BigCommerce vs Squarespace: Who Wins in 2024?

As both are famous eCommerce platforms in the world, the tight battle between BigCommerce vs Squarespace makes it difficult for merchants to choose. Which platform is more suitable when they want to build their own online website?

If you're having difficulty deciding the right platform for you, or if you want to switch from one to the other, read on! LitExtension – #1 Shopping Cart Migration Expert will help you answer questions you may have about BigCommerce and Squarespace through this article.

Let's take a look at the comparison of Squarespace vs BigCommerce using the sections below:

• BigCommerce vs Squarespace overview
• Detail comparison of BigCommerce vs Squarespace
• BigCommerce vs Squarespace – Who wins in 2024?

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BigCommerce vs Squarespace – Overview

Both BigCommerce and Squarespace are hosted platforms, so users can build an online store without worrying about any infrastructure-related hassles.

BigCommerce vs Squarespace Pro & Cons

As a hosted eCommerce platform founded in 2009, BigCommerce provides everything users need to create an online store. Registering a BigCommerce account allows you to start personalizing and monetizing your eCommerce store immediately.

Squarespace is also a hosted CMS solution founded in 2004. This platform allows online retailers to construct and manage a portfolio, blog, or eCommerce store without many technical skills.

BigCommerce vs Squarespace Quick Comparison

In a rush? No worries. Check out our quick comparison of BigCommerce and Squarespace to swiftly obtain all information about the two platforms and choose one for your business.

#1. Pricing

As we mentioned above, BigCommerce and Squarespace are hosted solutions, so they have specific pricing plans that meet the demands of each user. Let’s discover all the pricing plans and find the differences!

BigCommerce Pricing

You can start your BigCommerce experience with a 15-day free trial, and after that, you can choose which plan is right for your business. BigCommerce offers three specific pricing plans and an enterprise plan with customizable pricing.

The pricing of these plans is as below:

• Standard: $39/month
• Plus: $105/month
• Pro: $399/month
• Enterprise: Pricing varies depending on requirements.

Furthermore, BigCommerce pricing changes depending on how many sales you generate annually. With this platform, your subscription plan will be upgraded automatically as your business develops. Thanks to that, you can get more advanced features for your online store.

Whichever package you select, your store will come equipped with a completely responsive website, a one-page checkout, digital wallets, basic SEO tools, and thorough statistics. You'll even receive a 10% discount if you choose to pay annually rather than monthly.

Squarespace Pricing

Like BigCommerce, Squarespace also offers a free trial and distinguished pricing packages. There are four Squarespace pricing plans: Personal, Business, Basic Commerce, and Advanced Commerce, each offering different service selections.

You will get access to the incredible features listed below with each of these Squarespace pricing options:

• Various of modern templates
• Default SSL security encryption
• SEO support
• Fast and friendly support
• Mobile-optimized websites and basic website metrics

#2. Scalability & Growth

Considering the factors that impact scalability and growth is crucial when choosing an eCommerce platform.

BigCommerce Scalability

BigCommerce has sales limits per year on its standard plans (Standard, Plus, Pro). As your eCommerce growth hits a sales cap, BigCommerce can automatically upgrade you to a higher (more expensive) plan or encourage an enterprise-level solution.

Here’s the sales limit on BigCommerce for each tier:

• Standard: Up to $50k
• Plus: Up to $180k
• Pro: Up to $400k in online sales, +$150/mo charges $200k for each additional $200k in online sales

With BigCommerce, there's always the Enterprise solution for huge businesses. This provides custom pricing and features, ensuring the platform can scale alongside you.

Squarespace Scalability

Squarespace does not have any sales limits on their lower-priced plans. Although there are no feature tiers or sales limits, you may experience performance limitations at very high volumes. In such cases, Squarespace's API and developer tools can provide workarounds, but this requires more technical knowledge.

If you have a very complex store, sudden spikes in traffic could strain the performance even more. So, while Squarespace might perform well under usual circumstances, it's essential to research the platform's limitations regarding scalability.

#3. Ease of Use

BigCommerce and Squarespace are both user-friendly website builders that enable store owners to create an eCommerce site within a few minutes. Both platforms offer free trials, which is undoubtedly the best way to determine which interface suits you better.

BigCommerce Ease of Use

With BigCommerce, your eCommerce store can be easily launched and maintained. Because it is a fully hosted platform, you don't need to set up hosting or install any software to get started. While BigCommerce offers customization, it often requires some HTML/CSS knowledge for advanced editing.

If you’re not familiar with BigCommerce, it does have a knowledge base and support for all concerns, from the smallest to the most complex. And if you want control over every aspect of your store's design and functionality, BigCommerce can definitely give you that power.

Squarespace Ease of Use

Among website builders, Squarespace is one of the most user-friendly platforms. You don't need to touch a single line of code because the platform is purely drag-and-drop, allowing you to quickly add and modify any items on your pages.

Once you're familiar with the builder, you may modify your website's logo, theme, font, and color with ease, and your store will display exactly what you see when you edit.

However, the editor's site lacks any visual cues and is a little difficult to navigate. It will take more time for people who are unfamiliar with creating eCommerce websites to understand the Squarespace system.

#4. Design

It's a fact that the first thing customers notice when they see an eCommerce site is its design. Let's compare the designing functions and themes that BigCommerce and Squarespace have to offer.

BigCommerce Design

BigCommerce themes store offers more than 240 themes. The themes have been divided into distinct categories to correspond with the goods you're selling. Furthermore, you may purchase the top BigCommerce themes at Themeforest.

BigCommerce provides greater flexibility for customizing templates if you have some coding knowledge. Moreover, if you are familiar with CSS or HTML coding, you can easily customize the design to achieve your desired storefront.

BigCommerce runs on the Stencil framework, which makes their templates more developer-friendly than older platforms. If you're comfortable with coding, you can go far beyond basic template adjustments, implementing things like:

• Custom layouts and elements
• Unique product page designs
• Integrating JavaScript for dynamic functionality

Do you know that Wix is also an eCommerce website builder with stunning templates? If you're interested, here is our comparison between Wix vs BigCommerce for your concern.

Squarespace Design

Squarespace templates are very eye-catching and extremely professional. They also include high-quality stock photos for you to choose from.

Many Squarespace themes were created for users who want to blog or display their artistic, photographic, or musical portfolios in mind. The platform offers 160+ beautifully designed themes, the pricing of which will be with your subscription plan.

Squarespace groups template with similar structures and functionalities into “families”. For example, the Brine family of templates is known for its versatility and dynamic features.

While templates within a family share a core foundation, they can look radically different. Squarespace achieves this through the robust customization options for elements like:

• Fonts
• Colors
• Layout variations
• Image and content placement

The benefits of the Squarespace family template are that when switching between layouts within a family, your content will generally adjust and flow well into the new structure. You can radically alter your store's appearance while still utilizing the same underlying structure.

For store owners who prefer a more aesthetic look, Squarespace will be more suitable.

#5. Apps & Plugins

In order to enhance your eCommerce platform functionalities, adding apps and plugins is an important activity. In this section let’s see what apps and plugins BigCommerce vs Squarespace could offer.

BigCommerce Apps

As a BigCommerce user, you can install 1000+ apps that can assist with a variety of aspects of running an online store, including Accounting & Tax, Checkout, Payment & Security, etc. This makes it one of the most scalable eCommerce platforms available.

To meet your demand, we also offer a thorough analysis of apps you can’t miss on the BigCommerce Store. Check it out to see which applications are best for your store.

Squarespace Extensions

In contrast, Squarespace only offers a limited number of built-in apps. There are now 41 extensions, although this number may decrease due to country restrictions. This seems to be a disadvantage compared to BigCommerce.

Although the number of apps may be limited compared to other platforms, Squarespace extensions nonetheless address the essential necessities of eCommerce duties: shipping and fulfillment (7), finance (5), inventory and products (10), and sales and marketing (9).

#5. eCommerce Features

This is one of the most important factors that users focus on when considering an eCommerce platform for their business. In the BigCommerce vs Squarespace comparison, each platform has its own eCommerce strengths.

Inventory Management

Inventory management is the process of arranging and monitoring your goods, which is especially important when you have a large number of products.

BigCommerce Inventory Management

This platform creates a variety of apps and software to control your inventory. In this manner, inventory accuracy can be improved, low-stock products can be quickly refilled, and restocked products can automatically update on your eCommerce platform.

Additionally, BigCommerce integrates with third-party apps, so you can manage every aspect of your inventory with the help of these centralized systems.

A centralized system is essential if you sell through your BigCommerce website, social media, and marketplaces like Amazon. Visit LitCommerce to learn more about multichannel selling and integrating with other platforms.

Squarespace Inventory Management

With Squarespace, you can easily manage your inventory through the Squarespace Product Inventory panel. The user-friendly interface makes adding new products, changing stock levels, managing inventory, and bulk editing your products simple.

B2B eCommerce

BigCommerce B2B eCommerce

BigCommerce seems to be more expensive from the start but includes more of what B2B stores need natively. This platform's wholesale pricing and customer group functionality is a big time-saver. Specifically, BigCommerce lets you manage this within the core platform.

While BigCommerce has a good B2B foundation, the app marketplace provides specialized solutions if you need to go even deeper (things like integrations with procurement systems, advanced quote management, etc.).

Squarespace B2B eCommerce

Though Squarespace appears cheaper initially, its reliance on multiple paid apps to bridge the B2B gap could quickly close that price differential. To replicate most of BigCommerce's native features, Squarespace would require finding and integrating various third-party apps.

If your B2B side is a smaller portion of your business and orders are relatively straightforward, Squarespace could work.

Payment Gateways

eCommerce platform offers payment gateways to authorize the processing of direct payments or credit cards.

BigCommerce Payment Gateways

Over 250 local payment methods in over 100 countries and over 65 payment gateway integrations are ready to help BigCommerce users.

This website builder also provides integrations for the most widely used mobile and digital wallets, including Paypal, Apple Pay, and Amazon Pay. The payment gateways that are available to you will depend on the country and currency of your store.

Squarespace Payment Gateways

In contrast, Squarespace only provides a few payment methods, including Square, Stripe, and Paypal. Among them, Paypal and Stripe enable users to pay with widely used debit and credit cards from other countries, including Visa, MasterCard, and American Express. In addition, Square lets business owners use the Squarespace POS to take payments in person, including cash and credit cards.

Shipping

BigCommerce Shipping

BigCommerce has integrations with major shipping carriers (such as USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc.). This provides flexibility to select the best carriers for your business.

What’s more, the ability to fetch real-time shipping quotes during checkout offers customers accurate shipping costs at the point of decision, which can help reduce cart abandonment.

Squarespace Shipping

Squarespace integrates with major carriers, but the selection isn't as wide as BigCommerce. This could limit your options depending on your location or desired providers. While Squarespace offers real-time rates, their availability depends on which carriers you're using.

Setting up international shipping on Squarespace is possible, but it typically requires more manual configuration or third-party apps for a streamlined experience.

Blogging

Blogging could be a fantastic tool for marketing your goods, giving your company a human touch, and raising the SEO ranking of your website.

BigCommerce Blogging

BigCommerce is a well-known eCommerce platform that can be used for blogging. Furthermore, you can easily upload blog posts using the built-in blogging feature without having to purchase BigCommerce apps to manage content.

Additionally, BigCommerce offers a text editor with drag-and-drop support for embedding images and videos, text formatting, HTML markup, and other word-processing features you'll need to create posts that look wonderful.

This platform also integrates with social media platforms such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn to make it easier for users to share all BigCommerce posts.

Squarespace Blogging

With Squarespace's built-in blog page, you can write blog posts and excerpts, tag and categorize posts, allow comments, share your posts on social media, and more. 

#7. SEO

If you want to succeed in your online business, you must invest in SEO and marketing. Fortunately, whether you choose BigCommerce or Squarespace, you'll have access to powerful SEO to help your business succeed.

BigCommerce SEO

BigCommerce has a solid SEO foundation. You get full control over the technical SEO to important elements:

• Meta titles and descriptions
• URL structure customization
• 301 redirects
• Robots.txt editing
• Image alt tags

What’s more, BigCommerce supports some helpful SEO tools like:

• Sitemap generation
• Schema markup (structured data)
• Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) support

Squarespace SEO

Squarespace makes it simple to manage basic on-page SEO elements (titles, descriptions, image optimization). This platform handles some technical SEO aspects behind the scenes, like generating sitemaps and clean URL structures.

However, Squarespace offers less control over certain technical aspects compared to BigCommerce, making advanced optimizations trickier. It has a few SEO weaknesses: no automatic 301 and 302 redirects, no SEO checking tool, no rich snippet function, and difficult alt-tag addition.

You may visit our article on Squarespace SEO guide to better optimize your website.

#8. Security

Security should be one of the top considerations, regardless of which eCommerce platform you select between BigCommerce and Squarespace.

BigCommerce Security

As a fully hosted platform, BigCommerce will handle security as part of your monthly subscription. Regarding the SSL certificate, it provides not only SEO-friendly benefits but also the highest level of website security.

All BigCommerce servers have level 1 PCI DSS certification against credit card data breaches. Intrusion detection software, file integrity scanners, perimeter and server-specific firewalls, 24/7 human monitoring, and fraud protection are additional security measures.

Squarespace Security

Like BigCommerce, as a hosted solution, Squarespace takes care of all security concerns on your behalf. This platform pricing tier offers SSL certificates, and all payment processors adhere to the PCI-DSS standard.

Furthermore, Squarespace 2-factor authentication (2FA) enhances your account's security. Account ownership verification is also necessary each time you contact customer support. This significantly helps to protect your content and privacy.

#9. Support

Finally, let's compare the level of support provided by BigCommerce and Squarespace. Responsive customer support and help centers would greatly benefit users who are new to building websites.

BigCommerce Support

BigCommerce offers top-notch customer service. From the dashboard, you can easily get in touch with support personnel for phone, email, and live chat assistance. Additionally, they provide support from their user community, where you can talk about any problem or fascinating subject.

Keep in mind that BigCommerce offers support around the clock, so you can ask your questions whenever you want. What's even better is that BigCommerce created the Help Center, which houses an archive of user manuals for users of all skill levels, including beginners, seniors, non-techies, and developers.

Squarespace Support

In general, Squarespace offers a great support system. It provides in-depth answers and a pretty responsive live chat. Besides, Squarespace even provides a Developer Center to create fully custom sites or build everything from scratch.

However, some downsides exist: There is no phone support, and the response time is long, especially during peak times. Also, live chat is not always available. This impacts user satisfaction if they require immediate assistance.

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BigCommerce vs Squarespace: Who Wins in 2024?

Overall, you will find that both platforms are better in some categories.

Bigcommerce is best for:

• Traditional eCommerce storefronts: Companies with a primary emphasis on selling physical or digital products.
• Wholesalers and B2B sellers: BigCommerce offers features tailored for these markets, such as customer groups, tiered pricing, and bulk ordering capabilities.
• Stores with complex needs: If your niche requires unique product variations, complex shipping scenarios, or uncommon payment methods, BigCommerce's customization and wider app ecosystem will be a better fit.

Those are the reasons why BigCommerce is one of the best platforms for eCommerce.

In case you want some more insights to decide a suitable eCommerce platform, let's have a glance at BigCommerce alternatives.

Squarespace is best for:

• Creatives and freelancers: Its stunning templates and ease of use make it perfect for showcasing portfolios, selling services, and seamlessly adding products.
• Content-driven businesses: Bloggers, writers, course creators, etc., benefit from Squarespace's integrated features for both written content and their store.

If you want to go for eCommerce on Squarespace, its lower cost and quick setup could be better for testing without a big upfront investment.

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BigCommerce vs Squarespace: FAQs

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Our Methodology

As a leading expert in eCommerce migration, we have a deep understanding of the data sets associated with various eCommerce platforms, including BigCommerce vs Squarespace.

At LitExtension, we conduct extensive research to ensure that businesses have access to accurate information about their eCommerce platforms. When it comes to comparing BigCommerce and Squarespace, we take a thorough and methodical approach.

• We use free trials to test the features that are crucial for successful online stores.
• The team considers various business types and prioritizes scenarios where each platform excels.
• We ask our customers (who use our migration service to move from/to BigCommerce and Squarespace) for reviews to get a more precise understanding of the platforms in reality.

Finally, we regularly revisit this comparison as the platforms evolve to ensure that our information remains up-to-date.

Learn more about our methodology via LitExtension Methodology – How Do We Create Content On LitExtension?

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Final Words

We hope this article about BigCommerce vs Squarespace above can help you make the right decision.

If you're about to migrate to BigCommerce or to Squarespace, LitExtension will be here to help you migrate from BigCommerce to Squarespace or Squarespace to BigCommerce as easily as pie. Even if you lack technical knowledge, you can use the LitExtension migration solution with ease. If you don't want to get your hands dirty in this process, All-in-One Migration Service may be able to help.

Feel free to contact the LitExtension support team if you have any questions related to BigCommerce and Squarespace.

Please visit LitExtension Blog or join our community for extra eCommerce advice!