SQUARESPACE vs SHOPIFY — Which Is Better?

i currently have multiple websites on both squarespace and shopify and here's the thing both squarespace and shopify are excellent website builders but they do have major differences by the end of this video you'll understand the right time to use squarespace and the right time to use shopify okay let's get into it the year is 2010. lost is still on television and steve jobs just unveiled the ipad squarespace and shopify are young upstart companies this is shopify's homepage it's pretty clear what they're building a tool for building online stores this is squarespace's homepage pretty clear what they're building too a tool for building all kinds of websites for bloggers businesses authors teachers lawyers doctors anything today squarespace and shopify's homepage slogans are grander and honestly kind of more ambiguous so it's helpful to remember where they came from because at their core it's still fundamentally who they are squarespace is a tool for building all kinds of websites including online stores shopify is a tool for building just online stores in this video we'll see how this difference plays out in ease of use e-commerce templates pricing and more my work is supported by affiliate commissions so you can find a link to both squarespace and shopify in the video description if you click that link i might earn a commission let's start with ease of use this is squarespace and this is shopify we're going to edit a page with both so let's open a page in squarespace and hit edit we can just start writing in this text element we'll add a heading and we're editing but we can pull back and see how everything looks because it's a visual editor now let's edit a page in shopify so online store pages we'll open it and here's our page we can add text but shopify is not a visual editor so to see how things are looking we can save and view the page okay now what if we want to add something cool like a photo gallery well with squarespace it's pretty easy we click add choose a gallery and upload our photos nice now shopify doesn't have a gallery that we can add at least not by default so we need to upload each image individually let's fast forward through this there we go we can save and view our page and there we go remember squarespace is for all kinds of websites so they need a flexible page editor that can build all kinds of pages homepage photo galleries about us pages blogs contact pages testimonials and a bunch more shopify is just for online stores and online stores basically all have the same pages they need a home page product page and checkout page and maybe a categories page because of that it's just not as high of a priority for shopify to have a flexible page editor like squarespace let's look at something else let's look at editing our website theme if we want to edit our theme on squarespace we go to design site styles and let's change our font we have a bunch of fonts we can choose from but let's try this one okay let's go back and edit the colors so we have a palette for our website and it's an easy way to add our brand colors if we edit it so let's choose from some preset colors interesting okay yep what i like about squarespace is that if you'd like to get really specific and change exactly where and how colors and fonts are used you can still do that too so let's customize our theme in shopify we go to themes customize and theme settings and here we can set some colors so let's change the color of the headings okay and if we scroll down to typography we can choose some different fonts now we do often run into some limits when customizing shopify themes for example we can change the text color but what if i want a different color for the out of stock tags well unfortunately in order to do that i'd need to edit some css code which can be frustrating if you're not comfortable with code overall squarespace is just easier to use they've removed as many obstacles as possible so that anyone can build any kind of website shopify is all about removing obstacles too but in a different way shopify is all about removing obstacles for creating online stores and this is where shopify really shines so let's talk about e-commerce it's only when you build an online store that you really gain an appreciation for how complicated it really is then you realize there is a lot to think about you need a credit card processor to accept credit cards you need to collect accurate taxes you need to integrate with shipping services that can estimate shipping for your customers and also make it easy to print shipping labels and a whole lot more beyond this in my experience shopify makes these complications much simpler and in many cases they've made e-commerce easier than squarespace for example in order to accept credit cards on squarespace you need to integrate with a credit card processor such as stripe a payment processing company it's just another step and hassle by default shopify hooks you into their own credit card processor called shopify payments so if shopify payments works for you you don't ever need to think further about payment processing it just works out of the gate setting up accurate taxes with squarespace takes some work especially for canadians like me i have to manually go through each province and set its tax rate shopify automatically has these provincial tax rates built in so i can just quickly get up and running and not have to think too hard about it and shopify integrates with a ton of shipping services and you'll definitely want to integrate with a shipping service because it makes things like printing off shipping labels really easy i've had mixed success with this on squarespace my shipping service is canada post because i'm canadian but squarespace only integrates with fedex or usps for automatic shipping calculations which makes my life a lot more complicated and then on top of all of this is shopify's most important e-commerce feature the app store [Music] online stores always need random features that you don't think about at first and the shopify app store is here to help there's apps for everything restock alerts facebook integrations live chat product reviews basically shopify's core includes everything that most stores need products discounts that kind of thing the app store includes everything else so you can add a live chat app or a restock notification app for customers there are thousands of apps on shopify's app store and it's growing fast squarespace has something similar called squarespace extensions but it's much smaller 31 extensions currently so you can sell physical products on both shopify and squarespace but shopify definitely makes it easier and if you listen to squarespace's ceo anthony casolina he's actually pretty frank that while squarespace enables you to sell physical products just like shopify they're actually trying to push their commerce into new areas like appointment scheduling and taking reservations for restaurants squarespace is not just websites and and physical commerce it's so much more it's tools for the hospitality industry it's tools for appointment booking and scheduling um there's new emerging business models we want to highlight things like member areas which we're going to expand into and so squarespace has focused on types of commerce that shopify isn't great at like restaurant reservations selling memberships and courses and appointment scheduling and for these types of commerce squarespace is really excellent okay templates templates of course are the look and feel of your website let's take a look at some squarespace templates and now shopify [Music] as you can see there are beautiful templates available for both squarespace and shopify though i do find squarespace templates are just a lot easier to customize and make beautiful like one of my favorite features is the section editor it makes it quick and easy to create pretty beautiful splash sections you can kind of do that with shopify but it's just not nearly as powerful or intuitive with shopify there are nine free themes to choose from or 76 paid themes but beyond this there is a massive marketplace of third party theme providers that sell thousands of shopify themes though i found these third-party themes can have mixed quality squarespace offers about 110 templates to choose from and they're all created by squarespace no third-party themes which can be nice because you can be confident that these templates all work well okay let's take a look at pricing squarespace has four plans and their cheapest plan personal costs about the same as other website builders cheapest plans shopify has three main plans and basic is their cheapest but it's not correct to compare shopify's basic plan to squarespace's personal plan squarespace's personal plan does not include e-commerce every plan on shopify of course includes e-commerce a better comparison is squarespace's basic commerce plan because it has e-commerce with no transaction fees and if we look at its monthly price it costs 36 dollars per month so shopify actually has a cheaper ecommerce plan at 29 per month so let's wrap this up when should you use squarespace and when should you use shopify here's how i make that decision first of all i use squarespace for any small website that i'm building for example i use it for my mom's small business website and my music website i occasionally use squarespace for small ecommerce stores for example i sell a vinyl record on my music website because i don't really sell that many vinyl records so squarespace just works i use shopify whenever i have an online store that sells a product more than once a week shopify just makes it much easier hope that makes sense once again my work is supported by affiliate commissions so you can find a link to both squarespace and shopify in the video description below if you click that link i might earn a commission in any case thanks for watching you

Channel: Steve Builds Websites

Views: 35,552

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Id: YZ6oFUfFKSU

Length: 12min 12sec (732 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 28 2022