Part 4: Squarespace CMS

Squarespace CMS (www.squarespace.com) is among my second favorite e-commerce CMS. It brings in a nice balance of user friendly website design services (no advance coding needed) and basic e-commerce features and services. If you’re a person who needs a simple small website and don’t plan on going full throttle on a complex ecommerce business endeavor, then this platform is for you.  Squarespace CMS supports a lean and steady e-commerce platform, but they do not have the same in depth features and offerings as other CMS do as compared to Shopify. So for really small businesses who don’t plan to be updating their website much and need something small and easy to set up and use, Squarespace CMS is ideal for you.  

Ease of Use (9/10):

Squarespace CMS is made for people who are not technical, but understands and can navigate around a user interface.  The Squarespace CMS interface is very clean and easy to use.  Creating your website in this platform requires you to create your website pages and build content by adding in object blocks to your page, such as blocks or containers that will hold your copy, images, etc.  They provide templates that are easy to build on or you can totally start from scratch.  There are much more complex templates out there, but Squarespace makes this much more simple to understand. Just one big warning and drawback - if you have a poor slow internet connection, their pages won’t finish loading and you’ll find yourself wondering why certain features aren’t working anymore. You’ll think there is a bug but really it’s just that the page hasn’t fully loaded its code so rendered aspects of the page not usable.

Design (9/10):

Squarespace’s design is very clean and easy to use.  In comparison to WordPress. It is by far beats it. Options to do certain things on your website like create pages, blogs, configure settings is straightforward, versus WordPress which is more complex and has a steep learning curve.  It’s overall design and the template designs it offers, are all clean and intuitively easy to understand and use.  I think that in all CMS that I would recommend for non technical people, I would recommend Squarespace as the top pick of their list.  But do remember, you’re working with technology so I expect you to have a basic understanding of using general technology and websites.

Features (8/10):

SquareSpace is probably the easiest CMS website out there to use in my book.  It offers a nice balance of e-commerce features and services, as well as a setup for anyone who isn’t thinking about running a big complex online store and just wants a static website for a personal portfolio.  As for it’s e-commerce portion, they’ve now included POS support and can now integrate swipe cards to their service.  Just get a physical swipe reader, download their app, and you’ll be able to take credit card purchases anywhere with you so long as you have wifi connection.  Additionally, they support these elements which I think are important in any e-commerce businesses: discounts, POS (as we’ve just covered), Waitlist (for out of stock and backorder notifications), related product recommendations (a free and standard integration in some CMS like Shopify, but for SquareSpace, you’ll need to upgrade to Commerce), Low Stock alerts and more.

Scalability (7/10):

Scalability is available in Squarespace CMS in the sense that as you upgrade your subscription the available services open to you.  However, since Squarespace CMS doesn’t have a bigger service and feature offerings like Shopify does, I wouldn’t give it high marks in scalability knowing there are other CMS out there with greater offerings and service features.  Squarespace CMS is scalable as mentioned, but it would be nice to see more service features to scale your business to take advantage.  This isn’t a bad thing really, since how many business owners there will take advantage of every feature offered by a CMS, and as I mentioned many times, Squarespace excels in providing a service that is clean and easy to use, and provides you with core basic services that I think most online businesses will want at the start.

Support (7/10):

Support is really amazing for Squarespace CMS via chat and text support. Wait times are very short and most of the time I get a reply to my ticket the next day.  There is one area I wish they would try to integrate in the future and that is phone support.  Having someone, especially if you’re not technical, walk you through at the other end because they can see your content management interface and back end with you, helps make solving your e-commerce issues and questions a lot faster and easier.  I’m speaking this from experience working with Shopify’s support call and think that any business, no matter who you are and what you do, should always provide customer phone support.  It makes a huge difference in the world to be able to communicate swiftly over phone, while having direct visual access to the same platform at the same time.

Pricing (7/10):

Pricing is pretty standard across the board.  As you upgrade your subscription, you unlock more features as you go.  So definitely at the start, for beginners and startups, this platform is ideal for you especially when you need to take baby steps in growing your business and expanding to include more services and features as your business expands.

FINAL SCORE: 78%

Conclusion:

There you have it folks.  I compare three popular CMS platforms for you. I touched on areas of Ease of Use, Design, Features, Scalability, Support, and Pricing.  My rankings for CMS to use is below:

Shopify - 92%
Squarespace - 78%
Webflow - 76%
Woocommerce - 73%

There’s too many features for me to cover in this 4 part article, but I hope this gives you a general sense and understanding of each CMS offerings.  For anyone who wants to start an online store and don’t have the technical knowledge or patience to worry about website technical issues, I highly recommend going with Shopify.  It’s got an amazing 24/7 online and phone support for all those customers that are just not technical and need the helping hand. If you’re more of a graphic designer and want a hands on approach with branding and visual control of your store, but with less technical programming requirements, go with Webflow. But it’s still very young and a lot of promised e-commerce features have yet to be available.  Now if you want a really lean and clean e-commerce store, go with Squarespace, but once you outgrow it, that’s that. It’s not scalalable like Shopify with its scalable add-on apps service offerings. Stay away from Wordpress, although a free CMS and scalable with its library of endless plugins, can still be a huge headache. You’ll be dealing with a lot of time and patience troubleshooting broken codes and platform / plugin updates on your own as it does not have dedicate support, save the apps that may or may not provide it depending on your level of subscription, and those plugins can rack up in costs if you’re not careful.

Also, before I go, I did some test on Google Trends. I wanted to see out of the 4 CMS which platform was being queried the most (Shopify, Wordpress, Webflow and Squarespace) in Google search. The results below was not surprising. Remember the value is only a numeric representation relative to the other variable comparisons. So the real amount of queries for each word is not revealed to us. The graph only shows how much each word are used in comparison to each other. So in the past 12 months, Shopify was generating a lot of search queries by a land slide. Second most busiest was Squarespace. Woocommerce was third. And being a very young and in development CMS, Webflow was last in the list. So this is definitely statistical proof showing Shopify is currently the most popular CMS in the industry - out of the four we compared of course according to Google Trends 2019-2020.

Google Trends (Past 12 months)
Shopify v.s. Woocommerce v.s. Squarespace v.s. Webflow:

I hope you enjoyed this article on comparing 4 popular CMS: Shopify, Woocomerce, Webflow and Squarespace. I hope you also learned a thing or two to help you decide on what CMS to use for your e-commerce business venture. This article was designed to help people new to e-commerce narrow down their choices. Tell me what you think? Do you have ideas to improve this article or my blog? Do you have a really good CMS feature I didn’t cover that I should add? Let me know at info@e-comfashion.com

Thanks,

Allen

About the Author:

Allen Ray Sales is an e-commerce consultant for E-Com Fashion (www.e-comfashion.com). He brings in over 7 years of e-commerce experience working in the fashion, accessories, and luxury industry. He brings in e-commerce and technology experience from working for several high profile retail brands. Additionally, his multi-disciplines in fine arts, graphic design, evolving internet technologies, and digital marketing, gives him a unique creative edge and talent for building businesses and luxury brands in the e-commerce space.

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