After reading this article, you will understand “Why migrate from Squarespace to Shopify?” And also know which is the best e-commerce platform that suits your store. Creating or developing an online store is one of the processes that may seem more complex at first glance, but the reality is simpler. Especially if you have eCommerce experts to help you.

For this reason, we present you with a comparative guide to understanding two of the most popular and robust e-commerce platforms (or CMS) that exist in the market today: Shopify and Squarespace. Both have similar characteristics but it is in the details where we can play everything. Because they are not intended for the same type of seller. We see it.

Why migrate from Squarespace to Shopify?

Shopify is one of the best eCommerce platforms today. It works very well with small stores, as well as with the largest businesses. It is expressly designed for ambitious merchants who want the most up-to-date and robust options. So they can focus on what matters most: selling and dealing with the customer.

If your business invoices more than approximately $1000,000 per year, the recommendation that is usually given is to contract Shopify Plus. The enterprise version of the platform allows much more advanced options specifically designed for large companies.

While Shopify is designed for online sales, Squarespace is a website builder that also has features for e-commerce. It is a platform less specialized in sales since it allows the creation of websites for other purposes and for a more diverse audience. In any case, it also works perfectly with internet sales.

What is the main difference between Shopify and Squarespace? The cost, sacrificing functions. As we have said in the previous paragraph. Shopify is specialized in e-commerce, while Squarespace is more generic. Make no mistake, Squarespace’s design tools are really good, but Shopify stands out for its features.

Depending on what you want to spend and the functionalities. If you want to incorporate it into your brand, the scale can opt for one or the other. And that is precisely what we are going to see step by step in the following sections.

Easy to use

Whatever the features of both eCommerce platforms, we need to understand how easy or difficult they are to use. It is possible that saving time and versatility of use is the key. Especially if you observe that both CMS ( content management system ) can serve your online store.

Shopify: Easy to use

Starting with Shopify, we have to say that its ease of use is one of its strongest points. Unlike other platforms, it uses a fully-hosted model. In which they perform the store’s own installation without the need to download software of any kind.

What’s more, account creation only takes a few minutes after specifying the nature of your business and the most basic data. Almost as easy as creating an account on any social network.

It also makes use of a drag-and-drop design, and this means that all media elements can be dragged with the mouse. This functionality, added to the fact that its interface is really elegant and clean, makes things much easier and offers a very comfortable day-to-day experience.

Everything else, everything you want to find, is summarized in your main control panel as soon as you enter your store, and all the options classified by groups are located on the left. It has no loss.

Squarespace: Easy to use

Squarespace is not difficult to use, but its biggest drawback is that it is not a platform designed solely for e-commerce. The advantage is that its tools have great creative power. As in Shopify, you can also move and drag elements to design your web page in the way you prefer and in an intuitive way. It is also a fully-hosted platform in which you do not need to install any type of software.

Squarespace’s editor is perhaps a bit less intuitive than Shopify’s when it comes to using it. The winner here would be Shopify, as it offers a good balance between its functionalities and its design, designed to satisfy the most demanding seller.

Templates: migrate from Squarespace to Shopify

Your store window is one of the most important elements of your online business, and a very important factor by which a customer can leave the website or continue with the purchase, thus reducing or increasing your sales conversion.

Shopify Templates

In Shopify, you have at your disposal a wide catalog. The cost of the templates fluctuates from $0 to those that cost up to $180, something that you will have to think about very carefully in the beginning. The store where you can buy them is divided into categories, where each one emphasizes the type of product or service to be sold.

Thus, you will be able to navigate between templates specifically designed for clothing, sports, cosmetics, industrial machinery, electronics, and much more. Those templates that are most popular will also appear in the main view, along with their price and variations of them. There are so many options to choose from.

Squarespace Templates

Squarespace does not fall short, since it is a CMS designed specifically for the most advanced design. As in Shopify, you will have the most popular templates on the main page and many examples divided into different categories: photography, local business, events, weddings, blogs and podcasts, musicians and bands, among others.

They are professional and elegant themes. And of course, they are built to be mobile responsive. The visual effects of the templates are of high quality, as is the option of being able to add photos in very high definition. Finally, it has the possibility of adding video backgrounds just by copying and pasting a YouTube URL.

Although Shopify has very attractive templates, Squarespace continues to confirm itself as the king of design in the creation of web pages, be it for digital commerce, or for any other purpose. Both work great for any type of seller.

The product and its presentation

Now that we’ve explored the ease-of-use options and templates, we need to dive right into the product presentation and purchase process in the next section. After all, beauty is on the inside, or so they say. Robust selling and payment features will define your online business.

On both Shopify and Squarespace, you’ll have the option to not only sell physical products, but also digital products and services. The difference is that in Shopify you will need to install an add-on to activate the sale of digital products. Don’t worry, it’s free and doesn’t take much time. Shopify also allows you to set up physical outlets with Shopify POS so you’re not limited to just selling online.

Regarding the presentation of your products, Squarespace stands out for being a platform very focused on design. And therefore, it focuses on making your products the central element of your website. And with features such as zoom to the purest Amazon style and even a 360º presentation. Again, for Shopify to allow you to install the zoom feature, you need to download an add-on like Magic Zoom Plus.

Payment gateways

Payment gateways are one of the reasons to migrate from Squarespace to Shopify. When it comes to paying, Shopify contains many more payment gateways than its competitor. Being an e-commerce platform created exclusively for online merchants, payment methods such as:

• Visa, Mastercard and Discover credit cards
• Wire transfer
• AmazonPay,
• PayPal
• ideal
• Skrill
• WorldPay
• Bitcoin.

Customers will also be able to make use of Shopify Payments. It is the official payment gateway of the platform and with its use, you avoid transaction fees of 2% as can happen with other payment methods (but not sales fees, which will depend on your contracted plan and we will see it later). ). In total, more than 100 options to pay, and all are protected with a free SSL certificate.

Squarespace falls short on this point, as it only accepts PayPal, Stripe, and Apple Pay. Although it may be enough for certain types of clients, it will not be enough for others, and this can be a big drawback. In our opinion, before establishing a new online store on this platform, it is important to study our customers, as well as our sales prospects, and calculate if this point will greatly affect our future transactions.

Inventory and shipping management

Not everything is the presentation of the product and its sale, it is also the management of the inventory and the shipment of the same. This is something that many merchants may overlook when setting up a new online store.

Choosing the correct platform will save us headaches when managing our stock, shipments and taxes.
Well, once again, Shopify has a great strength here, and that is that everything you need for inventory and shipping is integrated and presented in a very intuitive way. Here you can activate the following options:

• Print shipping labels
• Integrate shipments directly with carriers
• Configure different types of packaging according to the characteristics of the product
• Set your preferred shipping rates, including customs rules based on the customer’s current shopping cart.

And More…

Shopify also allows drop shipping, that is, acting as intermediaries to deliver the product directly from the supplier, without the need to manage stock. This can be a great idea to save time and effort, but great care must be taken to ensure smooth communication with warehouses and avoid delays.
In terms of inventory, it has everything you expect:

• Quantitative reports
• Configuration of notices for limited stock
• Export and import inventory using CSV files
• Hide out of stock products
• View inventory history for a given product
• Etc.

In the enterprise version of the platform, Shopify Plus, it is possible to automate it with advanced rules.
Shipping and inventory management at Squarespace is conventional, and it can’t compete on an equal footing with Shopify. It is fully functional and fulfills its purpose perfectly, but it is not as advanced as a dedicated platform, as we can imagine.

The differentiating point is that it does allow you to set shipping rates according to the country to which the shipment is made, something that is more complicated to do in Shopify.

Other shipping options in Squarespace include the ability to create a flat rate for all shipments, let the carrier calculate the rate, create specific shipping zones, third-party integration, and even set up direct store pickup.

Marketing

All of the above loses relevance if we do not analyze the marketing options of each e-commerce platform and study how we can promote our products and services. A robust online store is nothing if we cannot attract our potential customers with all the marketing tools at our disposal.

Shopify Marketing

Once again, social media is the crème de la crème. With Shopify, you can integrate your online store with the most important social networks and you can manage your products from a single control panel. In other words, even if your products appear on Facebook or Instagram, you won’t need to be constantly changing screens.

For some of the features, you will once again need to install specific add-ons in the store, including those that inform the customer of an abandoned shopping cart or offer assistance through automated WhatsApp messages. The Shopify admin control panel includes features for email campaigns, extendable with add-ons like Privy, Klaviyo, or Omnisend.

SEO with Shopify is guaranteed, by including the best practices from minute one so that your store appears as high as possible in the search results of your potential customers. These options can be further customized with the aforementioned add-ons.

Squarespace Marketing

Squarespace is a bit more limited in the integration with social networks because it only allows you to sell natively through Instagram. If your idea is to grow in multichannel sales, you will run into a ceiling that you will not be able to cross. However, it does allow synchronization with your social networks to show all the content automatically when you publish something on your site, making it easier for customers to end up visiting your website. You will need an extra effort at this point because they will not be able to make purchases directly through platforms such as Facebook or Amazon.

One of Squarespace’s strengths is its integration with the popular email marketing platform Mailchimp. It adapts intuitively, allowing you to:

• Connect forms and newsletters to MailChimp campaigns
• Create pop-up windows to subscribe to a newsletter (I’m sure you’ve seen it more than once)
• Create newsletters for the blog
• Measure site traffic from MailChimp
• The second advantage is that the built-in native blogging options are really compelling, including blog analytics, archive functionality, and search service, something that Shopify doesn’t have out of the box.

And what about SEO with Squarespace? It contains options for editing meta titles and meta descriptions, along with other basic options like automatic redirection and optimization of the web on mobile devices. Shopify is the clear winner here, offering a much wider range of search engine optimization options.

Customer Support

This is all very well, but what if I get stuck and need help? Is there someone on the other side? The answer is yes – both Shopify and Squarespace have customer support services.

But it’s Shopify that wins the battle again because their customer support is available 24/7 via live chat, email, or phone support. What’s more, depending on the plan you’re on. (And we’ll cover that in the next section). You’ll get dedicated help, and with Shopify Plus. And you’ll even have a web design and e-commerce expert who can support you not only with problems that may arise in the store, but also to improve marketing practices and the management of your business.

Squarespace’s customer support and troubleshooting options are considerably more limited. However, most common issues can be resolved on the official forum, and a lot can be learned from webinars. There is also chat support with limited hours in the EST time zone, from 4 to 8 pm.

Price and plans

We hope that with everything that we have told you in the previous sections. It has become a little clearer for you what each platform offers and the fundamental differences that exist between them. Finally, we need to emphasize cost, one of the most important elements in establishing our brand online.

Let’s start with Shopify. First, we have to differentiate the standard plans from its version for large companies, Shopify Plus.

Here is a short description of its features:

Shopify Price  plan

• Shopify Lite plan. It is a plan intended for sale through Facebook Messenger, and that incorporates the Shopify products that are added to your current store. It has a low cost, but the good thing is that it also has personalized customer service.
• Basic Shopify Plan: This is the most basic plan for your Shopify store. Already from this plan, you can add an unlimited number of products, add 2 administrator accounts and incorporate an SSL certificate to protect purchases. Of course, it also has customer service.
• Shopify Plan: It is the intermediate plan of Shopify, which allows you to add up to 5 administrator accounts, create gift cards, make more advanced reports of your business, etc.
• Advanced Shopify Plan: All of the above, plus 15 manager accounts, even more, professional reporting, and third-party shipping cost calculations.
• Shopify Plan: It is the aforementioned version of Shopify for large companies with a good volume of business. It allows the hiring of marketing experts, great automation and functionalities for the shopping cart. It does not exist in other plans.

We wanted to make a small table so that you can compare at a glance the costs of the different plans (not including Shopify Lite, which would be $9 per month). The highest cost will be the hiring of templates and add-ons.

Prices for the United States.

Squarespace Price Plan

Squarespace is divided into four pricing options, two online stores and two websites. In this article, we are only going to mention only those of the online stores:

• Squarespace Basic Plan: It costs $26 per month if you sign up for the annual subscription and $30 if you pay monthly. It includes the following, among other features:
• unlimited products
• No transaction fees
• custom domain
• SSL Certificate.
• label printing.
• customer accounts.
• Squarespace Advanced Plan: $40 per month if you sign up for annual billing. Or $46 per month if you sign up for monthly billing. The plan includes all of the above, adding: Automatic shopping cart recovery, Integration with carriers in real-time, Personalized discounts, and Gift cards.

Conclusion

Finally, you got it “Why migrate from Squarespace to Shopify?” We don’t have much left to say, but we have a clear winner: Shopify. Although Squarespace has interesting aspects when it comes to designing a website.

Shopify is still the king of e-commerce due to its scalability, its robustness, and its extendable features with add-ons. Its personalized customer support and its numerous payment gateways.

Let’s remember that Squarespace is not specialized in e-commerce. And although it allows this function to be carried out in a really professional way. It falls short in several functions that Shopify fulfills perfectly. The cost may be higher initially, but you will not have any limitations once your business grows.

If you need to make the leap with Shopify, contact us. At Webrito. we help those merchants who want to create or develop their brand in the world of digital commerce. Thanks for reading us!