In the world of seemingly endless digital options, there are several different ways to set up your eCommerce store. You might not be sure which is the best fit for your needs. When looking at the differences between Squarespace eCommerce and Shopify, you might not know which of these popular solutions is the right one for your needs.

This guide will help you figure out which of these two eCommerce options is right for your business. There are certainly pros and cons to both options, so it’s worthwhile to look at the features of each before settling on a platform for your business.

What to Consider When Choosing Between Shopify vs. Squarespace

There are some differing key features between these two popular eCommerce options. If you are not sure which to choose, compare the various benefits that each site offers to determine which will best fit your business needs.

Personalization

Shopify offers some ways to personalize your site, but you have less chance to make customizations compared to Squarespace. Squarespace is the perfect choice for people who love to customize and personalize their website, and their many lovely templates make this an easy process.

If personalization is an important feature for your site’s eCommerce experience, you will want to go with Squarespace.

Integrations

When the POS is your main concern, Shopify will win every time. Shopify is built to allow you to collect payment in whatever way is best for your business. 

Squarespace also wins with integration in most areas, with the exception of point of sale. You will have fewer options for POS with Squarespace, but the many other integrations are excellent and seamless.

Blogging tools

Blogging on Shopify is pretty straightforward but offers difficulties if you want to make customizations. If all you need is a basic blog, Shopify will meet your business needs.

Meanwhile, the blogging and personalization experience is seamless on Squarespace. Squarespace makes any text management and insertion straightforward. You can customize how your templates appear so that your site is beautiful, unique, and informative. Squarespace is the clear winner when it comes to blog customizations.

Design Flexibility and Options

Shopify offers its own set of unique templates perfect for sales and customer experience within your site. The only place that you might have reduced design flexibility is if you want to use your Shopify site for blogging and other advertising.

Meanwhile, Squarespace is built for creative and unique design. You will have more flexibility concerning how your site appears but fewer options for customizing the buying process than Shopify.

Overview of Squarespace eCommerce Platform

Notable Built-in Features

Squarespace comes with lots of front-end and back-end improvements. You can choose from many styles of storefront and host blogging options. There are also a few quality POS options to choose from.

Squarespace offers heaps of site templates, unique blogging templates, and more. You can create an online store and correlating blog that will resonate with visitors. You get great marketing tools, and there are lots of integrations that work with the platform. Squarespace might not be explicitly targeted at eCommerce like Shopify is, but the company knows how to make site building easy.

 With Squarespace, you will love the ease of creating your store, making customizations, and making seamless updates. 

Marketing Tools Available

Online marketing with Squarespace is straightforward. This is where the platform shines.

With Squarespace, you get access to all kinds of social media and ad tools that make it simple to drive traffic to your site without working on lots of other apps or tools. You can choose to operate with each template set for best SEO practices off the bat. This means that everything you add to these pages will be optimized for you. You can also integrate a wide variety of marketing tools into your Squarespace use.

Search Engine Optimization

Squarespace is the clear winner for SEO optimization since this comes built into all of the templates, and you can add SEO tools with ease. Shopify offers access to built-in SEO, but it is not as robust as Squarespace. This means that you might need to do some external legwork to generate your SEO work for your Shopify store. Squarespace makes SEO seamless.

A Look Into the Shopify eCommerce Platform

Marketing Features

Shopify offers built-in SEO tactics and access to some plug-ins like Google Adwords. You can also easily share information from your listings on social media channels. You can drop discounts and other key lead magnets onto your social media and other marketing locations with built-in Shopify tools as well.

Payment Methods

Shopify offers a fully robust and effective POS. Your customers can pay with almost any kind of debit or credit card, and you can set up international payments as well. If you run into any issues, an entire support team is dedicated to this part of the Shopify platform.

The shopping cart with Shopify is also excellent — you’ll have a hard time finding one that stacks up.

Mobile Friendly

Shopify is very mobile-friendly, and you will never have to worry if people can shop seamlessly when viewing your site on their devices. This is a great benefit compared to some other eCommerce options on the market today.

How to Choose Which Platform Is Best for Your Needs

At the end of the day, the way you manage your eCommerce store is the biggest argument for choosing one of these platforms over the other. Shopify aims to make eCommerce processes easier than you may have thought they ever could be. If you might want to blog more effectively and enjoy access to more custom features like Squarespace offers, that platform may be best for you.

Choosing between these two excellent eCommerce platforms can be challenging, but if you start considering your means of managing your store, you can choose if Squarespace vs. Shopify is the right one for your needs.