Category: Ecommerce

Shopify is an online ecommerce platform with a huge range of features and plug-ins that make it a flexible option for store owners and businesses of all sizes. If you’re an ecommerce entrepreneur looking to set up a new online store then Shopify is probably one of the platforms you’re considering. But how does Shopify work? And how do you get started with it? 

We’ve put together a beginner’s guide that covers everything you need to know about starting online stores using Shopify. 

What is Shopify? 

Shopify is a cloud-based software for setting up an online store and selling products. It has a range of pricing plans and features that will meet the needs of new ecommerce businesses as they establish and grow. 

The popular ecommerce platform provides a number of different tools that allow you to run all aspects of your ecommerce website from listing your products, to customer engagement and marketing, payments, and managing orders. 

As well as setting up an online store, Shopify also has a POS (point of sale) feature that can be used for sales in a physical store, so that both parts of the business are linked. 

How does Shopify work? 

Shopify works on a monthly subscription, which gives you access to a cloud-based system for running an online store. It provides you with an online storefront, a payment processor, shipping management, and marketing tools. 

When you sign up and log in to your Shopify account you’ll have access to a dashboard where you can manage your store including setting up your website, adding products, and processing orders. Shopify offers a number of free and paid templates to use to design your site, and these can be edited to fit your requirements and convey your own branding.

The monthly subscription also includes secure web hosting for your website and a free SSL certificate, as well as access to customer support via phone, email, or live chat, whenever you need it.

While Shopify’s software has the main tools you’ll need as a merchant to run an ecommerce business, you can also find lots of plug-ins that give you additional functionality in the Shopify app store (more on that later).

Pros and cons of using Shopify 

Shopify is a huge ecommerce platform with thousands of retailers using it to run their business. These are a few of the reasons for and against using it for your store.

Pros of Shopify

• Easy to use: You don’t need a lot of technical skills to set your store up using Shopify. Everything is really straightforward and it’s simple to design a store that reflects your brand.
• Low cost for new stores: Shopify offers a 14-day free trial so you can test it out and make sure it’s right. If you decide it’s for you then the basic plan is $29 per month, which is a good starting point for a new store. There are also plenty of good design themes for free so you don’t have to spend a lot on the design.
• Lots of support: Shopify does a lot to support its retailers and help them build a successful business on the platform. As well as access to the customer support team, they provide free courses, guides, and their blog is full of useful information.

Cons of Shopify

• Learning the platform: Shopify is easy to use but it does take some time to learn how to use it and understand where to find everything that you need, so you’ll probably need to watch some tutorials.
• Costs can add up: While the Shopify platform comes with all the basics for running an online store, larger businesses will need additional functionality from plugins and apps. The monthly cost for these on top of the Shopify subscription can quickly add up.

For the majority of users, the pros of using Shopify outweigh the cons — but it’s about finding the right ecommerce platform for you and your business, so only you will be able to decide whether Shopify is for you or not. 

What to sell on Shopify

You can sell pretty much anything that you want to using Shopify. Popular categories include fashion, beauty, home and lifestyle, and gardening products. It’s a good idea to pick your niche and start selling products that are popular and in high demand to make sure your Shopify store is successful.

There are a number of things that Shopify prohibits retailers from selling including:

• Counterfeit or unauthorised goods
• Gambling-related products
• Licenced materials without appropriate authorisation (i.e. selling music without the copyright holder’s permission)
• Adult content and services
• Drug paraphernalia

Aside from this, the ecommerce world is your oyster.

How to use Shopify for your online store 

If you’re thinking of using Shopify to run your ecommerce store, these are a few of the key features that you should utilise to make sure you’re getting the most value from the platform.

Using Shopify Payments 

Shopify Payments (now known as Shop Pay) is Shopify’s own payment processor, which accepts payments from all major debit and credit cards. 

If you don’t use Shopify Payments then depending on your plan, Shopify will charge you between 0.5% and 2.0% for every transaction processed on the platform. By using Shop Pay, these additional transaction fees for payment processing are waived.

However, you’ll still have to pay processing fees whether you use Shop Pay or different payment providers, so it’s worth properly comparing which option works out best. Shop Pay allows customers to save their email, credit card, and shipping information so that they can pay faster the next time they shop with you, which can improve the shopping experience.

Shopify themes and templates 

Image: Shopify

Shopify offers a lot of templates and themes that make it simple to create a well-designed, branded website for your ecommerce store. 

There are a handful of free themes available in the theme store that can be easily tailored using a drag and drop editor to your requirements, providing a quick and affordable way to build an online store when you’re just starting out. 

And if you want to invest in something more advanced, there’s a huge range of premium paid templates. All of the templates on Shopify are responsive so they’re mobile-friendly, and you should be able to find one that suits your store and branding.

Add a blog

Shopify comes with all the basic functionality to add your own blog posts to your ecommerce store. It doesn’t offer anything too advanced but from your Shopify admin panel, it’s quick and easy to write, edit, and publish your content. 

Publishing regular blog content is a key way to boost your store’s rankings in search engine results pages, attract visitors to your site, and build up awareness of your brand.

Shopify POS

Shopify POS is a point of sale system that makes it easy to coordinate online and offline sales channels for your store. So if you run a physical store, or even just have pop up shops every now and then, you can use the POS to to process credit card payments. 

All your stock will be synced from offline sales so that your online inventory is kept up to date. This is an important feature if you’re looking at multichannel retail to grow your business.

Shopify marketing tools 

As well as blogging functionality, Shopify offers a number of marketing features and tools to help you sell your products. It’s easy to set up and manage Google Shopping campaigns, as well as social media advertising campaigns. There’s also a marketing dashboard report that provides you with an overview of how your marketing efforts are performing. 

Shopify app store

Image: Shopify 

Shopify has a huge marketplace for add-ons that can give you extra functionality to make running your shop a lot easier. A few key add-ons that are usually worth investing in are: 

• Shipping software: Help streamline your shipping process by importing orders and creating shipments and printing labels in bulk. Choose one with inventory management to make your processes even more efficient. 
• Payment gateways: Adding additional payment options can often encourage customers to make a purchase. 
• Email marketing: Make it easy to gather your customers’ email address into a mailing list and send out follow up marketing emails to customers and anyone that signs up.
• Site security: Keep your site secure and build up trust with potential customers.

There’s a lot to choose from, and the Shopify app store can be a bit overwhelming if you’re new to it. If you’re feeling stumped, you can visit our handy guide on the best Shopify apps for help choosing the right apps and tools for ecommerce success. 

How to get started with Shopify

If you’re thinking about using Shopify to run an ecommerce business then get started by signing up to their free 14-day trial. This gives you an opportunity to test out the platform and assess whether it’s right for you. 

Set up your shop, pick your store name, decide on a design for your storefront and then add in your products. Spend some time getting to know the more advanced features, and any areas that you might need help with or additional plugins. 

If you decide that Shopify is the right choice for your business then you need to choose the right pricing plan: 

• Basic Shopify plan: $29 per month for an online store, unlimited products, two staff accounts, four inventory locations 
• Standard Shopify plan: $79 per month for up to five staff accounts and five locations.
• Advanced Shopify plan: $299 per month for 15 staff accounts and eight locations, plus third-party calculated shipping rates. 

If you’re starting out really small or you already have a website, then the Shopify Lite plan allows you to add products to your website or blog and accept credit card payments for $9 per month. 

Overall, Shopify is one of the best ecommerce platforms for entrepreneurs and retailers looking to establish an online shop that they want to scale up and expand. It offers all the basic features, and the Shopify app store can give you the added functionality you might need as the business grows. 

When you’re looking for suppliers for your ecommerce business, one term that’s likely to come up is ‘MOQ’ or ‘minimum order quantity’. It can be a bit confusing if you’ve never heard the term before.

Knowing what MOQ means will help you find the right suppliers to work with and negotiate the best deal to suit your business. 

In this article you’ll find everything you need to know about MOQ meaning, why they’re so important, the advantages and disadvantages, as well as how you can meet them. 

MOQ meaning: What is minimum order quantity? 

MOQ stands for minimum order quantity, which refers to the smallest number of products or units that a supplier is willing to sell at one time. The MOQ is set by suppliers and manufacturers to ensure that any orders placed with them are big enough to cover production costs and ensure they make a profit.

The MOQ can vary hugely between different suppliers — some may require orders of 100,000 units or more, while others will only require you to order 100 units. The amount and the cost will depend on the product, the manufacturing process, where they’re based and a number of other factors. 

Sometimes it is possible to negotiate with a supplier on their MOQ, but this will depend on their profit margins and whether they can guarantee they’ll still make money. For example, you might be able to get a lower MOQ if you agree to place future orders with them. 

Why do MOQs matter? 

Not only do MOQs mean that the supplier or manufacturer covers their costs and makes a profit, but it’s also a way of ensuring that they find the right businesses to partner with. With a set MOQ, they can establish the scale of their business and the size of businesses that they can work well with. 

Large businesses that require thousands of units on a regular basis need to find suppliers that can meet that demand. If a manufacturer’s MOQ is high, they’re going to have the materials and resources to produce enough products. 

On the other hand, smaller businesses only need a few hundred units or less each time they order — so it’s important that they find a supplier that can work with those units and keep supplying a smaller amount on a regular basis. 

Advantages and disadvantages of MOQ

Image: Pexels

The main advantage of MOQs is that they are likely to give you the best price per unit or product. Because you’re buying in bulk, the manufacturer is usually offering a significant discount on the price it would cost for an individual product. 

In most cases, the higher the number of units you buy, the lower the cost per unit will be — so if you’re definitely going to be able to sell something, you can maximise your profits by buying in bulk. 

However, this does mean that you have to have the finances to cover the upfront costs of your products. For suppliers with a high MOQ, this could mean that you need thousands in cash to pay, which is sometimes difficult for new businesses. And if you can afford to buy large quantities, you need to be sure that you’ll be able to sell the products and make a profit.

Negotiating an MOQ

Minimum order companies are especially difficult when you’re starting out as a retailer. If you find a supplier for the products you want but can’t meet their MOQ either because of the upfront cost or because you can’t store the inventory, then it’s often worth talking to them to find a way to make it work:  

• Ask your supplier to produce the full MOQ, pay upfront, but see if they have storage facilities to keep hold of half of the products until you’ve sold the first half. This helps with inventory management and gives you some time to make space for the rest of the order. 
• Pay for the MOQ but only take as much of the products as you can store — the supplier can do what they want with the rest of the production run. This is only really a viable option if you’re getting the products at a good enough price that you can mark up the ones you do receive and still make a profit. 
• Find out if there’s some way that the manufacturer can lower the production cost by changing the materials. 

It’s always worth asking to establish if one of these is a viable option for you and your business. However, there are a few things you need to consider when negotiating.

What to consider when negotiating

It’s always important to remember that for most suppliers their MOQ is there for a reason — it’s the best price that they can produce those products at to run their business. 

If you do manage to negotiate the minimum order quantity or price down, there’s a good chance that they’ll have to make the money back in another way. This could mean that they use cheaper materials that lower the quality of your product, or they try to make them more quickly, so there’s more likely to be problems or mistakes. 

It can also damage your relationship with the supplier if you push too hard to get a better deal. They might agree to work with you this time but in future, they’ll be less likely to or they’ll prioritise other clients. It’s important to establish a good relationship with suppliers so that they’re willing to offer you good deals in the future and keep producing high-quality products. 

Pre-order to meet MOQ

Alternatively, you could try offering products to pre-order to your customers. This means that you can get the money from your customers before placing an order with the supplier so that you don’t have to front any of the costs involved.

However, this requires you to effectively promote your products. You need to make sure that your products are something shoppers are willing to pay in advance for and you also need to make it clear that they won’t receive the products straight away — it could be weeks or months before you’ve made enough sales to place the order with your supplier. 

Finding suppliers for your business 

If the supplier you want to work with isn’t able to negotiate on their MOQ and you really can’t meet it, then there are plenty of other suppliers and manufacturers out there. Go back to Google and dig deeper for alternatives or use a supplier directory and find ones that will be able to work with your requirements.

There are a lot of suppliers that have a low MOQ or don’t have one at all. And you can also find wholesale products on sites like AliExpress, where you can purchase them as individual units. These costs might be slightly higher for each unit but it’s a more accessible way of sourcing your products as an entrepreneur or new business. 

You could also try looking at other ecommerce businesses that are similar to you in size and in the same niche or selling the same type of products. Investigate which suppliers they use for their products and get in touch with them. 

Other factors to consider with a supplier 

Image: Pexels

If you’re just starting out and don’t have a lot of money to invest in your stock upfront, then you might be tempted to just pick the supplier with the lowest MOQ. However, there are a few other important factors to consider: 

• How much more you’re paying for each unit and whether it suits your pricing strategy. Will you be able to price them competitively and still make a profit?
• The quality of the products they’re producing and whether they meet any safety standards that are required. 
• How easy are they to work with? Is it easy to get hold of their support team and discuss your orders? 
• Do they have a good track record of fulfilling orders on time? 

You’ll often have to find a balance between a supplier with an MOQ that fits your finances and capacity, but also provides you with good quality products, on time, that you can make a profit on. 

MOQs are often one of the key deciding factors when it comes to choosing a supplier. 

Consider all these points, and spend some time looking for suppliers that can meet your requirements, but don’t try to drive their MOQs down too far. Remember there are plenty of suppliers out there, so you will be able to find one that works for you. 

Today’s guest blog comes from Prisync — a developer of price tracking and monitoring software. 

Setting too high or too low price rates can affect your business. So, how will you decide on the fair price for your ecommerce products? 

When the price is very low, you will not get much profit. Customers will assume that you are selling low-quality products. On the contrary, high price rates will provoke your potential customers to go to your competitor’s store.

87% of shoppers say knowing they got a good deal is important when choosing a brand/store. Thus, perfect pricing is a must to retain customers and maintain the best position of your ecommerce store. Let us provide you with a guide on how to set the right price for your products.

Factors important to ensure the fair price for your products

While deciding on your product prices, you need to focus on two major things:

1. Your business’s goals
2. Your overheads

Still, there are some other factors related to your product pricing tactics.

Target ROI

Do you want to make your business more sustainable — or maybe you want to help the business grow rapidly? These goals can change in due course. However, you need to grow your business responsibly to ensure longevity.

Intelligent and fair pricing is the most important factor to reach your targets. Be focused on your targets and set the ideal product. That is what every successful marketer does.

Fixed cost

Fixed costs refer to the costs incurred by your business. 

Regardless of the number of orders for your ecommerce products, you need to incur this cost. For instance, it includes the cost of utilities, insurance, rent, and salaries. You can work on lowering most of your business costs, but not these. Proper maintenance of product prices is the only way to spread these costs.

Image: The Balance Small Business

Testing

Have you set the perfect price for ecommerce products? You may have decided on the product price. However, it must not be the final one. Test out different price levels and find one that works best to increase your sales.

How to set fair prices

To ensure that you have set the right price for your ecommerce products, it is essential to go through some steps.

Analyse the industry

Based on your chosen industry, you can find several competitors. Try to be more precise and accurate while comparing your business to competitors.

Image: Amazon

For instance, as a dairy product seller, you have to compare similar products in other ecommerce stores. It is better to find products made of similar ingredients. 

After identifying your competitors, you can create a list of:

• Products
• Shipping costs
• Prices
• Any discount offer

Researching your competitors is a great benchmark for setting fair prices. 

Assess your product’s market share

A new ecommerce business may not have a considerable market share. With the growth of your business, you can start calculating the market share. Find the average sales volume of your business. Moreover, you need to identify the product prices that increase and decrease your profit margin.

Deal with different costs

How much have you spent on buying products from vendors? Moreover, product packaging costs must also be considered. The increasing number of sales can raise these costs. Add all these costs to overheads and note down the numerical figure.

You must also focus on some other factors:

• How will VAT affect your price?
• Can you achieve a modest profit margin while maintaining sales?
• Should you take a delivery charge from customers?

There are many costs to consider when setting prices that are fair, but you can profit from. 

Set prices that ensure consistent profits 

You cannot run a business without making profits. Calculate the amount that you need to invest in the delivery team, materials, and other factors. Optimise your supply chain and ensure the standard costs.

When you have found ways to refine costs, you can adjust the product prices. Moreover, you can help your customers to save money. Although you can set a standard price, you may offer discounts on bulk purchases of different products.

Finally, we need to say that you cannot stick to a particular price rate throughout the year. If your competitors have adjusted the rate, you may also rethink that price. It is common for every ecommerce business to find a shift in the product price. You may have to communicate this with customers to ensure that your product prices are optimal.

Some vital elements for unbiased pricing

These are the vital elements for setting fair, unbiased prices on your ecommerce website:

Price transparency

Price transparency increases the willingness of customers to purchase from your store. While selling premium products, you have to describe their quality and the reason for higher pricing. 

Equality

Have you heard about Amazon’s scandal in 2000? Some shoppers claimed that the ecommerce company sold them a particular product at different price rates based on the chosen browser — this shows you must maintain equal prices without focusing on customer demographics.

Consistency

Consistency in pricing is highly desirable. However, Amazon uses its dynamic pricing engine to adjust their prices every day. Although SMBs don’t have to make changes so frequently, they have to have some level of agility in their pricing decisions.

How to use software to set a reasonable product price

A reliable price tracking software helps you ensure that your product price is fair and decent. What can you do with this software? How does it help you?

• Know your competitor: by monitoring competitor prices, you will learn how their pricing schemes affect your sales rate.
• Match your competitor prices: the price matching system collects your competitors’ price details for the perfect adjustment of your product prices. 
• Change your rates regularly: you may adjust your price rates at any time using the dynamic pricing software. In other words, the software will automatically adjust your prices based on the rules you set.

Image: Prisync

• Maintain balance in prices: you can keep up a balance between overpricing and underpricing with response to customers’ needs and market conditions.
• Control your product pricing strategy: You will receive daily notifications on price changes and detailed reports. Based on these reports, you can test countless different price points.

Image: Prisync

Use the software to maintain the fair prices of your products. The proper pricing strengthens your relationship with customers. Observe how a change in price affects the demand for your products.

Moreover, you can conform to the industry norms. The software will let you decide on the right price for your products.

Setting fair prices plays an important role in the buyers’ decision-making process. It can be the difference between somebody shopping at your store or choosing a competitor instead. Use this guide to help ensure you’re setting the right prices to make your ecommerce store a success. 

Shopify remains the default recommendation for so many people in the ecommerce industry.

It’s convenient, intuitive, scalable, well-supported, and offers a powerhouse combination of native features and expandability through the superb Shopify App Store. But it isn’t the best option for everyone, and there are more strong competitors than ever before.

Squarespace, meanwhile, has picked up a lot of buzz through strong marketing, and it’s already carved out a decent piece of the ecommerce pie despite not fundamentally being intended for online retail. It’s a low-cost, all-purpose website-building solution that generates slick and visually-arresting layouts with minimal effort, making it great for beginners.

Here, then, we have a competition with no clear loser. Anyone looking to create an ecommerce store would do well to pick either of these platforms. Each one covers all the basics and can capably do everything the average merchant would need it to do.

But if you’re going to commit your time, energy and financial resources to building a store, you don’t want something that’s merely good enough. You want the best ecommerce platform you can find — so why would you pick the runner-up?

In this comparison, we’re going to pit Squarespace against Shopify in the ecommerce arena to see which one is the better option for you. Is there a clear answer to the titular question, or are things somewhat more complicated? Shopify vs Squarespace, pros and cons: let’s find out.

Tier pricing and differences

It’s typical for an ecommerce platform to offer more than one level of service, so how do these huge brands frame their online retail solutions? We’ll start with Shopify since it has the most interesting range of options by a significant margin.

Shopify pricing

There are essentially three categories for these five pricing tiers:

Shopify Lite doesn’t actually produce a Shopify store. Skipping the website builder, it allows you to use the Shopify back-end to add basic buying functionality to a non-Shopify store. If you already have a website and want to casually monetize it (or want to establish a point-of-sale setup with no online store), this is a solid way to make that happen (and it’s cheap at just $9 per month).

Shopify is the tier aimed at the average ecommerce entrepreneur. It provides a fully-operational Shopify store, and will likely suffice unless (or until) you grow your store to the enterprise level. Note that the Basic and Advanced tiers pertain to things like reporting and payment (the higher the tier, the better the options, and the lower the transaction fees), but don’t change the game.

Shopify Plus, starting at $2000 per month, is the smart choice for big businesses that can justify its weighty price tag. It brings out the full force of the Shopify platform, leaving no features in reserve and enabling the kind of rich customization needed for enterprise selling.

Squarespace pricing

Things are much simpler for Squarespace, because there are only three tiers with the features necessary to run a functional ecommerce store:

Business technically needs to be included because it has integrated ecommerce functionality, but it isn’t a strong recommendation because it doesn’t provide in-domain checkout processes. To buy from your store, a shopper would need to be sent elsewhere to pay for their order. That isn’t very convenient and it makes a brand look sloppy and unprofessional.

Basic Commerce covers the gaps left by the cheaper tier, adding a native checkout process and doing other useful things like supporting user accounts and providing enhanced analytics. If you don’t need anything too sophisticated for your store, this tier will be the right choice.

Advanced Commerce bumps up the features once again, allowing sellers to offer subscriptions in addition to products (very useful if you want to sell training courses, for instance), set up abandoned cart emails to improve conversions, and even build custom integrations.

Features (native and extended)

Shopify was built from the outset to do just one thing: sell online. This is reflected in its range of features and in its industry-leading App Store. Whatever you want to do to boost your ecommerce business (whether it involves marketing, conversion-rate optimization, or social media engagement), you can find the functions to help you do it.

Squarespace, on the other hand, wasn’t developed for ecommerce. That functionality was added later. This doesn’t mean that it’s incapable when it comes to online retail, but it does mean that you can’t expect the kind of focus you’d get from Shopify.

Just look at how the range of Squarespace extensions fares. At the time of writing, there were just 24 extensions with official support (plus a handful of Premium integrations limited to the Business tier and above). If you want to use an email manager other than Mailchimp, such as Constant Contact, you’ll need to use Zapier or configure it manually.

In Shopify, you can just use the official Constant Contact app. This makes life so much easier, and gives you a huge range of freedom when it comes to the business software you use. Squarespace and Shopify are both competent here, but when it comes to making an online store, Shopify is the clear winner.

Design quality and flexibility

Unless you’re using Shopify Lite, you’re going to be using your chosen platform to design your ecommerce store — and you want that process to be as productive as possible. So how do Shopify and Squarespace compare when it comes to design?

Well, Shopify has always been great at simplifying the ecommerce process. You can get an online store built very quickly and easily, taking advantage of free templates that look solid, allow reasonable customization of design elements, and work well on all devices. With that said, you can’t usually do that much to rearrange those themes. They’ll have set structural patterns.

Squarespace grants much more freedom through its focus on drag and drop block-based building. You can freely add, remove or rearrange all your on-page elements. This allows you to create the exact layout you want, all without doing anything more complicated than you’d need to do in Shopify. It also has far more themes to pick from. Due to this, I have to give the nod to Squarespace here.

Performance and SEO

A good ecommerce site needs to load quickly and consistently — and to rank well in Google’s SERPs, it also needs to cover various other SEO basics (such as featuring page metadata). There’s no sense in creating an attractive store if it can’t handle a lot of traffic, or can’t attract it in the first place because technical issues prevent it from competing for search rankings.

Put simply, Shopify has the edge in almost every regard here. Squarespace offers marginally more flexibility in some ways (when it comes to custom URLs, for instance), but Shopify has the kind of grip on ecommerce demands that you’d expect from a service built for online retail. It makes technical SEO elements clearer, generates decent metadata, and — very notably — will continue to be updated whenever useful with a retail-first approach.

There’s nothing much wrong with Squarespace here, and you certainly can create a Squarespace store with strong ranking potential. If you’re an ambitious business owner looking to maximize your chances of competing for top keywords, though, Shopify is the obvious choice.

Customer support reliability

Every hosted ecommerce service needs excellent support options. If you encounter a major issue with your site at a particularly-inconvenient time, it can cost you immensely. Making a good platform choice will allow you to proceed with absolute confidence that the developer will have your back when things go wrong (particularly vital if you’re a beginner).

Shopify is known in the ecommerce world for its industry-leading support service, and you can find glowing endorsements wherever you look. Whether you want to log a support ticket, send an email, reach out via social media, or even place a phone call, the Shopify support team is there to accommodate — and it’s even available on a 24/7 basis. 

Throw in the weight of ecommerce advice Shopify provides through its blog and knowledge base, and you have a range of support options that ticks all the boxes.

But that doesn’t mean that Squarespace is a slouch in this area. Feedback is comparably positive, with the Squarespace support team being reliably communicative and helpful. Live chat is available during regular business hours, and email support is available 24/7.

There’s no phone support, though, and the range of instructional materials isn’t as expansive (though there are plenty of help guides and webinars to choose from). You can’t go wrong with either support service, but if you have to pick one, Shopify is the way to go.

Shopify vs Squarespace: our verdict

Having looked at some of the key concerns for prospective ecommerce sellers, we can now reach a verdict. Shopify vs Squarespace, Squarespace vs Shopify… which should you choose? 

Well, though it depends on your specific circumstances, the rational answer is Shopify.

Squarespace is a fantastic platform for sites of all kinds, offering superb versatility with a great aesthetic and enough features to assemble a custom store that looks outstanding. If looks are key for you (if you’re planning to sell luxury items, perhaps), choosing Squarespace will allow you to punch above your weight with your general store design.

But Shopify is too strong in too many areas to get second place here. It’s a commonplace recommendation for good reason. It offers an exceptional range of ecommerce features, top-class support, and an intuitive design approach that allows enough room for variation without overwhelming beginners.

And when you factor in the strength of the Shopify App Store, it’s priced very competitively, with its Basic Shopify tier comparing favourably to the Advanced Commerce tier of Squarespace. Shopify or Squarespace? When in doubt, give the win to Shopify.

Should you look at alternatives?

We’ve only looked at Shopify and Squarespace here, and there are many more ecommerce platforms on the market. If neither of these systems covers all your needs, then, should you look elsewhere? Absolutely! The more research you can do, the better prepared you’ll be to make an informed decision, and the happier you’ll be with the results.

This guide is all about settling things between two particular systems, helping you proceed if you’ve already whittled your options down. If you’re curious about systems like Magento or WooCommerce, check out our other reviews. Good luck!