The Best E-commerce CMS/SAAS for Small Businesses
November 20, 2018

The Best E-commerce CMS/SAAS for Small Businesses

Sean Pomory | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Squarespace

We use Squarespace to build a modern, beautiful, responsive websites. I also use Squarespace to implement websites for smaller businesses that need full-scale commerce as well. It has a ton of capabilities and integrates with some of the biggest players in the game, including Apply Pay, MailChimp and PayPal. WordPress may give you more features, but it will cost more time to build. The templates are beautiful.

Best of all, the pricing includes website hosting and SSL.
  • E-commerce
  • Easy to use
  • Transparent pricing
  • Great support
  • Decent analytics
  • Limited template options
  • Difficult to edit the UI of a site beyond provided templates
  • Can be more difficult to use than Wix or Weebly
  • Transparency in pricing means easy to measure competitors
  • Low overhead means it's easy to recoup cost. Especially if being used for e-commerce.
Again, Squarespace is the best option for small businesses seeking an e-commerce solution. If you need more robust features, look to Drupal or WordPress, depending on site size. Weebly or Wix are solid options for basic sites, but I personally have had significant issues with the WYSIWYG editor. Shopify and WooCommerce make solid platforms as well, and may be good options if you need direct integrations. For example, Shopify integrates directly with HubSpot and WooCommerce with WordPress.
This recommendation depends entirely on use case. If you are looking for an enterprise level e-commerce site, look to something like Drupal 8 to solve your needs. If you desire complete control over your code at the SMB level, use WordPress. If want to spin up a site efficiently, at low cost, and know exactly what you're paying for, use Squarespace. It is by far the best e-commerce platform form small businesses.

Squarespace Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG editor
10
Code quality / cleanliness
8
Admin section
9
Page templates
7
Library of website themes
6
Mobile optimization / responsive design
9
Publishing workflow
9
Form generator
8
Content taxonomy
8
SEO support
7
Bulk management
7
Availability / breadth of extensions
4
Community / comment management
5
API
8
Internationalization / multi-language
8
Role-based user permissions
8