Shopify vs Wix vs Squarespace: Which Is the Best Choice

Picking an eCommerce platform is a key decision that can have a noticeable effect on your performance. But never fear – we’ve put together this handy guide to help make your decision easier. Three of the most popular and powerful solutions among the various options are Shopify vs Wix vs Squarespace. To help make an informed decision in the Shopify vs Wix vs Squarespace showdown, we’ll break down pricing, design options, and platform functionality.

Shopify vs Squarespace vs Wix: A Quick Overview

Shopify vs Wix vs Squarespace: A Detailed Comparison

Shopify vs Wix vs Squarespace: Pricing Plans

Shopify

Shopify has four price plans for merchants of all sizes:

• Shopify Basic – $25/month (ideal for side projects and startups)
• Shopify – $65 month (also good for new businesses looking to scale)
• Shopify advanced – $399/month (best for medium-sized to large-sized businesses with broader customer bases)
• Shopify Plus – starts at $2300/month (for large already well-established brands & businesses targeting global customers)

It is worth noting that Shopify provides 25% off for its Basic, Shopify and Advanced plans if you go for a yearly subscription.

✨✨✨ DISCOVER NOW: SHOPIFY PRICING PLAN

Wix

Wix four pricing plans are also quite similar:

• Light – $17 per month (equates to selling a few things from their online store)
• Core – $29 monthly (ideal for local business owners aiming to sell products through an online store)
• Business - $36/month (suitable for medium to large-sized businesses in need of an out-of-the-box, comprehensive ecommerce solution)
• Business Elite – $159/month (recommended for larger size businesses, especially experienced drop shippers that want to import a lot of products to their stores and sell them all over the world)

Wix does not offer an annual subscription.

Squarespace

Squarespace provides four pricing plans:

• Personal – $25/month (great for entrepreneurs offering services like consultancies as well as a simple personal portfolio)
• Business – $36/month (good for small business that need basic ecommerce feature)
• Commerce Basic – $40/month (best for small to medium businesses seeking to gain additional customers through online and offline channels)
• Commerce Advanced – $72/month (best for mid sized businesses with an existing user base who want to create fully fledged ecommerce site with any conversion features you’d want from Squarespace)

Squarespace, also similar to Shopify, offers all its plans at 28% to 36% discount if you pay for an annual plan.

Shopify vs Wix vs Squarespace: Website Builder Functionalities

Ease of use

Shopify

Shopify is a specialized eCommerce platform with a simple and intuitive interface. With its dashboard, you can manage stock quantities, track sales, and customize your site effortlessly. The basics are easy to set up, but the more advanced aspects, things like tax set-ups, shipping, and complicated integrations, will take some learning.

Wix

Wix is most renowned for its drop and drag builder that makes building a website almost zero effort. Users can select from more than 800 templates, and drag features to place them within layouts. While that works great for small companies and personal users, it can mean bigger shops become trickier to final with no dedicated eCommerce focus. Moreover, heavy customization can result in inconsistency in design, as most users have no background in design principles.

Squarespace

Squarespace is a powerful design-focused hosting platform with a user-friendly interface. This highly structured nature of its templates means professional-quality websites can be created with little or no technical skills by the inexperienced. But that restricts adjustability compared with Wix. Squarespace’s dashboard isn’t as polished as those of Wix or Shopify, especially for eCommerce stuff like product variations and discounts, so it is really best for creative businesses with only a few items for sale.

Design flexibility

Shopify

On Shopify Theme Store, there are more than 100 Shopify themes (free and paid). Like Squarespace and Wix, Shopify is also offered as a drag-and-drop option. Shopify also provides its users with the facility to modify Shopify themes in CSS/ HTML languages.

Unlike Wix and Squarespace or any hosted solution, Shopify develops its own templating language – Shopify Liquid (written in Ruby). Liquid is considered as the backbone of Shopify themes. With Liquid, you’re able to render dynamic content for your storefront, including: Tags, Filters, and other objects for rendering specific content.

Wix

Wix possesses the largest collection of templates with more than 800 templates, out of which 300+ are offered for free. Out of all the three platforms, this website is supposed to have the most trendy drag-and-drop functionalities. Wix users have the freedom to drag and drop any element and section to design it as per their own preference.

Wix also assists its users in making theme customization with the help of CSS/ HTML languages. But one of Wix’s limitations in design freedom is, once you have chosen a Wix theme, you will not be able to edit it.

Squarespace

On the Squarespace template market, there are more than 180 templates. Squarespace also has drag-and-drop sections, but you are not given complete control over web editing. There are still some static places for each component to be placed on Squarespace websites.

Squarespace also accommodates customization of themes via CSS/ HTML languages. But using CSS to change other features of the site can cause display issues because it is not compatible with the active template, and Squarespace does not support code-based workarounds.

Responsiveness

Wix automatically generates a mobile version of their sites. However, they are not fully optimizable. Therefore, Wix users have to customize themes using the mobile editor so that they become fully compatible with different screen resolutions.

Squarespace and Shopify themes are designed to be responsive on mobile. Guests are able to seamlessly use your website on any device they desire, from computers to tablets to mobile phones. This is beneficial to Shopify and Squarespace because most website traffic now originates from mobile phones.

Shopify vs Wix vs Squarespace: Ecommerce Features

Payments

Shopify

Shopify is the leader with support for over 100 payment gateways all over the world, including popular payment options like Apple Pay and Google Pay. They also provide their own Shopify POS system for store owners with a physical storefront.

One of the components in Shopify’s ecosystem is Shopify Payments, which is its native gateway for payment processing and serves to improve the process of transactions on behalf of merchants as well as customers. The gateway is available for stores with businesses across multiple countries such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and many in Europe and Asia.

The diversity of payments available combined with multi-currency support render Shopify a strong website for businesses in search of tapping into the global market.

Wix

Wix provides more than 80 payment gateways across the globe, including Apple Pay, but is just behind as it supports only part of the multi-currency transaction. Yet, Wix POS is a new feature that ensures a seamless face-to-face selling experience with a smooth integration into your web store to give a single, integrated sales process.

Squarespace

Squarespace supports just 4 payment processors, including Apple Pay, Klarna, Afterpay, and Link. Although, it is still competitive with Apple Pay support and access to a US POS system, which is accompanied by the requirement of a Square reader. The setup is perfect for US businesses that need a simple, bundled solution for offline and online transactions.

Dropshipping

Shopify

Overall, Shopify has powerful tools to assist your dropshipping business. Shopify also supports popular dropshipping suppliers such as Ders-AliExpress Dropshipping and Spocket.

Wix 

Before you launch your dropshipping shop on Wix, you should connect your Wix shop to dropshipping applications on Wix App Market. The site partners with the majority of best-in-class dropshipping suppliers like Modalyst and Spocket to enable a seamless selling experience. Using Wix, you are also able to sell print-on-demand (POD) products by linking your Wix store to leading POD providers like Modalyst print-on-demand, Printful or Printify.

More details: Wix vs Shopify: Which Is Better For Your Business Success

Squarespace

Squarespace is not a leading name when it comes to dropshipping. You can still integrate your Squarespace sites with fulfillment extensions like Printful or Syncee if you want to start your dropshipping business on Squarespace. Squarespace does not, however, support it when the extensions are not performing optimally. Therefore, you will have to contact those third-party services directly for more information.

Inventory management

Shopify

Shopify inventory management solution keeps you organized, saves you money on expensive mistakes and tracks all the inventory activities in an easy way. Shopify enables you to accomplish a lot of things such as: setting up and arranging products, product variation management, barcode assignment; stock tracking and much more.

Wix

Wix allows you to monitor and update your inventory. That is, you can automatically monitor how many of a particular product you have in stock and manually configure the inventory status for each one individually. But only inventory, SKU and weight is the data you can complete to monitor the store inventory.

Squarespace

Under Squarespace Commerce mobile apps and inventory panel, clients can look for and oversee the stock of goods in a single location. Squarespace allows you to view, arrange, search, and edit your inventory. The feature of Squarespace on managing the inventory is very narrow, thus necessitating users to incorporate other applications in order to add and enhance this process.

POS

Shopify

Shopify possesses built-in POS and it forms part of every Shopify package. But to get more features like staff management and hardware integration, you have to be on 3 of Shopify’s core plans or Shopify Plus. This checkout system accommodates all the leading credit and debit cards when you are utilizing gift cards that allow for a seamless and stress-free checkout process for customers. Besides, Shopify POS is available internationally but the store needs to be part of the list of over 175 countries offering Shopify Payment.

Wix

Currently, Wix POS solution only accommodates specific U.S. and Canada-based merchants. You can only utilize Wix POS when you have an authenticated Wix Payments account.

Wix POS is loaded with all features that business demands, including:

• Creating an uninterrupted retail experience
• Accepting payments with Wix Mobile POS anywhere
• Selling at the door during having events

Customers can also be advantaged by the platforms’ partnership with Square. Square, however, is only available in certain plans of Wix (Business Premium Plan).

Squarespace

The Squarespace website creator has gone through the effort to add POS for its users. Squarespace POS is already integrated into Commerce plans. This website creator also works with Square to offer users an easy-to-use experience. Using Squarespace POS, you can:

• Accept offline payments in brick and mortar locations
• Offer in-store promotions
• Offer a beautifully designed experience

However, one downside of Squarespace POS is that it is impossible to set up a POS system in Squarespace outside the US.

Apps & extensions

Shopify App Store contains more than 8,000 apps in total. As one can imagine, Shopify definitely tops the eCommerce community in terms of number of apps. The majority of extensions are eCommerce-related, as opposed to the Wix app store where you do plugins for regular websites mainly.

Currently, on Wix App Market, there are over 500 apps both created by Wix and third-party developers. Based on your business model, you can gain access to a large number of app categories.

Squarespace Extensions has hardly 40 extensions and all are third-party applications. If you need only simple applications for your website, you can still proceed and utilize Squarespace.

Customer support

Wix vs Shopify vs Squarespace all try their best to offer the best customer support and all these sites are well known for their excellent support service. To enable their customers to gain an advantage when running a website or opening an online store, they provide a huge resource knowledge base consisting of instruction tutorials and FAQs. Apart from that, each one of these websites is packed with its own forum and community where business owners and professionals share their knowledge and assist each other.

In case content in knowledge bases and their forums do not aid in technical issues, customers are able to recourse to direct help from these sites.

• Shopify provides support on various channels: social media, email, phone and live chat.
• Wix provides callback on the phone.
• Squarespace provides chat assistance.

Security

Wix vs Shopify vs Squarespace all benefit from SSL certificate protection for their stores and customers. They also enable their stores with PCI Compliance. The rationale is to implement further controls for the payment data so that your financial transactions and orders are guarded from potential scams.

Squarespace vs Wix vs Shopify: Finding Your Fit

Shopify: The eCommerce Powerhouse

Shopify is the best option for businesses with ambitions, particularly those looking to scale globally. It’s sporting a ton of eCommerce tools, unlimited products, integrations, and payment processors included – in short, everything you need to cater to businesses of whatever stage of growth. This can be particularly beneficial if you want to increase your online selling potential and extend your reach over international markets.

Wix: The Best Platform for Building Your Store Your Way

Wix is ideal for individuals and businesses that value website design and customisation. It makes it easier to correlate functionalities and gameplay with the protruded control panel on your screen allowing even for a full creative artistic control of your Wix website without much coding skills. With hundreds of customizable templates and an easy drag-and-drop editor, Wix is ideal for showing off your brand’s personality.

Squarespace: The Home of Creatives

Squarespace is the perfect site solution for photographers, artists and creatives who want their users to enjoy a design-led experience. Showcasing beautiful, award-winning templates that are both beautiful and functional. This will not only also make your site look professional but provide a cohesive user experience. Squarespace’s design-oriented and minimalist approach means that it is one of the most popular website builders among creatives seeking an elegant and visually stunning showcase for their work, or an online selling portal.

Bottom Up

Wix vs Squarespace vs Shopify comparison does not include a one-size-fits-all champion. These website builders possess varying strengths for online selling, accommodating different business models and priorities. Go through your priorities, experiment with the website builders on their free trials, and choose the one that is most suitable to your business vision and goals.

If you find this blog useful, let visit BSS Commerce for more eCommerce blogs and reviews! CONTACT NOW and tell us your concerns. We are here to assist you whenever you require help!

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest