions

• Customizing the sites can be highly UN intuitive
• Navigation for editing the sites can be difficult and frustrating
• Squarespace has different versions and it's hard to know which version you're on. You can't switch after you start making a site with one version.

Incentivized

Updates aren't valuable and don't see us ever being ahead of the competition with this solution. Feature enhancements that are released are just attempts to stay relevant with other ERPs in the industry. If you're trying to take your company to the next level this isn't going to be your solution unless you're a very small company

Unless our website requires significantly more functionality in the future, I can't see us terminating our contract

Incentivized

The interface is pretty easy to use and get used to. It's the lack of account, product and customer management usability that hinders ChannelOnline

It's simple to use for someone who is really good with computers as well as those who are not. I've been using my personal squarespace for years and have also helped clients build a starting page which they are later able to manage theirselves.

Incentivized

We are down for 5-20 minutes once or twice a month

Support Staff is very nice and friendly. Most are knowledgeable but other than phone support they're lacking in every category

Help is available directly from the back end and uses full sentence searching to find answers to questions others may have asked before. With a ton of articles and support questions documents, it is very likely that your question has been answered. If not each page has the ability to open a direct email to support. Each case has a number and can be followed. Responses are often quick and have links and directions clearly stated

Incentivized

Squarespace was quicker to set up and more accessible to manipulate the theme, pictures, and content. The page layouts are more versatile and fluid. With WordPress, more time-consuming efforts go into making a template work the way you want it to (because of the lack of the drag-and-drop grids that Squarespace has).

Incentivized

New features are released twice a year. Often these releases are fixing bugs and will rarely be an enhancement that will take your company to another level of effectiveness

• It handles most business functions so the value is definitely there.
• Account Management is really inconvenient and will cost you hours of pay if you're in a business with a relatively medium-high employee turnover.
• It won't easily integrate at all with your website.
• Lead Management is pretty much non existent.
• Quotes and orders are fairly easy to manage so employee efficiency could rise.
• Training and readily available documentation on ChannelOnline is weak. This is especially true for new features.

• The cost is reasonably decent. My client says they spent about $20 a month or $240 a year. I asked her if she could add Google AdSense to her blog one day, and they believe they can. They said a custom site would cost them $3000-10,000 depending on who does it. And I agreed, but I found the website they created was on the lower end of that range.

Incentivized