Video: Shopify vs Squarespace

Video transcript

Hi all, it’s Matt from Style Factory here. Today I’m going to look at Shopify vs Squarespace. Stay tuned to see which of these two website building tools is the better fit for you.

But before I begin, I just wanted to say that if you have any questions about either platform, do make sure to leave them in the comments. We’ll do our very best to answer them.

I’d also encourage you to like this video, hit the subscribe button and click the notifications bell. This helps us raise the visibility of our work and gives you easy access to all our reviews and tips too.

Ok, let’s dive in with a look at the reasons to use Shopify over Squarespace.

One — Shopify lets you sell in more ways

Unlike Squarespace, which started life as a general website building tool, Shopify has been designed specifically as an ecommerce platform. This means that its selling tools are more flexible and sophisticated than the Squarespace equivalents.

In particular, Shopify is better for dropshipping. This is a business model where you don’t make, store or deliver any products. Instead, you take orders for products via an online store, and pass them onto a supplier. The supplier then charges you, and sends the goods to the customer.

The range of dropshipping integrations for Shopify is enormous and dwarfs the equivalent offering from Squarespace.

Additionally, Shopify is the much better solution for point of sale. It gives you access to a much wider range of POS hardware and software features than Squarespace, and lets you use POS in more countries too.

Two — Shopify is better for selling internationally

Unlike Squarespace, Shopify lets you sell in multiple currencies, which means that your store’s visitors can see product prices in their own currency. This is something that can lead to significantly more conversions.

And, thanks to its sophisticated built-in multilingual features, Shopify makes it much easier than Squarespace to create different language versions of your store.

Three — Shopify works with more payment gateways than Squarespace

Payment gateways are software applications that process credit card payments on your website. Shopify lets you use far more of these than Squarespace — you can integrate over 100 payment gateways with Shopify, while Squarespace limits you to just using Stripe and PayPal.

This means there are more limits on the type of payment methods you can accept with Squarespace, and significantly, Squarespace doesn’t work with Google Pay.

Four — Abandoned cart saving is included on all Shopify plans

An abandoned cart saving tool lets you send reminder emails automatically to people who leave your store in the middle of a purchase. You can use these emails to encourage those visitors to complete their transaction.

While Shopify includes this feature on all plans, you’ll have to be on Squarespace’s most expensive plan to access it.

Five — Shopify’s automatic tax calculation features are stronger

One of the key challenges of selling online is that you often have to deal with lots of different tax rates, and price your products accordingly.

Because of its automatic tax calculation features, Shopify can simplify this process considerably for merchants.

Additionally, Shopify makes it easy to automatically apply the EU’s complex VAT MOSS tax rates to digital products.

By contrast, Squarespace’s offering here is very limited. Its automatic tax calculation features are only currently available in the USA, and involve installing a third-party app.

Six — there are a lot more integrations available for Shopify

Thanks to an app store containing over 8,000 apps, Shopify integrates with a huge number of third-party tools and services. Squarespace’s equivalent app store only contains 35 or so apps.

Seven — Shopify’s customer support is more comprehensive

Shopify lets you contact the company for help in more ways.

Phone support is available on most Shopify plans, while Squarespace only provides customer support via email or live chat.

Additionally, Shopify provides customer support in considerably more languages than Squarespace.

So those are some of the key things that Shopify does better than Squarespace.

But where does Squarespace beat Shopify?

I’ll come to that in a moment but first, I just wanted to add that if you’re interested in using either Shopify or Squarespace to build a website, make sure you check out the special links in the video description. These will let you access either platform at a significant discount.

OK, let’s take a look at the reasons to use Squarespace over Shopify.

One — Squarespace gives you a much wider range of free templates — and they’re stunning too

There are far more free templates bundled with Squarespace than Shopify — you can choose from a range of over 150 free templates.

By contrast, Shopify only gives you access to around a dozen free ones, and its paid-for templates are quite expensive.

Additionally, the Squarespace templates are stunning. Although this is a subjective area, we think that their design has a ‘wow’ factor that isn’t present in the free Shopify themes.

Two — Squarespace is easier to use

The Squarespace interface is very user friendly and arguably presents a gentler learning curve than Shopify’s.

Squarespace’s drag and drop editor is particularly good, and better than Shopify’s when it comes to designing pages that look exactly the way you want them to.

Three — Squarespace gives you more website building features

Because Squarespace was initially conceived as a website building platform rather than an ecommerce solution, it gives you more tools for laying out your content exactly the way you want to. You get a lot more ways to create attractive page layouts, galleries and forms in Squarespace, and its blogging features are stronger too.

Four — Squarespace lets you sell online courses really easily

Selling online courses is a great way to monetize your content and your skills — and Squarespace lets you do this more easily than Shopify.

You will have to pay extra to unlock Squarespace’s course-selling feature, but it’s a fully integrated part of the platform, and unlike Shopify there’s no need to buy and configure third-party apps to sell a course.

Five — Product images are handled better by Squarespace

With Shopify, unless all your images have the same aspect ratio, visitors to your site will see a bunch of differently sized image photos in your product catalogs. This can look messy, and to get around this problem, you may find yourself doing a lot of photo editing.

Squarespace provides a much better approach: you simply pick an aspect ratio for your product images and the system will automatically crop all your pictures to that ratio.

So that’s it – some of the key ways that Shopify beats Squarespace, and some of the key areas where Squarespace wins.

Of course, the best way to discover which platform meets your needs best is to try both out — you’ll find links to free trials of Shopify and Squarespace underneath this video. There are also links to some special offers for both platforms in the description too.

I hope you’ve found this Shopify vs Squarespace video helpful, but there’s lots more pros and cons of both platforms to discover. You’ll find all these in our full Shopify vs Squarespace comparison, which is available on the Style Factory website. You’ll find a link to this article below.

And finally, if you have any questions about Shopify versus Squarespace, do leave a comment on this video — we try to answer all of them.