Shopify Vs Squarespace - for the wellness & beauty industry.
What's the Best Platform for Your Wellness and Beauty Business?
If you are a wellness and beauty business owner, you know how important it is to have an online presence. You need a platform that is flexible, reliable, and easy to update and isn’t too time consuming to make changes. But with all the options out there, it can be difficult to decide which platform is right for you. Let’s take a look at two of the most popular platforms out there —Shopify and Squarespace— they are the two most popular platforms loved by business owners and website designers. Let's see how they stack up against each other.
Shopify
Shopify is an e-commerce platform that allows business owners to create their own online store in just minutes. With Shopify, users have access to hundreds of themes and templates, although most of the nicest templates are paid and allow you to have a nicer looking website you're looking at roughly looking at $150-$300 US a template. Shopify also has powerful features such as shopping cart integration, SEO optimization tools, and comprehensive analytics which work really well if you're someone that is more forced on selling products over services. Shopify also provides 24/7 customer support so that if anything ever goes wrong with your store, help is just a click away. This support is extremely helpful. You can email, call or live chat and get them to help with almost anything! Shopify is a powerful platform for those that are looking at selling larger amounts of products and want to grow. If you also have a storefront you can use their software to process payments and it all links up to your website.
Pros:
Great if your looking at selling more than 5 products
You have lots of nice paid themes to choose from
Great if you have a shop front or may in the future
Has wonderful analytics dashboard so you can see where you sales are coming from.
Cons:
Steeper learning curve
You may end up spending money or time on buying a few different themes
You don’t have much freedom with design on where things are placed, that's why choosing a theme is so important and people change them sometimes a few times.
If you want design changes to the theme you’ll have to hire a developer that works with Shopify’s coding language liquid.
Lots of people find they need to purchase a few different apps with Shopify I’ve had some clients needing to spend $40 extra a month just to run all their apps. Here are some app examples; reviews under products, social media integrations, amazon, etsy integrations, spin the wheel to win, email pop ups
Squarespace
Squarespace is another popular website building platform that has been around since 2004. The user interface is intuitive and easy to use; plus, it offers dozens of beautiful templates for building your site from scratch or customizing existing ones. They have a huge selections of templates you can use, basically the templates they have on there site to choose from are just starting points and can be exactly re-created no matter which template you use on Squarespace so no sweat if you don’t like parts of the template you chose. I like this because there is no pressure to spend a lot on a templates within the platform, unless you look outside the platform you can purchase templates no third party sites from designers that may save you a lot of time. This platform also has built-in SEO tools like shopify to help boost your search engine rankings and integrated analytics so you can track the performance of your site over time.
Pros:
Easier learning curve
Makes more sense on how to edit pages
Clean design
Has a great booking system for beauty and wellness businesses https://www.squarespace.com/scheduling
The templates are beautiful and easy to use
Great for blog posts
Great of individually designing each page and section, drag and drop features now available
Cons:
It's not the best if you have lots of products it's definitely do-able but shopify will be easier to maintain
You may not be able to use certain apps
You have to pay more for the scheduling app
You have to pay more for a closed off members area
Conclusion:
Both Shopify and Squarespace offer plenty of features for small business owners that are looking to build their online presence quickly and easily. Ultimately, which one is best for you will depend on what type of business you have and what types of features you need from your website builder. If you are looking for more e-commerce options then Shopify may be the better choice; however if customization options are more important then Squarespace might be the way to go it's more flexible with design, makes scene on how to make changes and updates, less of a learning curve and great if you want it all such as have content, blog posts, have the option to sell later, want a good booking system.
Either way, both platforms offer great benefits for entrepreneurs in the wellness and beauty industry!
