Shopify vs Squarespace (Which is the best eCommerce Builder?)

so Shopify and Squarespace are two absolutely dominant players in the website building space but that doesn't mean they're both great options for you in fact they're both very very different platforms and they're very good at very different things but it's not especially obvious for most people which one you should be getting so in this video we're going to compare the two head-to-head dive into the features the interface the setup the pricing everything else you might need to know as well as how well they both rank on Google to help you decide which one's actually the best choice for you whether you're a local shop a fundraiser a personal brand with some merch a drop shipper or just looking to experiment with a new online business whatever your reason is for choosing one of these this video is going to help you choose which one is actually the best for you so let's start off with the background of both of these they've both been in the game for a pretty long time Squarespace being the older one coming out in 2003 which is 21 years ago and Shopify coming out just 3 years after that so it's still 18 years old they've been in the industry for a pretty long time but what they focused on in the beginning and what they focus focus on now even though they definitely merged a lot and have a lot more overlap that really shows what their fundamental values are and it's really going to foreshadow a lot in this video so Squarespace started off just as a regular website builder building generic websites for people and then eventually moved into e-commerce and now they work as a jack of all trades like if somebody asks me hey Mike I want to make a website what should I use I'm going to ask them have you tried Squarespace because it just works well for whatever you're trying to do of course you can sell on there you can make a Blog on there you can even host a podcast like an RSS feed on there you can do all types of different things scheduling appointments um like local stuff all all types of things at Squarespace we'll talk about that a little bit later in the video but really it's meant to be a jack of all trades but that may mean it is a master of none so Shopify on the other hand it's not necessarily jack of all trades like you can use it now for anything but it's really hyperfocused on one thing in particular and the name kind of gives it away shopping shopping is what it's meant for Shopify is the biggest e-commerce platform for websites to to be built and sell their own products on the entire Internet it's something that is so ubiquitous out there that all the big sellers are using it but again that doesn't mean it's the best one for you like if you're not trying to be the next I think like skims like is that skins whatever Kim Kardashian's brand is that's on Shopify if you're not trying to be like like that then maybe you don't need Shopify and if you're watching this video you're probably somewhere in the middle on this spectrum so for example some people may want a podcast and a Blog and a nice custom website but maybe they also want to sell some things so where's the threshold of where it's no longer worth it to use Squarespace and becomes worth it to use Shopify so let's kind of take a different approach here let's talk about the design aspect of these when you're making your website the first thing they both prompt you to do is choose a template choose a theme so Squarespace is really the king of website design in my opinion uh between the two of these it really comes across a very clean very professional and it's very easy to make but Shopify it's also quite simple as well Shopify has 12 free themes you can choose from I'm going to Interchange themes and templates these these two platforms have different names but in essence it's going to be a pre-made website that you just populate with your own photos your own colors your own text but you you get a really nice Head Start there so Shopify has 12 free and 171 paid themes the paid ones are about $300 each so definitely a little steep but if you can afford it they do look really nice the free ones look good and I usually use the free ones though Squarespace on the other hand has 168 themes and these are all free like you don't have to pay for any of them and 60 of them are specifically focused on E Ecommerce of course all the Shopify ones are focused on e-commerce so when you're looking at e-commerce themes you still have even more options for free when you're using Squarespace and in addition Squarespace allows you to build with their Squarespace blueprint so you kind of build like a custom theme if you wanted to do that when you're actually editing these uh this is really interesting so Squarespace used to be almost exactly like Shopify is today where it was really pre-structured and you could add things into certain blocks certain locations uh you just click the a little plus button you're able to add in like a photo or you're able to to add in like a little section of something and so with that layout which currently only Shopify uses out of these two that is really robust like it's very easy to make you choose the the layout that you want you're able to populate that and no matter what platform people are using whether it is on a phone on a TV on a laptop on a really big monitor whatever it is it's always going to show up looking really good whereas Squarespace now kind of changed their layout so it's definitely still responsive it still works on everything but now you can click and drag elements wherever you want on the screen the benefit here is that of course you can make it as customized as you want you can move things absolutely anywhere the downside however is that you will want to be double-checking pretty frequently how it looks on a mobile device on a tablet on a laptop to make sure that your website actually looks good in all of those different display aspect ratios okay so taking a look at the pricing of both these platforms Squarespace technically does have a cheaper option starting off at $16 per month and and keep in mind for both of these it's showing the annualized price so if you pay monthly it's like $10 per month more or something like that but anyway look looking at the annual plans $16 per month for personal but that doesn't give you any e-commerce abilities on here if you wanted to get into e-commerce you have to go down to the Commerce plan as and as you can see here 27 versus $29 per month is a pretty small Gap there especially when we start digging into some of the other features on here as we go down you'll see there is also a Commerce Advanced option with Squarespace where Shopify kind of jumps up quite a bit I think there it is Shopify that's their more advanced one $80 per month which does give you quite a bit of advantages and of course Advanced which is a really high price so Shopify definitely scales way more to the high end um which makes sense once I talk about the features one of the big things you'll notice though is going to be the credit card rate so right here don't be fooled by the 0% transaction fee uh that is not like it's going to depend on where you're accepting payments but what Shopify does that's really cool is that the credit card rates actually start off at 2.9% which is pretty standard and as you go with the more expensive plans it goes down to 22% so you save a significant amount of money when you're doing really high volumes with Shopify when you are actually like I said once you start doing higher volumes if you upgrade your plans accordingly and if you just Google Squarespace transaction fees you can always find out what the latest rate is on this 2.9% plus 30 Cent so it is going to be the exact same for the basic plan but like I said the upside is that if you start off with Shopify as you scale you can cut that rate like I said a lot more down to 2 and 1 half% even though there's a higher monthly cost there will be a point in sales volume where that becomes worth it and so a lot of people end up doing that and by the way whichever one you end up choosing we do have links in the description below to both of them they're affiliate links so if you appreciate this free information and you want to support the channel it cost you absolutely nothing to go through our links cost no extra money for you and whenever you sign up we will get a small commission that helps make this content free for everybody continuing on the ease of use with both of these Squarespace honestly like I talked about with the builder earlier is a little bit easier there's more native tools built into it so you don't have to shop around for other tools and Integrations Shopify on the other hand has more Integrations available I would say but they're not all integrated by default so it's kind of a trade-off if you're willing to put in the work and find things that are really made for Shopify and really give you extra functionality then it might be easier for example to automate your emails and your email newsletter and things like that so that could be done really really well with some really Advanced features on Shopify using things like omnisend or clavo and and a lot of other platforms out there and many of those also work with Squarespace too but Squarespace kind of encourages their own native their their built-in one which again makes it easier for things like scheduling for email marketing for things like that so in this category I have to say the winner like it's kind of a tie I would say in this category they both do a good job but it's just a tossup they're easy enough to learn and I'm really happy with both of them now the features and the applications I kind of touched on this a little bit in the last category Shopify has over like I think 2500 apps it's really hard to find the exact number a lot of them are kind of paid or premium at least where you can kind of get some functionality out of it by default but you then pay to get substantially more like I said Squarespace has fewer apps or integration ations out there but includes all of the essential ones with your plan when you actually get Squarespace they do have some upsells but again they're all within the Squarespace ecosystem they're made by Squarespace so they're very native and they're really easy to manage that in addition if you buy a domain directly through either Shopify or Squarespace sure you could go through name cheap and import it I always just go like natively it's just easier for people to set that up Squarespace tends to be a little bit more expensive for their domains an advantage of Shopify is that it is more scalable for product libraries Squarespace I think has better blogging capability so if you're really trying to rank on Google through the blog route and and show up a lot like that in search then that could be the better option there but that's not to say you can't show up in search with Shopify in fact a lot of people do quite often uh either when searched for their products or searching for specific blogs that they write but Shopify has the advantage I would say of being better for paid Integrations paid uh promotions so they've got a lot of Integrations with like Tik Tok shop Facebook Instagram you can sell natively on those different platforms and very easily run ads with with them you can run ads with stuff that's on Squarespace but Shopify just takes it to a whole another level in my opinion they both have great support so if you need assistance with anything are you're getting like 247 with Shopify which is really great and as far as the payments that are accepted on them they both accept basically every payment style out there so there's like stripe PayPal uh Square you can accept of course Visa Mastercard JCB Apple pay AMX like anything that people would want to pay with anything like that I could even think of they both accept it so that's not going to be a limitation pretty much for anybody I would say Shopify tends to have more powerful e-commerce features for sure so there'll be like some deeper analytics into your e-commerce and stuff like that and it's easier to sell across multiple channels not just like I said advertising on Instagram and Facebook but also selling natively on Instagram on Facebook on Tik Tok those are all very easy apps that you just add to Shopify in a couple clicks it's all set up it's ready to go and there are a lot of other apps out there that are specifically catered to print on demand or or Drop Shipping or something like that and those Focus so much more effort on working with Shopify because they know it's such a big network of of people using Shopify specifically for those features so it's going to be a better ecosystem in that sense now some other Commerce features you might want to be aware of they both let you define shipping zones they both factor in weight they both factor in uh value and more stuff like that they do both offer label printing if you're doing your own fulfillment um but in general for the Commerce section of this video which was kind of the past couple minutes I would say Shopify is the winner so kind of concluding here of course for anyone who is like a larger retailer or seller of your own stuff Shopify is going to be better for big and serious sellers anyone looking to get into print on demand or Drop Shipping definitely go with Shopify uh there's more apps more scalability and even like Drop Shipping oriented software that really goes well with Shopify it Powers countless stores across the internet and is really a good default but Squarespace on the other hand is better for anyone looking to have a more well-rounded website anyone looking to maybe sell a small small library of products maybe you want to build a Blog a podcast have a lot of really nice looking Pages or just a clean website in general Squarespace is a really great option so if you kind of view this as a spectrum going back to that question of where does it become better to use Shopify it's kind of obvious that Squarespace is good for small stores Shopify is good for really big stores but you can start a really small store on Shopify it really just comes down to how much customization do you really want in a small store and how big do you plan on scaling your store if you want to have just like one or two products really casual but you care a lot about uh the other aspects of your website go with Squarespace if you want a small store you don't care about customizing the site then go with Shopify But whichever one you end up choosing I have Again full free training down below so don't be intimidated they're not hard to get started with um I'll have those links in the description so you guys can go check out those full length videos next and once you're once you're going I would love to see a little bit more about your stores definitely leave a comment below with a link to your store so I could check it out and and see what it actually looks like so if you enjoyed the video consider liking and subscribing I'm Michael Bren from sandral media thanks for watching and I'll see you in those tutorials

Channel: Santrel Media

Views: 5,170

Keywords: nate o'brien, mike o'brien, santrel media

Id: LiQ3r30wPPg

Length: 12min 6sec (726 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 11 2024