Shopify vs SquareSpace: The Definitive Guide To Picking The Best Ecommerce Platform

An eCommerce website can now be built using the services of hosted solutions such as Shopify and Squarespace – both these platforms claim to offer an easy way for anyone to build a fully-functional and professional online store.

The reality however is that these eCommerce store builders are not the same. They’re same in the sense that they’re both paid software-as-a-service (SaaS) products. But while Shopify was built from scratch as an eCommerce platform, Squarespace started out as a website builder.

As SaaS products, both these services are quite popular, albeit for different reasons (which we will explore in detail). That’s because eCommerce features are a relatively recent addition to Squarespace. That naturally makes it a Shopify competitor but can it really stand its own ground against a product that was built solely for the purposes of eCommerce?

In this Shopify vs Squarespace comparison, we’ll be exploring the various similarities and differences between these two eCommerce platforms. After evaluating both, we’ll provide a list of reasons as to why you should consider one of these over the other.

Shopify vs Squarespace – Is Shopify Better Than Squarespace?

	Shopify	Squarespace
Platform transaction fees	Up to 2%	Up to 3%
Products in inventory	Unlimited	Unlimited
Templates	62	14
Apps and Plugins	2000+	None
Supported Payment Gateways	100+	Stripe and PayPal only
Number of Stores	600,000+	300,000+
Bandwidth Restrictions	None	None
Pricing	Starting at $9 per month	Starting at $26 per month

 

Shopify Themes vs Squarespace Templates

Templates provide a way for online businesses to make a great first impression on their customers. An eye-catching template will make the website appear more ‘inviting’, and will encourage users to browse around the store and find the items they’re looking for. But it isn’t just enough for a template to feature an eye-catching design – it has to be intuitive and easy to navigate as well.

Good website design can also have a positive effect on your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). An attractive website retains its visitors better, thereby reducing bounce rate. A low bounce rate is viewed favorably by Google, which is definitely good for your SEO.

Mobile-responsive website fare better in Google SERPs

Before choosing a template, make sure that it has been optimized for viewing on mobile devices because a significant portion of your daily traffic will consist of mobile users. What’s more, Google has made mobile users a priority ranking factor for its search results.

Shopify Templates

Templates for Shopify can be found on their official template store. The store offers a selection of 62 templates, out of which 10 can be used for free. Each of Shopify’s templates comes in 2 or 3 design variations so there’s quite a lot of choice for the user, even with the 10 free templates.

 

From a design point of view, each one of the templates appears to have a modern and professional design. Even the free templates look clean and crisp and offer a fair amount of diversity to users. Naturally, the free templates do not cover every business niche out there and in that case users will have to opt for one of the paid-for templates.

The paid-for templates start at $140 and go up to $180. If you’re willing to pay for a template but can’t quite find a design you like on the official Shopify template store, try looking in third-party marketplaces.

Theme Forest and Template Monster are both recommended in this regard as they have strict policies for quality control. Before purchasing a Shopify template from third-party marketplaces, make sure that the template’s developer offers after-sales support.

Squarespace Templates

The official Squarespace template store offers a selection of 90 templates, which is great considering Shopify offers only 65 in total. However, only 14 of these templates are meant for eCommerce while the rest are for regular websites and blogs.

Squarespace’s eCommerce template selection is rather limited

The great thing about Squarespace templates is that they are all free. Users with a Squarespace subscription automatically get access to all templates. The small selection of eCommerce templates definitely limits options for users though.

Squarespace’s minimalist Indigo eCommerce template

The eCommerce templates also appear to be geared more towards individuals who want to showcase a small number or products or services. From a design perspective the templates are pretty contemporary and professional. But the selection lacks in variety and that will undoubtedly limit the appeal of the platform as a whole.

There aren’t any third-party developers for Squarespace templates either – the only place to get templates for the platform is from the official Squarespace template store.

Which has Better Customer Support Shopify or Squarespace?

Access to reliable and helpful customer support is vital to the smooth operation of any eCommerce business. If your online store is facing issues it could result in lost sales because of frustrated customers.

Shopify Customer Support

Shopify offers 24/7 online support for all of its users. This includes round the clock access to support through live chat, email and a phone line.

In practice, we found Shopify support to be really helpful in resolving most issues.

Squarespace Customer Support

Squarespace offers online support for all of its users. Support can be reached via live chat and email. Phone support is not available which is definitely a drawback considering that Shopify users have 24/7 access to it.

There are set timings for live chat support (Monday through Friday from 4am to 8pm), during which support personnel are generally easy to reach. Email support is available 24/7 so Squarespace customers can always avail help from a real person, even if this form of support is not very prompt.

Is Squarespace More Affordable Than Shopify?

Shopify and Squarespace offer 14-day trial periods to anyone who wants to use test their platforms. After 14 days, users are expected to ‘upgrade’ to a paid subscription plan.

Shopify Pricing

Shopify currently offers users 5 subscription plans to choose from:

Shopify Pricing Plans	Monthly Billing ($/month)	Annual Billing ($/month)
Shopify Lite	$9	$8
Basic Shopify	$29	$26
Shopify	$79	$71
Advanced Shopify	$299	$266
Shopify Plus	N/A*	N/A*

*Shopify Plus is a tailored subscription plan for high-volume merchants. Pricing for this plan is variable but reportedly hovers around $2000 per month.

As you can see from the above table, Shopify offers a 10% discount to users who opt for annual billing.

One thing to note is that the Lite plan doesn’t really give access to the platform’s store building tools. Rather, it allows users to sell products through an existing website or Facebook page, or at a physical point of sale location.

The Basic Shopify plan on the other hand provides users with everything they need to start an eCommerce website.

Advanced features like abandoned cart notifications and gift cards are only available on the Shopify plan ($79/mo) and up.

Squarespace Pricing

Squarespace offers a total of 4 subscription plans, only 3 of which give users access to the platform’s eCommerce features. For the purposes of this article, we’ll be talking about the plans which offer eCommerce features.

Squarespace Pricing Plans	Monthly Billing ($/month)	Annual Billing ($/month)
Business	$26	$18
Basic	$30	$26
Advanced	$46	$40

 

The naming for Squarespace’s pricing plans is quite confusing – why is the Basic plan more expensive than the Business plan?

That is because the Basic and Advanced plans are billed as plans meant for eCommerce purposes, while the Business plan is meant for regular websites but it also happens to have some eCommerce functionality in it.

For users who want to use Squarespace to build an online store, we recommend going for the dedicated eCommerce price plans (Basic and Advanced). The Business plan is only slightly cheaper but misses out on necessary features such as advanced eCommerce reports.

Abandoned cart notifications are only available on the Advanced plan ($46/mo). But to be fair, Shopify offers this feature on the more expensive Shopify plan ($79/mo).

Ecommerce Transaction Fees

Transaction fees are levied by eCommerce platforms when a transaction (such as a sale) is conducted through them.

Shopify charges a transaction fee of up to 2% on each sale, but this can be avoided if users choose the platform’s built in payment processor – Shopify payments.

	Basic Shopify	Shopify	Advanced Shopify
Shopify Transaction Fees	2.0%	1.0%	0.5%

 

Without Shopify Payments, users have to pay the transaction fees – up to 2.0% of each sale – plus the credit card rates for the third-party payment gateway (Stripe, for example).

Shopify Payments not only removes the transaction fees but also provides slightly lower credit card rates. The only problem with this payment processor is that it is not available in many countries.

Currently, it is only available for Shopify merchants based out of the United States, Puerto Rico, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. Shopify merchants elsewhere will have to choose a different payment processor. Fortunately, there are over 100 payment gateways that integrate with the service.

Squarespace meanwhile charges a transaction fee of 3% for its Business plan only. If users opt for the eCommerce-centric Basic and Advanced plans, they do not have to pay any transaction fees.

	Business	Basic	Advanced
Squarespace Transaction Fees	3.0%	None	None

 

However, credit card rates do still apply and for that Squarespace gives users the option of choosing between Stripe and PayPal as the payment processor. But even though PayPal and Stripe are quite popular and widely available throughout the world, there are still some countries that do not support them.

Popularity

Why does popularity matter when choosing an eCommerce platform? The tech industry is fiercely competitive – the more popular a product is, the more its chances of survival. An unpopular service will fail to generate meaningful revenue and will thus be at the risk of shutting down.

Fortunately, both Shopify and Squarespace are quite popular. But Squarespace is popular primarily for its site building capabilities and not as an eCommerce platform. That is why we’re curious to find out how its eCommerce offering stacks up against one of the most popular eCommerce platforms – Shopify.

eCommerce Market Share

Shopify market share for websites (Source: builtwith.com)

Shopify is currently the leading hosted eCommerce platform. More than 500,000 eCommerce businesses use the service, putting it in front of direct competitors such as Squarespace and BigCommerce.

Squarespace Commerce market share for websites (Source: builtwith.com)

Squarespace eCommerce is quite popular in its own right. It currently powers around 300,000 eCommerce websites around the globe.

Google Trends

Google’s search trends are a great way to gauge user interest for a particular product or service. We performed a comparison for the keywords ‘Squarespace’ and ‘Shopify’ to find out which term gets the most amount of interest on Google.

Search interest for Squarespace has been largely stagnant over the years, while for Shopify it is growing at a steady pace. Shopify is clearly the more popular platform in Google searches.

Competition

Source: builtwith.com

Judging by the image shown above, it is clear that Squarespace customers are choosing to migrate to Shopify in great numbers. Squarespace is also gaining customers from Shopify, but at a significantly lower rate.

Shopify Apps vs Squarespace

Plugins and widgets are a great way to make up for shortcomings in a platform’s feature set. What’s more, a platform with a boatload of built-in features might become unnecessarily complicated for its users. This is why developers choose to keep a platform fairly basic at its core, but allow plugin integrations for greater flexibility.

Shopify Plugins

Shopify refers to plugins as ‘apps’, and offers more than 2000 of these ‘apps’ on its official App Store. Owing to the platform’s popularity, third-party plugin support is quite strong and the number of apps on the App Store is proof of this.

The App Store itself is very well-designed with an intuitive interface which makes browsing through the various apps on offer a pleasant affair.

Squarespace Plugins

Squarespace allows custom integrations through its Developers Platform

Unfortunately with Squarespace, users are limited to the functionality offered by the platform only, since there is no official plugin store. Squarespace does allow for custom integrations through its Developers Platform but – as the name suggests – it’s recommended for skilled developers only.

Features

Shopify was built as an eCommerce platform while Squarespace is a simple website builder that has eCommerce features in it. That is what makes a feature comparison between these platforms quite interesting.

Can Squarespace’s eCommerce features really measure up against what is widely considered as one of the most comprehensive eCommerce solutions available?

Product Options

Shopify allows users to add up to 3 options for a product. So for example, a t-shirt might have options such as color, size and material. If you want to add a fourth option such as material, you’re out of luck. This can be remedied by third-party apps available on the App Store but the platform itself limits users to 3 product options only.

Squarespace allows for up to 100 product variants.

Squarespace on the other hand allows users to add an unlimited number of options for each product.

Point of Sale (POS) Support

Point of Sale (POS) support is a vital feature for online businesses that want to grow by offering their product lineup at physical locations.

Shopify offers users a fully-integrated POS system. The service even offers official hardware to facilitate POS sales. This includes a bar code scanner, a receipt printer, a credit card reader and a till. And because this is official hardware, it can be seamlessly integrated into your Shopify store.

Unfortunately with Squarespace, users will be limited to selling their services or products through their online store only since there is no POS support available.

Dropshipping

Dropshipping is a popular business model for eCommerce websites. It allows users to effectively become middlemen by offering products on their websites that will be shipped by a third-party retailer. There is no need to worry about inventory levels or shipping – simply advertise the products effectively and convey the orders to the retailer.

If you’re interested in this type of business then Shopify will be better suited for the job as there are a wide range of dropshipping apps available for it.

Squarespace definitely lacks in this regard as there are no dropshipping apps available for it.

Blogging

Augmenting advertising efforts with some content marketing is a great way of attracting traffic to your eCommerce store. For this, both Shopify and Squarespace offer a pretty intuitive way of setting a website blog.

But since Squarespace is at its core a content management system (CMS), its blogging features are more extensive than Shopify’s. For example, you can easily embed a blog to any part of your website in Squarespace, something you cannot do in Shopify. Content categories are also notably missing in Shopify, but present in Squarespace.

Reporting

Shopify provides users with a thoroughly detailed reporting feature. Using Shopify’s analytics users can get detailed stats for finance, sales, customer, acquisition and behavior reports.

Squarespace has fairly decent reporting features as well, but they’re not quite as extensive as what Shopify offers.

Abandoned Cart Recovery

Abandoned cart recovery allows eCommerce businesses to automatically send email reminders to customers who add items to their cart but do not go through with the purchase. It’s an effective way of increasing overall sales and fortunately, Shopify and Squarespace both offer this functionality.

Shopify’s settings for abandoned cart notifications

Shopify allows users to send abandoned cart notification emails after specified durations (1, 6, 10 or 24 hours). This is because according to Shopify, customers who abandon their carts are more likely to come back and complete the purchase if they get a notification email within 1 to 10 hours.

Settings for Squarespace’s abandoned cart recovery feature

Squarespace has an abandoned cart recovery feature as well, however, there is a slight limitation to the way it implements it. That’s because it automatically sends abandoned cart notifications after a set time period of 24 hours. If the user wants to send an email notification according after a duration of their own choice, it’s simply not allowed through the platform.

Ease of Use

The main draw of tools like Shopify and Squarespace is that they can – apparently – be used by anyone to create professional eCommerce websites. But how easy to use are they in practice?

Shopify Login vs Squarespace (Store setup)

For store setup we gauge the time it takes for users to setup a basic online store. Shopify and Squarespace both make it incredibly easy for anyone to get started with building an online store. There are no technical hoops to jump through – simply go to their respective websites and sign up for an account to get started.

In terms of time taken to initially setup the store, we can’t really find any differences between Shopify and Squarespace.

Backend Dashboard

Shopify and Squarespace offer extremely easy to use and intuitive backend dashboards. Both allow easy access to common eCommerce administration tasks such as product and inventory management, storefront customization and analytics.

Squarespace dashboard shows a live view of the user’s eCommerce store

The design and aesthetic of both dashboards is quite clutter-free and minimalistic. However, Squarespace takes this a bit further and offers an extremely simplified interface which is very beginner-friendly.

Shopify dashboard

The Shopify dashboard offers a very handy search feature in its dashboard. If you’re unclear as to how to accomplish a certain action, simply enter a few relevant keywords in the search bar and it will return very helpful results including navigational links to various parts of the dashboard.

Squarespace lacks a similar ‘intelligent’ search function. But on the whole, we’re inclined to say that both of these dashboards are quite similar in terms of ease of use.

Site Editor

Shopify and Squarespace allow users to customize the visual appearance of eCommerce stores without the need to fiddle around with HTML or CSS. This is done through the platforms’ site editor functionality.

The Shopify Site Editor

The Shopify site editor is easy to get to grips with and has an intuitive user interface. Even novice users can easily use it to customize the look and feel of their online stores.

Squarespace site editor

The Squarespace site editor is also very well thought out and easy to use. It has a clean and clutter-free interface and there’s no widget/feature overload to confuse users. Customization options are easy to understand and novice users will have no problems getting to grips with it.

Shopify vs Squarespace – Choosing the Right eCommerce Platform

Before we deliver a verdict on what we think is the better eCommerce platform, we’d like to pose a question to the reader:

Do you want to build a website with some eCommerce features, or a complete eCommerce store?

The reason we ask this is because Shopify and Squarespace are very different products. Shopify was created from the ground up to be an eCommerce platform while Squarespace is at its core a website builder.

If you want to build a website whose main focus is on delivering content – and not selling products – then Squarespace is simply the better option. An example for this would be bloggers who want to sell 2 or 3 eBooks on their website. In this case, the owner’s blog will be the prime focus of the website. And since there are only 2 or 3 products to sell, Squarespace will manage it without issue.

For websites like these, content management features are much more important than eCommerce features. And because of that, Squarespace is a great option for individuals or small businesses who want to showcase a small number of products through a good looking, professional but small online store.

Reasons to Choose Shopify over Squarespace

1. Bespoke eCommerce platform built from the ground up to facilitate online selling. The service’s focus is on introducing better eCommerce features and improving the ones it already has.
2. Hugely popular, as a result of which it has great third-party support. Squarespace has very limited third-party support.
3. Better selection of templates (more than 500) on official and third-party marketplaces. Squarespace users are limited to just 14 eCommerce templates.
4. 24/7 access to live chat, email and phone support. Squarespace has no phone support and its live chat support is only available during specific timings.
5. 2000+ plugins give Shopify great flexibility in terms of features.
6. Fully integrated, proprietary point of sale (POS) system complete with official POS hardware. Squarespace has no POS support.
7. Supports more than 100 payment gateways. Squarespace only supports PayPal and Stripe.
8. Deeper and more extensive reporting analytics.

Reasons to Choose Squarespace over Shopify

1. If the main aim is to build a content-driven website that sells a few products.
2. No transaction fees on ‘Basic’ and ‘Advanced’ plans. Shopify users pay transaction fees regardless of price plan unless they choose Shopify Payments.
3. Abandoned cart functionality is available on the $46-per-month Advanced plan. To get the same feature in Shopify, you have to opt for the $79-per-month Shopify plan.
4. Slightly better blogging features.

Verdict

Between Shopify and Squarespace, the former is simply the better eCommerce platform. With its competitive pricing (starting at just $9-per-month for the Lite plan), extensive feature sets and solid third-party developer support, it is an easy product to recommend.

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Best WooCommerce Plugins for Taxes, Amazon, Coupons and More

WooCommerce WordPress plugins can enhance and optimize your e-commerce shop or online store. WooCommerce has a range of plugins that are simple to use and offer a lot of attractive features for merchants and sellers.

There are so many plugins for WooCommerce that choosing the right ones can get confusing. Sometimes, store owners are tempted to choose too many or too few when faced with a slew of options. Figure out which WooCommerce plugins you actually need and can benefit from with our WooCommerce plugins guide.

Best WooCommerce WordPress Plugins

If you already know how to use WooCommerce and WordPress, and understand how plugins work, feel free to skip ahead. If not, you may benefit from the brief overviews we include as part of our larger review. Our plugin picks appear later in the guide.

What is WooCommerce and How Does it Work for e-Commerce?

WooCommerce is an e-commerce platform that works directly with WordPress to produce a storefront that online businesses can use to sell their products and services. Thousands of online businesses already use WooCommerce for their daily operations and sales. Those who have experience with WordPress already will likely find WooCommerce a very easy way to begin their e-commerce business.

WooCommerce is different from many other e-commerce platforms, including Volusion, Etsy, Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce because of the way it integrates with WordPress. After installing WooCommerce, you can apply one of their themes directly to WordPress to start your store. A few themes are free, while others come at a small additional cost.

Some e-commerce shop owners find that WooCommerce and a theme is enough to get them started. Those who want more than the basic features that go along with these themes, however, may want to look at plugins to add more features and functionality to their stores.

What are Plugins for WooCommerce?

For WooCommerce or any other program, plugins are simply a means of adding specific features. They are designed to modify existing programs in order to improve or enhance them.

Say, for example, you run the type of e-commerce business that could really benefit from having memberships and subscriptions. That kind of specialized functionality doesn’t come packaged into the basic WooCommerce program. You can, however, get a WooCommerce plugin that adds memberships and subscription services to your store.

When it comes to WooCommerce, some plugins come from WooCommerce, but others originate from third parties such as Amazon. That also means fluctuations in functionality, price and reliability. It’s important to parse through the avalanche of plugins out there to get only the ones you need and that come from providers you trust.  

How Do WooCommerce Plugins Work?

WooCommerce refers to plugins as “extensions” and offers them in their Extensions Store. Some of them are free to add on to your website while others cost extra. As noted above, the cost will vary depending on who is providing the plugin. For example, while PayPal offers a free extension for WooCommerce, Amazon charges for its Fulfillment by Amazon service.

Using plugins you select for WooCommerce is simple:

• Navigate to the dashboard of your WordPress site
• Select Plugins from the leftside menu bar
• Select “Add New” from under Plugins
• Choose the plugin file you downloaded (it should be a .zip file)
• Click “Install Now”

The plugin should install and work on your website!

Why Get WooCommerce Plugins?

All of this might be starting to sound like a needless hassle. If WooCommerce has a basic theme you can use without plugins and add-ons, why go to the trouble of researching them, choosing some and installing them?

There are many benefits for plugins. They allow you to gain functionalities you simply don’t have without them. Try to picture things from your customers’ perspectives. PayPal might not be a big deal to you personally, but for some customers it is absolutely essential, perhaps even the only means they have for paying for goods online. Don’t miss out on customers just to save yourself the “hassle” of learning a little about plugins.

Aside from adding functionality and features your customers enjoy, they also make your e-commerce store look and feel more professional. When customers see PayPal or Amazon payment options on your site, they know they are dealing with a seller than can trust and not a sketchy internet scam.

Best WooCommerce WordPress Plugins

WooCommerce Plugins	Price
Beeketing for WooCommerce	Free
Authorize.net	Free
WooZone Amazon Affiliates	$70
WooCommerce Membership	$39
Subscriptio	$59
Coupon Creator	Free
Simples Sales Tax	Free

Beeketing for WooCommerce

Since you’re in the eCommerce game, the goal is pretty simple: Get as many conversions down the hole as you possibly can.

What should you do now? So Beeketing comes like a bolt from the blue, it’s one of the most popular WooCommerce plugins that will do a number of different tasks to increase your conversion rate and sales automatically.

Beeketing is packed with 10+ marketing tools, each having a distinctive set of functionalities meant to leverage the conversion rate of your sales funnel. You can use this plugin to:

• Send personalized follow-up emails
• Create upsell & cross-sell offers
• Design product sliders
• Display coupon pop ups
• Create social proofs
• Create many types of coupons/ offers/ promotions

WooCommerce Authorize.net Plugin

Authorize.net is a payment gateway plugin you can install to add options to your site for paying with most major credit cards. This includes Visa, MasterCard, Discover and other credit card options. Plus, the plugin is free. You can download it right from WordPress’ website at no cost.

After installing this plugin for WooCommerce, you simply activate it and you’ll have authorize.net payment options right on your store. Features of this plugin include:

• No SSL required
• No PCI required
• Set up your own successful payment and failed payment messages
• Hassle free installation and configuration
• Offers your customers a safe and secure way for them to use their preferred credit or debit card in your store
• Plugin hosted on secure Authoize.net servers so you don’t have to worry, either
• An Authorize-only mode option

WooCommerce Amazon Affiliate Plugin

Amazon affiliates earn more when others make purchases on Amazon. By placing a link on your own site, you can earn money from Amazon. For everyone who clicks from your site to Amazon and makes a purchase, you will receive a percentage. But only if you have an Amazon affiliate plugin for your WooCommerce WordPress website.

There are many Amazon affiliate plugins to choose from. Here are a few of the most popular ones and what they have to offer. We place them as our top three choices for WooCommerce Amazon affiliate plugins:

• WooZone: It doesn’t matter if you have an established store already or not when you use WooZone. It works with both existing WooCommerce stores and brand new ones. WooZone pulls products directly from Amazon and publishes them on your website with your affiliate links. All you need to do is set up a keyword and add it to the queue and WooZone will do the rest. There are other features you can customize in WooZone, including how often products are imported and how many pages of products to import. WooZone currently costs $70.
• Amazon eStore Affiliates Plugin: If all you plan to do with your e-commerce store is make money by being an Amazon affiliate, this is the right plugin for you. This plugin helps you create a store featuring Amazon’s products without you needing to code or design much at all. For $49 you can have a high-powered Amazon affiliate store online.
• EasyAzon: The goal of this plugin is ease and it delivers. EasyAzon will save you time and help you earn more money as an Amazon affiliate by linking automatically to relevant Amazon products with an affiliate link. There’s no need for you to curate, manually add links or log in to the Amazon Associates website even. The plugin costs $67.

WooCommerce Membership Plugin

Memberships are useful for your e-commerce website when you need a way to restrict some of your content so only certain people have access to it and can view it. Customers will pay for a membership in order to see that content. When creating a membership program, keep in mind how long a membership will last for, whether and how it will recur, and what kind of content will be restricted on your website.

WooCommerce has their own membership plugin that breaks down as follows:

1. Single site: $149
2. 5 sites: $199
3. 25 sites: $249

Depending on the number of sites you’re running, the price scales. If you run many, many websites that require membership services you can save a significant amount of money on the per-site cost of WooCommerce’s membership plugin.

There are also outside vendors who have created WooCommerce membership plugins for you to use:

• WooCommerce Membership: This extension allows you to create an unlimited number of online membership tiers. You can add or remove members manually. Easily convert WooCommerce products to membership products and set up optional expiration times. The memberships will expire automatically when membership orders are canceled or refunded. The plugin costs $39 and allows you to set up access restrictions to posts and pages based on memberships.
• YITH WooCommerce Membership: YITH is $90 for a single-site membership program. The plugin allows you to manage membership to everything from schedules to products to publishing resources right in your WooCommerce website. The plugin will work with pages, posts, files, products, videos and other WooCommerce items. YITH has a tiered payment structure: It costs $90 for a single site license, $199 for up to 6 sites and $249 for up to 30 sites. This is a slight bump up over WooCommerce’s own membership plugin.  

WooCommerce Subscriptions Plugin

Subscriptions are different from memberships. Memberships allows tiers of access to restricted content on your website. Subscriptions are a way to get recurring payments. There may be perks that go along with subscriptions, such as a monthly gift, but subscriptions are also used when a seller simply wants to offer a product on a regular schedule (such as a podcast that comes out once a week or a newsletter that is sent around once a month).

WooCommerce has its own subscriptions plugin. Customers can subscribe to physical or virtual products and services. With WooCommerce’s subscriptions plugin, you can add sign-up fees, free trials and expiration periods. This is a great way for many e-commerce businesses to gain some extra residual revenue every month.

WooCommerce’s subscriptions plugin is a lot like its membership plugin in that there are payment tiers to choose from. These are:

Single Site	$199
5 Sites	$249
25 Sites	$399

As with the membership plugin, there are savings to be had if you operate many sites. Also similar to the membership plugin from WooCommerce, there are competing plugins out there for subscriptions services that do not come directly from WooCommerce.

• YITH WooCommerce Subscription: YITH makes a subscription services plugin for WooCommerce along with its membership plugin. The YITH WooCommerce Subscription plugin is pretty similar, so if you like the membership plugin you’ll likely like their subscriptions plugin as well. You can use it to create subscriptions for reviews, videos, learning courses, podcasts, hosting and whatever else you want to offer to subscribers in installments over time. Make unlimited subscription plans and set the type of renewal (daily or monthly) for each WooCommerce product you have to offer.
• Subscription for WooCommerce: This plugin works with WooCommerce to create a subscription service. You can set the subscription length and create a plan based on either days or weeks. Set the amount of days before sending email reminders that someone’s subscription is about to end. Overall, this is a handy and straightforward subscription service for WooCommerce that you can download for free.
• Subsciptio: Get semi or fully-automatic subscription billing with Subsciptio for WooCommerce. Subscriptio is super easy to use, with the ability to turn various products into subscriptions and set a billing cycle length and maximum subscription length. It costs $49 and also has an option to set up free trials.

WooCommerce Coupon Plugin

Coupon creators for WooCommerce allow you to offer coupons to your customers for special deals and promotions. There are many coupon creators to choose from, but here are a few we particularly like:

• Coupon Creator: This plugin creates a custom post type in WooCommerce called coupon. You can use this new custom post type to create coupons right in WordPress. You can also choose to upload an image of a coupon. Download it for free.
• Magic WP Coupons – Lite: This might be the lite version, but it is still a powerful tool for e-commerce stores looking to create coupons for their customers. The lite version is a demo, but you will still be able to download and install it for free and start making coupons in WordPress. The plugin also generates shortcodes that you can put on your pages and posts to offer discounts and coupons.
• Social Offers: This is different from the first two plugins in this this. Rather than coupons on pages and posts, Social Offers creates an overlay that displays incentives. You can offer things like music, PDFs and templates, as well as coupons, when using Social Offers. You can test this plugin out with a free trial.
• YITH WooCommerce Gift Cards: YITH also has a plugin for coupons, aside from its offerings for memberships and subscriptions. This is slightly different from the options above in that it focuses on gift cards. Allow customers to buy gift cards to your store using this plugin. Gift cards are a powerful type of product in and of themselves that can help grow your store. You can download it for free.
• YITH WooCommerce Share for Discounts: YITH also has a straightforward coupon/discount plugin as well, though. Your customers can share on Facebook, Twitter and/or Google in order to get discounts on your products. This not only offers enticing discounts to customers, but also encourages them to share your store and products, boosting sales and attracting new customers.

WooCommerce Tax Plugin

Figuring out sales tax is a major concern for e-commerce businesses. Sales tax changes from state to state. Rates can even shift depending on whether you’re online or taking sales in person. Laws and regulations that change from year to year also change sales tax rates across the country. Therefore, a WooCommerce Tax plugin is essential for online businesses in order to keep up with changing sales tax rates around the country.

• TaxJar: TaxJar is a sales tax automation program for WooCommerce. The plugin works in WordPress to make sales tax calculations painless. TaxJar claims that more than 10,000 e-commerce businesses use it each month calculate sales tax. TaxJar promises its plugin is never out of date and can maintain more than 10,000 tax rates that are updated monthly in its database. You can sign up for a free 30-day trial of TaxJar to test it out for yourself.
• Simple Sales Tax: Simple Sales Tax by TaxCloud offers a free download of its plugin. It can calculate sales tax during checkout, generate reports for your own records and assist you with filing your own taxes. TaxCloud’s database of sales tax rate information is similar to TaxJar’s, so you can rely on it to be up to date and dependable.

WooCommerce Search Plugin

Make it easy for users to browse your website with a search plugin. These are useful for those with large inventories and product offerings. But even if you are a smaller store, it’s great to offer a search option to make life easy for your customers. Don’t lose business simply because someone got frustrated by the lack of a search bar. Try one of these plugins instead:

• Advanced Woo Search: This is a powerful search plugin. Your customers can simply start typing and they’re immediately see products making their query. Woo Search boasts a products search, easy to use settings page, search in option, shortcode, product images and more.
• Smart WooCommerce Search: This plugin focuses more on sites with a large amount of inventory. Set different “required” fields and manage settings with this robust and powerful plugin. You can even integrate Smart Search into a default WordPress search widget to use it for non-WooCommerce websites as well.

The Final Word

There are a lot of plugins for WordPress and WooCommerce in this guide. Ultimately, you will have to determine which are most needed for your e-commerce business. Things like sales tax calculators and search functionality are right for just about every e-commerce site out there. But other more specialized plugins may not be right for your particular site.

 

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Wix Vs Squarespace: Which Platform Is Right for Your Business

Hosted eCommerce platforms such as Wix and Squarespace are becoming popular choices for users who want to open an online business with minimum hassles related to technical development. Both offer a similar set of features and are priced competitively. Choosing between the two is not an easy decision.

Wix has long been considered one of the best online website builders on the market. To cater to the growing market for specialized eCommerce site builders such as Shopify, Wix has extended the functionality of their platform with WixStores.

WixStores lets users with no coding knowledge whatsoever to create beautiful and fully functional eCommerce websites.

Squarespace offers their users the exact same thing – a fully hosted “software-as-a-service” (SaaS) that lets them create eCommerce stores without touching a line of code.

Both of these platforms have significant market share in eCommerce websites. So it’s quite evident that users like these products. But which one should you use to create your online business? Which one will fit into your budget requirements?

And which one will prove to be an asset to your business in the longer run? Will it be able to keep up if the requirements for your eCommerce operation grow?

In this article, we’ll be taking a deeper look at both these platforms to find answers to those important questions.

Wix vs SquareSpace at a Glance

	Wix eCommerce	Squarespace
Platform transaction fees	None	None
Number of Products	Unlimited	Unlimited
Templates	65 (Free)	14 (Free)
Apps and Plugins	250+	None
Supported Payment Gateways	Supports major gateways including Stripe and PayPal	Stripe and PayPal only
Number of Stores	700,000+	300,000+
Bandwidth Restrictions	None	None
Pricing	Starting at $20 per month	Starting at $30 per month

Wix Themes vs Squarespace Templates

The template of an eCommerce store plays a crucial role in its overall appeal towards customers. The design of the template, if attractive and eye-catching, will instantly put forth a good image for the store. And if the design is intuitive, user-friendly and makes for easy navigation throughout the store, customers will more likely stay on the website and make a purchase.

On the other hand, bad design does nothing good. First of all, it makes a bad impression towards the store’s visitors. It doesn’t inspire confidence or trust, and can is often a signifier of an unsuccessful or struggling business. Secondly, it makes navigation difficult. If the customer can’t use the website, what’s the point of having a website?

Even from an SEO perspective, good design is greatly beneficial for your eCommerce site. It reduces the bounce rate and in turn increases your site’s SERP rankings. These can oftentimes be a contributing factor to a store’s success or failure.

Wix eCommerce Templates

When it comes to templates Wix customers have a huge selection to choose from. There are a total of 510 designs to choose from, but out of these only 65 are made for eCommerce stores. These templates are listed under the “online stores” category and they provide a great variety for users.

Design-wise, any of Wix’s templates is hard to fault. They have all been designed with a modern aesthetic and look great out-of-the-box. The template store also allows you to filter the templates based on industry, so you can easily find a template that matches the theme of your business.

What’s more, all of these templates are offered without any cost, so you can simply pick anyone you want without worrying about the costs!

The Cap Hats template from Wix

There is a problem though, and it doesn’t have anything to do with templates. Once you pick a template, it will be locked down as the design for your store. If you want to choose a different template, you’ll have to build your store again from scratch. This is a huge downside, meaning you have to be extra careful when selecting a template design.

If you want to go for a different look down the road, be prepared to migrate all of your current store’s data and content to the new one. Of course, this is not very practical.

Squarespace eCommerce Templates

Squarespace offers a fewer number of templates as compared to Wix. And there are even fewer options available if you want to build an online store. At the time of writing, Squarespace only has 14 templates for eCommerce stores.

Squarespace’s eCommerce template selection is rather limited

The small number of templates definitely means fewer options for users, but there’s another issue. From a design perspective, all templates are absolutely top-notch. They sport professional, clean designs that look great on both desktop and mobile devices. The issue is that they all look like they’ve been designed for individuals, and not businesses.

The templates are too focused on being minimalist, so they will appeal to a small portion of users out there. For example, if you want to build an electronics store, you won’t find a suitable template for it on Squarespace.

Squarespace’s minimalist Indigo eCommerce template

The one area where Squarespace has an edge over Wix is in content migration. If you want to change the design of your online store, simply select a new template and all of your data and content will be carried to the design. Compared to Wix where you have to build a new store from scratch in case of a new template, this is definitely an advantage.

Wix vs Squarespace Customer Support

Responsive and helpful customer support is vital to the smooth operations of any online business. It is especially important for services like Wix and Squarespace whose target audience consists of users with minimum technical knowledge.

Wix Customer Support

Wix offers premium support for all of its pricing plans. This includes phone and email support, but there is a glaring omission: live chat support. What’s more, phone and email support are available only during specific hours (Monday through Friday from 5am to 5pm PST), so you won’t be able to reach them outside of the specified timings.

Wix has a powerful automated support system in place

The omission of live chat support is also concerning, since it means you won’t have quick expert help when you need it. Wix does have extremely helpful documentation and walk-through videos for all of its features, but sometimes you just need to talk to an expert if you’re in a bit of a hurry.

Squarespace Customer Support

Squarespace offers online support for all of its pricing plans. This includes live chat support with an expert and email support. Live chat support is only available during specific timings (Monday through Friday from 4am to 8pm), but they’re extremely easy to reach within these timings. Answers to queries are fairly prompt and useful.

Email support on the other hand is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And response times to most emails are well under an hour, so you’ll be able to get fairly quick resolutions to your questions.

Wix vs Squarespace Pricing

Wix and Squarespace are website builders that can have eCommerce applications. As such, eCommerce functionality is not included by default on all of their plans. For the purposes of this article, we’ll be mentioning the subscription plans which include an online store builder.

Wix eCommerce Pricing

Wix offers 2 plans to users who want to build an eCommerce site:

1. eCommerce: $20 per month
2. VIP: $30 per month

All of these plans include online support but VIP customers get access to Wix’s “VIP Team”, which they claim will provide a professional review of your website.

Wix Pricing Plan	Cost per month	Cost per month (1-year subscription)	Cost per month (2-year subscription)
eCommerce	$20	$16.5	$15
VIP	$30	$24.5	$23

 

This pricing also includes access to all of Wix’s premium templates. What’s more, users can save up to 25% per month if they choose to go with annual billing.

Squarespace eCommerce Pricing

Squarespace offers 2 plans for eCommerce customers:

1. Basic: $30 per month
2. Advanced: $46 per month

Both these plans include access to Squarespace’s 24/7 online support. The service also offers discounted pricing if the customer opts for annual billing:

Squarespace Pricing Plan	Cost per month	Cost per month (1-year subscription)
Basic	$30	$26
Advanced	$46	$40

As is the case with Wix, Squarespace offers customers access to all of its premium website templates.

Transaction Fees

Popular eCommerce store builders like Shopify deduct a transaction fee for each sale. Fortunately, Wix and Squarespace do not deduct any fees for transactions carried out through their platforms.

Instead, users will be paying the regular card rates which are determined by their chosen payment processor. Stripe, a popular payment processor for Wix and Squarespace, charges 2.9% (of total sale + shipping charges) + $0.3 for each transaction.

Popularity

The popularity of any SaaS product is important. The more popular a product is, the more likely it is to keep getting regular updates and developer support. The technology business is highly competitive and unpopular products have a tendency to “die out” if they’re not successful.

Wix and Squarespace enjoy equal amounts of interest in Google searches

The popularity of the eCommerce should be a factor for users who’re looking to open an online store. If the product stops receiving updates or gets shut down, the user’s eCommerce business will be in serious jeopardy.

Wix eCommerce Popularity

Wix has been around for ages. The company has made a name for offering anyone with no coding skills whatsoever to make great-looking websites. What’s more, all of Wix’s features can be availed for free, as long you’re willing to put up with Wix advertising on your website.

To start with the big numbers, Wix surpassed the 100-million-registered-users mark last year, and it’s still showing signs of impressive growth. But remember that Wix can be used for absolutely free, so this huge user base shouldn’t be so surprising.

But users seem to be pleased with Wix as a paid subscription as well. The company reported having more than 2.8 million premium subscribers in 2017. To put that into perspective, in 2012, the company only had 378,000 paying customers. That makes for an almost 800% increase in paying customers over 5 years.

Keep in mind that those numbers are for the Wix platform, and not just for Wix eCommerce. Digging deeper into those numbers reveals that there are currently more than 700,000 sites using Wix eCommerce, which is still quite impressive.

Squarespace eCommerce Popularity

Squarespace as a platform has impressive usage statistics of its own. The platform is being used on more than 430,000 eCommerce websites. The only worrying thing to consider is that according to BuiltWith, Wix eCommerce (Wix Stores) is one of the top platforms Squarespace customers migrate to.

Regardless of this, we would still maintain that you can easily build a website on Squarespace without worrying that the company will shut down its business. According to Google search trends, the platform enjoys an equal amount of interest from users as Wix.

Apps, Widgets and Plugins

Apps and plugins for a platform can come in handy when the user wants to have functionality beyond that offered by the platform’s core feature set. This is an essential thing to consider if you want to grow the store’s functionality as the business attracts more customers and the need for advanced business processes arises.

Choosing a platform that has a lackluster number of plugins means you will be limited to its core functionality.

Wix eCommerce Apps

The Wix App Store hosts more than 250 apps, out of which dozens are dedicated to its online stores. The selection of apps is quite impressive and what’s more, you can use any of the apps on your Wix eCommerce website.

The App Store itself is very well-designed and makes browsing through apps an effortless affair. All of the apps can be installed with just 1 click which means there’s no hassle of downloading, installing and activating them.

The eCommerce-focused apps are quite diverse in the functionality they offer. For example, you can use these apps to add the following functions to your eCommerce site:

• Traffic analytics
• Live chat support
• Appointment scheduling system

Most of the apps are available for free, but some are offered with a free/fremium pricing model where the user has to pay for locked features.

Squarespace eCommerce Apps

Unfortunately, with Squarespace you’re limited to the functionality offered out of the box because there is no official plugin store. If you really want additional functionality for your Squarespace eCommerce website, you’ll have to look into doing custom integrations. Of course, this really isn’t an option for non-developers.

If you do manage to get a custom plugin integrated into your Squarespace website, official support won’t be able to help you with further issues unless you remove the custom integrations.

There are some companies that offer plug-and-play integrations with Squarespace. These aren’t complex integrations however, and mostly serve to enhance the visual aspect of your website. Here’s a list of some of these companies:

• SqspThemes
• Square Studio
• The Custom Square
• Devon Stank’s Code Shop
• Square Plugs

If you decide to use third-party plugins, make sure that the developers offer after-sales support for them.

Features

The features that come bundled with an eCommerce platform contribute to its ease of use. A feature-rich platform will have a lesser need for extended functionality through plugins and apps.

Plugins and apps can often cause unforeseen disruptions in websites, causing them to slow down or in extreme cases stop working as a whole.

Marketing and Analytics

Effective marketing and traffic analysis is crucial to any online business’s success. Without marketing efforts, the website will fail to attract a reasonable amount of visitors. Traffic analytics are also important as they give crucial insights (device, location, age group) into the users who’re visiting your website.

Wix does not have any notable marketing features of its own. Instead, users are expected to pick and choose marketing apps that will suit their needs from the App Store. Most of these apps have been developed by Wix and are thus officially supported.

Because Squarespace doesn’t have an official app store, it bundles a lot of analytics functionality with its core feature set. The platform provides customer insights through traffic analytics, and email marketing through MailChimp integration.

Dropshipping

Wix eCommerce gives users the ability to bulk upload products from a CSV file. But that’s about as far as it’ll go when it comes to supporting a dropshipping business. There is no way to synchronize your inventory with the fulfillment company, for example.

It’s the same story with Squarespace, with no dropshipping features or modules available. However, if you’re managing your dropshipping business manually, Squarespace does come with native support for ShipStation integration, so keeping track of orders and shipping them becomes easier.

Point of Sale (POS) Support

If you want to sell your online store’s products at a physical location, you’re going to need a point of sale system. It isn’t absolutely necessary, of course, but it helps by automatically generating invoices and updating inventory levels as you generate sales offline.

Using the Square magstripe card reader, you can start a POS operation for your Wix eCommerce site

Wix offers POS support through Square integration. All you need to do is sign up with Square, ask them to mail you a magstripe credit card reader and setup Square as a payment method in your Wix settings. And that’s about it. The magstripe reader can be plugged into any smartphone or tablet to read credit cards.

What’s more, whenever you make a sale through your Square POS, your Wix inventory levels will be automatically updated to reflect that sale. It isn’t the most comprehensive POS solution out there but it certainly gets basics right.

Currently, there is no official support for point of sale systems from Squarespace.

Blogging

Adding a blog to your website is a great way of increasing customer engagement. A blog should have content that reflects your company’s values and provides genuinely interesting insights to your target audiences.

Wix packages blogging within its set of features and allows users to setup beautiful blogs within a matter of minutes. The blogging interface is also extremely simple and easy to use.

Squarespace offers a lot of features in its blogging module

Squarespace allows users to setup an unlimited amount of blogs on their website. The blog dashboard is extremely easy to use and allows users to add grouped content through tagging and categories. Users can also enable or disable comments on posts on an individual basis.

Supported Payment Gateways

Payment gateway support is an important factor to consider when choosing between these platforms. They’re packaged solutions, so you need to know if your payment processor of choice is supported. If it isn’t, you won’t be able to collect online payments.

Major payment gateways supported by Wix:

• Stripe
• Paypal
• Square
• 2Checkout
• Braintree

Payment gateways supported by Squarespace:

• Stripe
• PayPal

Which is easier to use Wix or Squarespace?

Wix and Squarespace are aimed at non-developers. They have been built to provide the easiest way of setting up a website. But how do these platforms fare in real usage? Specifically, how easy are they to use for setting up an eCommerce website?

Wix Website Editor

Wix bills their website editing tool as being the easiest in the world. That is quite a claim, and in practice, it really does seem that way. The editor’s interface is very well-designed and there are a great number of tools at hand. However, the great number of customization options here doesn’t hamper user-friendliness in any manner.

The website editor is quite powerful and gives users full control over how they want the website to look. But all of this is done strictly through drag-and-drop – there is not a line of code to deal with in sight.

Squarespace Website Editor

The Squarespace website editor has a very minimalist interface that is very user-friendly. Getting to grips with the tools doesn’t take long and there are many customization options available.

The one gripe we have is that we couldn’t find an undo button at the first glance. It’s not that the editor isn’t capable of undoing changes but it would be convenient to have an undo button that is within reach without too many navigation jumps in between.

Wix eCommerce Dashboard

The Wix dashboard is well-designed and gives easy access to most site settings and functions. However, to access eCommerce functions you’ll have to go to the site editor and navigate to the “Store Manager” section.

Once you’re really in the eCommerce dashboard, you’re presented with a very intuitive and well-designed interface that provides easy access to common tasks. We did not experience any browser crashes or glitches when using the site’s powerful web tools.

Squarespace eCommerce Dashboard

Most store functions for a Squarespace eCommerce site can be accessed through the website editor. Common tasks such as adding products are done fairly easily by simply navigating to the inventory tab and clicking on “Add Product”.

The surprisingly powerful analytics feature can be accessed by navigating to “Analytics”.

Throughout the user interface, information is presented in a clear and concise manner. The interface looks “highly polished” and is simple and easy to use. The links take you exactly where you expect them to and there are no unexpected surprises or glitches.

Wix vs Squarespace – Choosing the Right eCommerce Platform

Choosing between Wix and Squarespace’s eCommerce offerings is not an easy decision. Both are extremely easy to use and can be easily handled by computer novices. There are no bandwidth limits, no inventory limits and no transaction fees for either of these platforms.

To help you make the decision, we’ve boiled down our findings into a couple of pros and cons lists for each platform. Analyze these pros and cons and see which suits your business requirements the most and you’ll know which platform to choose.

Wix Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Easy to use, intuitive site builder and dashboard	No live support
Wide selection of professionally designed templates, all completely free	Website template cannot be ‘switched’ to another design
Lots of apps and plugins for extended functionality
Point of sale support
Significant savings on annual billing options

 

Squarespace Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Easy to use, intuitive site builder and dashboard	Small selection of eCommerce templates with little variance in design
Powerful analytics suite built-in	No official plugins – you’re limited to the platform’s features
Users can switch template designs anytime without worrying about migrating content	No point of sale support
Responsive live chat support	Payment methods limited to Stripe and PayPal

 

Wix eCommerce: The Better eCommerce Platform

We consider Wix to be the superior platform for eCommerce simply because it offers a much larger selection of professionally designed templates, and because of its large selection of functionality-extending apps. These are the platform’s main differentiators against Squarespace, but in eCommerce they are crucially important. What’s more, Wix is also much cheaper and users can make additional savings by opting for yearly billing.

 

 

 

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