How to Choose Between Shopify, Squarespace and All Other E-Commerce Sites
In the early days of e-commerce, users were limited to a few content management systems built specifically for this purpose, such as Zencart, Bigcommerce, and Spree. Nowadays, people starting out rarely use their own content management system, but instead use a hosted platform such as Shopify or Square. There are many factors to consider when choosing the best platform for you—and consider them carefully, because once you’ve made your choice, you’ll find it difficult to switch.
Before you start searching, simplify
In short, setting up eCommerce sucks. Every part of it, from pricing to taxes, order fulfillment and customer service, is complex and difficult in its own way. There’s a reason why many companies try to eliminate pain points, but often they just add new ones. The best way to find the right hosting platform and get on your feet is to simplify your offering as much as possible in all major aspects of sales: have simple products with simple pricing and discount structures, simple shipping options. , and they are easy to do.
The platform you choose probably won’t meet all your needs out of the box.
No matter how you simplify, you’ll probably still have to install plugins, add-ons, extensions, or what your specific platform calls additional services for which you’ll pay extra. There are extensions for marketing, shipping, lead generation, customer service, and all other aspects of your store. They can connect your store to other services you use for payment or shipping. As you explore different platforms, you should also look into their extensions and make sure they offer the functionality you need at a price you find acceptable. All of these platforms allow you to have your own domain name, which you can register with them directly or with the registrar you purchased it from.
Shopify
Best for: Companies that plan to scale and primarily engage in e-commerce. Price: $29 – $299 per month. Customizable : You can customize the content as well as the main colors and fonts. You’ll need to know a bit of coding to adjust the layout and affect things like padding. E-commerce flexibility : You can customize core products, shipping, and payment right out of the box. This is very difficult or requires finding the right extension to support complex pricing, configuration or delivery schemes. Ease of Use: One of the easiest dashboards to use, with many tools offering basic support. For more functionality you need to add modules.
If you’re primarily building a store—not a website that sells a few things, but a store with multiple web pages—you should choose a platform that specializes in e-commerce. Shopify is designed to sell products and features that help you do that job better. It comes standard with simple reporting tools (which may also not be robust enough for most people), marketing recommendations, customer service tools, and templates built for sales.
Generally speaking, if people are setting up a store, I recommend they look at Shopify first and only look at other platforms if there are compelling reasons not to use Shopify. Some of these reasons could be that Shopify templates are quite simple; If you want a personalized experience, you need to hire a developer who specializes in the platform. If you want to run a blog in addition to your store, Shopify doesn’t make it particularly easy. This also applies to landing pages, which are an important part of your store’s marketing. As with Squarespace, there is no backwards compatibility. So if you’re using an older version or theme of Shopify, you won’t be able to easily upgrade to a newer one without rebuilding a large portion of the site.
Shopify runs on a code base called Liquid , which is easy to learn if you use any other coding language. It does a great job of separating the CSS and layout from the actual site content.
Square
Best for : Companies that have in-person or in-store operations in addition to an online experience. Price: $29/month . Customizable: Basic themes are offered and you can customize the content of this theme using a block system that is mainly focused on selling products. E-commerce flexibility: If you have one retail location (online only, not online and in person), you’ll have an easier time. Otherwise, Square offers about the same flexibility as Shopify, but with a much less robust library of extensions. Ease of Use: The control panel is like being lost in a Vegas casino.
Square has positions in many companies for the simplest reason: Square was the first to release a mobile card reader. Square also invested heavily in POS (point of sale) displays for small businesses like cafes and restaurants, so when they introduced websites, people decided to build a site where their inventory already was. The problem is that in the Square dashboard, these two features (website and products) are in completely different parts and seem completely separate.
Square does a good job of being able to customize products with many variables. However, I find the control panel to be absurdly difficult to understand and use; it feels like features are being created without any connection to previous features. For example, if you sell wine in your restaurant as well as for pickup, you cannot use the same product because in a restaurant you sell wine by the glass and by the bottle, but in a pickup you will only be selling the bottle. In fact, setting up your store, despite having a quick start guide, is almost incredibly difficult.
However, if you’re going to sell your products primarily in person or in person and online, Square may still be a better choice since the integration between the two is better than any other platform. If someone buys an item at a craft fair, if you use the app and reader, it will go out of your shared inventory.
Square space
Best for: Businesses that have a website that sells multiple products, rather than a store with multiple web pages . Price: $16-$49 per month. Customizable: There’s a really robust template market for Squarespace, and these themes run on standard HTML, CSS, and javascript, so they’re easier to customize than other platforms. However, if you are just a non-programming user, you will be limited to changing the basic layout of blocks and colors. Squarespace’s color system can drive you crazy. E-commerce flexibility. Marketing aside, Squarespace isn’t really built for products. The product settings are quite limited compared to other engines and are best suited for visual products with few variations, such as T-shirts. Ease of Use: The Squarespace dashboard doesn’t do much and is therefore fairly easy to use.
People choose Squarespace because they’ve heard about it. Tons of marketing money have been spent on these efforts, and Squarespace has done a good job of making it easy to create a beautiful website. They do this by recording how much you can change something, so there’s a lot of white space and a lot of visuals on the pages. If for any reason you want to create pages, be it a blog or landing pages, it’s pretty simple. You can also set up a paid membership quite easily, which will block selected site content to everyone except those with a paid subscription. However, setting up subscription levels is not standard, so it’s all or nothing.
Placing products on a page is quite difficult, except in the limited ways that Squarespace wants you to, and it offers little control over the appearance of those products compared to other websites. Squarespace wants you to have a product page and direct people to it. For this reason, Squarespace is not my top choice for an e-commerce store, but rather for a website that can sell some things, like blog subscriptions. Squarespace is another platform without backward compatibility: if you’re using a specific version of Squarespace, upgrading to the new version will require a rebuild.
Having built a lot of Squarespace sites, I can tell you that the biggest weird thing is that there is a universal style guide that follows you around, but it’s absurdly difficult to just change the color of one block, button, or header on your page, and you’re it you will do it. will inevitably end up ruining other parts of your site. This is a common headache I hear about from Squarespace users.
The dashboard is delightfully simple, which I appreciate, but doesn’t offer much data about your customers or marketing tips.
WordPress with WooCommerce
Best for: Companies that have highly specialized needs that other platforms can’t meet, and can afford monthly maintenance/support . Price: Free, but prices can increase dramatically depending on the number of extensions your site and store need . Customizable: Unlimited flexibility. E-Commerce: Even out of the box, WooCommerce has the most customizable product configuration options, as well as the most robust extension marketplace on the web. Ease of Use: WordPress offers the most functionality and flexibility, but this also means the greatest likelihood of problems. Although WordPress and WooCommerce dashboards are well organized, it is best to have professional support.
WordPress actually has a variety of highly functional e-commerce plugins available for use, including Easy Digital Downloads for virtual products and ShopWP , which integrates your Shopify products into your WordPress site. But WooCommerce , which became so popular that it was acquired by Automattic a few years ago, takes the top spot as an e-commerce plugin for WordPress sites.
It’s a little complicated, so bear with me. WordPress is a platform and WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress. Additionally, WooCommerce has its own very robust extension marketplace that provides much more functionality. Out of the box, WooCommerce can create almost any product with virtually unlimited variations. Since e-commerce is not really a core feature of WordPress, the area in which you create these products is not as prominent as on other platforms. If you need any additional functionality, you look for add-ons that do it, either in the WordPress plugin directory , which may provide a free option, or the WooCommerce directory, which is likely to provide a paid but supported add-on.
Since the codebase is WordPress (a mix of html, php, CSS and a hefty dose of javascript) and the codebase is open source, you can customize the look and functionality to your liking without having to “hack” it. With 40% of the world’s websites using WordPress, it’s not hard to find a developer, but you’ll definitely want one to help you. You can host WordPress almost anywhere, but it’s better to choose a dedicated WordPress hosting like Flywheel.
Apart from all this, one of the main advantages of WordPress is that you don’t have to choose between a store or a website – you can easily create as many pages as you need for any reason, host a blog that will be very functional and on top of everything adds endless functionality. All data is neatly structured and portable, but again, all this freedom comes with great responsibility.
Choose a platform for your e-commerce website that suits your current situation.
You’ll likely be rebuilding your website, or at least changing its theme, every few years. The choices you make today don’t limit you forever, but depending on the number of products you have, migration becomes more time-consuming. However, choose the platform that suits your needs today (and in the next 24 months) based on the above criteria. Almost all of these platforms have free trials and free demos. Talk to people who have used these platforms and find support before you start developing with someone other than the platform itself.