nopCommerce vs. Squarespace

nopCommerce is an ideal solution for businesses that want to tailor the customer journey for discovering and purchasing products. The nopCommerce solution is designed to adapt to you, not the other way around. The platform works best when you partner with a solution provider like ourselves. It also works well if you have a team of in-house .NET developers. A one-person shop will likely find less value in a platform like this if they're looking to spin up a small ecommerce site with just a few button clicks.

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

• As I came from Microsoft .Net technical experience with more than 15 years in IT industry, the nopCommerce .Net based open sourced framework is the best eCommerce framework in terms of architectural perspective - such as incorporating with Entity Framework code first approach, Domain Driven Architecture, using ASP.Net MVC, Unit Testing, ...etc.
• When my client asked for an eCommerce portal, the whole team was struggling from designing a database to identifying the requirements. nopCommerce has everything we need. All the industrial standard eCommerce features are included. It saves hours of database design, application design and also the client's requirements are easily fit into nopCommerce's features.
• The cost of nopCommerce- the last time we paid was a $200 one time cost for using the production site. It was ridiculously cost effective. As it is opened source, the whole community is supporting and constantly making this framework better and better.
• I set up a web site within a week using nopCommerce to sell my own products online. It was so easy to use, deploy, and set up.

Incentivized

• 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

• More community templates would be great.
• Some of the pricing can be a bit tricky, especially configured items... there is a likelihood of mispriced items with the current structure

Incentivized

• 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

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

Incentivized

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

I have asked numerous questions and the team treats my random questions as if they are critical to the continued success of their product. They really take each users' questions to heart and strive to solve them. I cannot commend them enough on how fast they respond to questions as well as the follow-through given to things thay may or may not even be a part of their platform.

Incentivized

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

Go for a plugin based development if you would like to extend nopCommerce. This approach will make it easier for you to upgrade the software.

NopCommerce offers you more flexibility where it comes to customization and scaling your application. The customization and extension is easy as well as the theme and plugin structure adds a large value to the overall system. The API's introduced by nopCommerce makes it more efficient when it comes to integrations and developing a mobile application on top of your eCommerce platform. The customer owns 100% of the source code without any extra fee.

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

• It has been our sole platform for developing online stores for the last 9 years and our business have been growing year to year.
• The disadvantage of nopCommerce is that it is not as well known as other competitors, which makes it more difficult to sell.

• 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