Shopify is a commerce platform designed for both online stores and retail locations. Shopify offers a professional online storefront, a payment solution to accept credit cards, and the Shopify POS application to power retail sales.
$29
per month
Squarespace
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Squarespace is a CMS platform that allows users to create a DIY blog, eCommerce store, and/or portfolio (visual art or music). Some Squarespace website and shop templates are industry or use case-specific, such as menu builders for restaurant sites.
I use Squarespace for my personal services website. I do not feel like the shop options for Squarespace are very valuable when compared to Shopify. Shopify is created ultimately for vendors to sell their product. It doesn't worry too much about being beautiful and puts most of …
I looked at both Wix and Squarespace. I felt Wix was a little too complicated for me to use as I only have a fairly basic knowledge of web development. And while Squarespace was easy to use and looked better than Shopify, its pricing was a little bit on the higher side. I felt …
We used Volusion for a while, but switched over because Shopify was a lot easier to use. It has an easier check-out process, better templates, easier management of products, and is user-friendly. Squarespace on the other hand, we still use because we think it's better when we …
I considered using the Squarespace platform but it wasn't going to be able to keep a hidden shop for my retailers without a significant amount of work. I also considered a WordPress website but I was looking for something I could do a lot of on my own without needing coding …
With Wix and Squarespace, we really like the extended customization options for our store, but they both lacked the "commerce theme." Shopify, like BigCommerce is essentially designed to cater right to ecommerce and thus has more tools and features to support that effort. BigCom…
They have more analytics, better designs, more apps to create a more robust system to run a business on. Their system is very intuitive, and they are heavily investing in constantly making their platform better. The biggest selling point years ago was the ability to track with …
Shopify is way easier to set up. No coding needed. All the tools to create your eCommerce are there and are easy to use. You can literally set up a working site in minutes. Most of the initial work is more focused on us making sure we had proper images and product descriptions, …
Shopify performs a great marketing influence by having ads and different kinds of branding on various social media. Also, their utilities promotion creates a great impact on the people's mind, and after executing action on the platform, in my experience I liked it how …
Shopify easily holds its own against some of the top eCommerce and web design sites on the market today. It's affordable and definitely worth the price. Set up is straight forward and easy to understand.
Shopify as a business is one of the fastest-growing e-commerce solutions in the world. And for good reason, because it's core functionality is set up in such a way that you can literally start an online business in a couple of hours. They have a massive suite of applications …
We continue to integrate with all platforms. As far as Shopify goes, we've found them to be the easiest to work with and integrate with. Everything on their platform is set up for 3P expansion; you can tell they're serious about it and that it isn't just an afterthought to …
Squarespace is a great starter website, however once your business grows and you need your website more, I would switch over to Shopify. As mentioned before Squarespace makes it hard to manage multiple pages or products. It's easier than Shopify when you first start out, but …
We use Shopify for a retail venture we are trying and I find it more difficult to use than SquareSpace. The features are more complicated and require more knowledge than simply typing what you want and publishing it. Squarespace is more intuitive and is easier and faster to …
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 …
I select Squarespace only when my client is on an extremely short budget, otherwise I'm going with WordPress. Wix is basically the same animal as Squarespace and I do not really see the benefit of one over the other. Shopify is one of the most useful DIY builders when it comes …
As they say, form follows function. After that, it’s about finding the template that’s the best fit for your brand. If that’s all you need, Weebly will satisfy. You can custom visualize your brand with logo, fonts, colors and more.
Each website or webstore backend that I've used has different purposes, so do not let me mislead you. Squarespace provides the best balance of website, blog and storefront for my purposes, and outright beats Weebly for a better appearance in your final product. Tumblr and WordPr…
Freelance Web Developer, SEO and Social Media Specialist
Chose Squarespace
We use Squarespace to create small to medium informational websites for clients that want an easy-to-maintain site. Most sites we design use WordPress due to its extreme flexibility and countless templates and plug-ins. While we have used Wix and Shopify to create sites, we …
Squarespace offers better SEO options and ease of use than Wix/Weebly site builders. Squarespace is easy to manage and easy to track inventory and sales. For companies with lower skill sets in-house, it is also very easy to train staff to manage the platform.
Ultimately Squarespace was the easiest for us to use for our needs and allowed us to tie in our other ecommerce third party provider. It is competitive in costs and has good customer service.
It's hard for me to say how Squarespace stacks up against these other options as I've only recently just begun to look into other options. I selected Squarespace initially due to good marketing on their part to get me to look at them first, and also because we initially only …
The ease of use was a massive plus in Squarespace's side. I have limited knowledge of HTML and web development. Squarespace won simply because of its user-friendliness and the low barrier to entry when it comes to creating a good looking website. Every alternative that I looked …
Shopify is a great platform for small to medium-sized businesses looking to set up an online store. It's easy to use, offers a wide range of features and integrations, and is perfect for businesses in the retail and food industry. However, large enterprise businesses with complex and custom needs may find Shopify less suitable.
I have a gorgeous website that I made myself, thanks to Squarespace. I'm able to integrate marketing emails, SEO, analytics, online carts, pretty much instantly. If you want to get started fast, it's really great. I think if you want to customize square space and you're having trouble, it would be most helpful to hire a square space designer. That's what I would have done in retrospect.
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.
The main drawback that I am facing in Shopify for a long time is that their sales analytics system is not up to mark. As I am using Shopify to run different stores for my organization it does not get updated after-sales and does not provide the right analytics about the product strength and number of sales.
Secondly, Shopify has different apps which are best to run the store on max strength but they are very much costly like inventory management, generating multiple discount codes, and more robust customizable editing.
Nothing we have used in the past or have seen thus far even comes close to offering what we get with Shopify Plus, especially for the price. You cannot even come close to getting what we are getting at the price we pay. We are beyond thrilled and Shopify Plus meets and exceeds all of our needs and expectations. We love it!
I think most people are able to suer Shopify that have used a computer. There are some features that take a bit longer to learn. If you are not a creative person it may be a bit more difficult to learn the website customization, but with a help guide or tutorial it will only take a few tries to understand how to work the interface
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.
In terms of support I give Shopify a 9 out of 10 because they're always very friendly and thorough, and they personally can't solve my problem for me they always point me in the proper direction with the proper information I need to move forward
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
The old platform that I used could not help us to meet our requirements. It was not helping us properly, then I got to know about Shopify and started using it. After 1 month [of] usage of Shopify we could understand that this is the best platform [for E-commerce] to make better sales and goodwill. Shopify helped us to get a proper idea of the analytics of the website. Shopify [supports] most of the [applications] and helps us to make better results.
Overall, as a designer, it makes perfect sense for small to large businesses to use a site such as SquareSpace. Costs are relatively reasonable with the ability to go in and do custom code.
The issue is certain aspects of it, depending on the plan, you can't do. So, if you want to do API to the site, you need to use the top-tier program to do so. Even at custom code, you won't have access to the API section.
As well, like all templates and themes, everybody is using the same style too.
It got the store up quickly so the client could start selling. She was previously selling products on Etsy and Facebook and wanted to consolidate everything onto one website, so the main thing Shopify solved was to reduce the store owner's time in managing all her products on multiple sites. Also, we had previously built a website on Wix with all the custom functionality and branding she needed - a truly great, high-end website - but it performed so slowly that it was unusable. So the speed at which Shopify can be set up and then works on the page is appreciable.
The website was manageable by the client - she could figure the system out herself after a while so she saved money on costs for hiring developers. She did have to hire developers to customize some of the plug-ins but costs are all relative; it wasn't a high investment compared to building a full e-commerce website. With the complexity and size of her product base and the functionality and branding she wanted to have in a website, and the potential of her business, she would have needed to invest well over $10,000 to get to where she really needs to be. In the end she kept the budget under $5000.00.
Costs kept climbing with plug-ins having to be added with everything. My client became more involved in building the website and began to try multiple plugins, and she did not have the skill base to evaluate the plugins functionalities so she chose plugins that did not do everything she needed, and then ended up paying the plugin developers to customize the plugins. So on one hand, it's pretty amazing to be able to bring up an e-commerce website as quickly as a week or so, but on the other hand if you need anything customized or deeper functionality in regards to product searching and filtering on the web page, and management on the backend, it quickly goes beyond the skills of the average person to manage, and above their expected budget as well. In the end my client really did not get anything close to the functionality for the website we had originally envisioned.
Shopify was the easiest way we could find to bring the client's products to a global market. We evaluated several other platforms and the functionality simple did not seem to be adequate, so Shopify seemed like the only solution that could do enough of what we needed and still stay within this client's budget. Really the problem in this project was not platform per se but that the budget wasn't large enough. Shopify managed to provide a solution for an ecommerce store with thousands of products on a tiny budget, so in the sense of pure functionality it provided the best value of all the platforms we evaluated. The solution still isn't big enough for this client's business though so, without having insights into this client's post-build sales results, my guess is that because her new website did not make her products easier to sort through, and she likely didn't have much more budget left to invest in SEO and other marketing of the website, her sales probably didn't increase substantially as a result of having built the website. So I think this project all in all did not likely have a high ROI.
The key positive impact on my overall business objectives is how simple Squarespace sites are to implement new information. Whenever our services change, we can quickly update pages or even change how the website flows, in a very short window of time. This allows me to get back to more urgent work sooner.
Our Squarespace site for Club Swim Show helped present our web series to potential partners; Club Swim Show went on to partner with a popular swimming magazine and reach a larger audience through that magazine's hosting thanks to the professional design of our original website.
Squarespace does not bring in customers to my storefront, which is fine for me, since I sell things infrequently and it is not my main business, but might work against someone who is expecting a Shopify or Etsy level connection with buyer markets.