Wix vs Squarespace (2024) – Ecommerce Comparison

Wix and Squarespace are two of the most popular website builders in the world, with millions of customers between them but how good are their ecommerce offerings?

Well, that is what we are going to be looking at in our in-depth comparison of Wix vs Squarespace, so let’s get started…

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Wix vs Squarespace: Quick Summary

Wix vs Squarespace – which one is the best? This was a very close contest but Squarespace did come out on top for a few reasons:

  1. It is easier to use
  2. The website builder is much simpler to use but still allows you to make great-looking sites
  3. The Squarespace hosting setup means sites load a lot quicker than Wix
  4. The workflow for managing your store is a lot better

There are some areas where Wix is stronger, such as the larger selection of payment gateways and 24/7 support but we think that Squarespace offers the better overall package.

ShopWired Logo
3.6/5

EcommerceGold Score

ShopWired Logo
4.2/5

EcommerceGold Score

Pricing

Wix Logo
  • Business Basic: $27/m
  • Business Unlimited: $32/m
  • Business Elite: $159/m
Squarespace Logo
  • Business: $23/m
  • Basic Commerce: $27/m
  • Advanced Commerce: $49/m

As you can see from the tables above, there really isn’t much difference between Wix and Squarespace when it comes to their entry-level plans but it should be noted that the prices listed above are if you pay annually, if you pay monthly, the subscription fees are higher.

Wix doesn’t have any turnover limits nor do they charge any additional transaction fees but all plans are limited to 50,000 products, which should be more than enough for most users.

They also have an Enterprise plan for larger stores and the pricing is based on your requirements.

Squarespace doesn’t have annual turnover limits or limit the number of products that you can sell but the Business package does include a 3% transaction fee but there are no transaction fees on either the Basic and Advanced Commerce plans.

Free Trial

Both Wix and Squarespace offer prospective users a way they can test the platform out.

  • Wix offers a free plan, which allows you to install the Wix Stores app but if you want to test it out properly, you will need to upgrade to a paid plan but they offer a 14-day money-back guarantee if you don’t like it
  • Squarespace is much simpler as they offer a free 14-day trial and don’t require any payment information upfront

With Wix, you do get a free plan for life and while you can test out the Wix Stores App, you can’t use it on your live website.

Features

When it comes to selling online, features are very important as you want to not only have a good range of ecommerce related ones but also marketing ones, so that you can promote your products to try and generate traffic and sales but what do these two website builders offer?

Wix

As Wix was originally a website builder and the ability to sell on the platform comes in the form of the Wix Stores app, this adds a checkout and product pages to your Wix website. Combined, Wix and the Wix Stores app offer the following features:

Ecommerce Tools

  • Sell Physical & Digital Products
  • Discount Coupons
  • Create Promo Video
  • Live Chat

Marketing & SEO

  • SEO Friendly URLs
  • Custom Meta Data
  • Send via Email Campaign
  • Share Product to Social Media
  • Sell via Facebook and Instagram
  • Blog

Reporting

  • Orders
  • Conversion Rate
  • Revenue
  • Purchase Funnel
  • Top Email Campaign

Payment Gateways

  • PayPal
  • Wix Payments
  • Stripe
  • Square
  • SumUp

With all Wix packages, you also get access to the Wix App Market, which has a variety of apps that are made not only by the Wix team but also by third-party developers and they offer additional features or integrations with third-party companies.

While the majority of these apps will have some form of free plan, to get all of the features of the third-party developed apps, you will have to upgrade to a paid plan on top of your existing Wix package.

Squarespace

To access all of the features that Squarespace offers, you do need to be on the Advanced Commerce plan and the Business and Basic Commerce plans are a little light when it comes to features, which is why we have summarised all of the features that are available on Squarespace:

Ecommerce Tools

  • Sell Physical, Digital, Service based products
  • Custom Forms
  • Product Quick View
  • Limited Availability Labels
  • Product Variations
  • Gift Cards

Marketing & SEO

  • Built-in Blog
  • Abandoned Cart Recovery
  • Discounts
  • Sell on Instagram
  • Product Reviews
  • Email Campaigns
  • Social Media Integration

Reporting

  • Revenue
  • Units Sold
  • Number of Orders
  • Conversion Rate
  • Average Order Value
  • Revenue per Visit

Payment Gateways

  • PayPal
  • Stripe
  • Afterpay
  • Square (for POS)

Squarespace Extensions

Squarespace also offers a range of extensions that allow integrations with third-party platforms, such as:

  • Printful
  • Xero
  • Quickbooks
  • Shipstation

All of these extensions are designed to make running and managing your online store easier by reducing the number of manual actions you need to take.

Squarespace Extensions

Website Builder

Wix

Wix has a very large library of themes that are available, with over 100 available for online stores but you need to choose the theme you want to use when you are setting up your store with Wix as they don’t offer the ability to switch themes.

Instead, if you want to change the theme, you need to create a new site and then transfer your plan to that site, which is far from optimal!

One of the things that Wix says in their adverts is how easy it is to build a beautiful custom website and when it comes to editing your theme, the Wix Editor certainly gives you a lot of control over the look at feel of your site as you can:

  • Add, remove and rearrange sections
  • Make changes to the layout by dragging and dropping elements
  • Customize different page types
  • Change the colors and font

There are also additional options for customizing your mobile site as well, which is a nice touch but there is almost too much you can do as it allows you to make such minor changes, such as dragging an element slightly to the right or left that will have no impact on user experience.

Sometimes, you can have too much control!

Wix Advanced Editor

Squarespace

Squarespace recently made a big change to their template offering and now all of the pre-designed templates that you can choose all use the same theme as the base, which removes the need to change templates if you want to redesign your store.

The only thing that we didn’t like was that you can’t choose or swap between these pre-designed templates, if you want to make design changes, you have to do these via the customizer.

But when it comes to customizing your Squarespace site, there are plenty of options and tools to help you create a good-looking site and while you don’t get the macro level of control you get with Wix, we think that the Squarespace website builder is a lot easier to use.

This is because it offers:

  • A good selection of sections to create custom pages
  • An easy to use drag and drop editor
  • Site-wide settings for color, fonts etc

We just found the process of building a site much more enjoyable and quicker using Squarespace and the page sections can also be used for blog posts to help you create good-looking content for your site.

A look at the Squarespace website builder

Support

Wix

Wix offers 24/7 support to all English-speaking users (times vary for other languages) and this is primarily done through live chat or via a callback and this can be accessed directly from the admin dashboard, you just need to navigate past the bot in order to speak to a human.

Squarespace

Squarespace also offers 24/7 support but this is only available via email support tickets, live chat is only available 4 am – 8 pm EST, Monday to Friday and they don’t offer phone support.

Hosting & Performance

Performance is a very important aspect of running an online store as it is not only a ranking factor but also impacts on user experience but neither Wix or Squarespace are very forthcoming about the hosting environments on which their sites are run and we could only find out the following info:

  • Free SSL Certificate
  • Unlimited Bandwidth
  • Global CDN
  • PCI-compliant servers

Squarespace does offer a little more as it also includes unlimited storage, whereas Wix’s plans all have storage limits.

But that didn’t stop us from putting both platforms to the test and to do this, we took 5 customer example sites and ran them through Uptrends Speed Tool using their New York server to test the load time and Google PageSpeed scores on both mobile and desktop devices.

We did this once a day for three days to get a good spread of data and the results were:

Wix Logo

Mobile:

  • Load Time: 3.98 Seconds
  • PageSpeed: 20/100

Desktop:

  • Load Time: 4.10 Seconds
  • PageSpeed: 54/100
Squarespace Logo

Mobile:

  • Load Time: 1.91 Seconds
  • PageSpeed: 23/100

Desktop:

  • Load Time: 2.27 Seconds
  • PageSpeed: 65/100

In terms of load time, it wasn’t close between the two platforms with Squarespace loading considerably quicker but in terms of PageSpeed scores, there isn’t much between the two platforms and both have significant room for improvement in this area.

To see how both Wix and Squarespace fare against their competition in terms of performance, then check out our annual ecommerce performance testing report.

Ease of Use

One of the most important aspects (in our opinion) is how easy the platform is to use as this can make a big difference in the day-to-day running of your online store and to test this out, we look at three main areas:

  • Getting started
  • Inventory management
  • Order management

Getting Started

All three platforms make it really easy to get started and they all offer a 14-day free trial that allows you to test the platform out before signing up to a paid plan. You can also have a free Wix site after the trial if you want to. But what about once you have signed up?

Wix

Getting started with Wix is a very straightforward process as you only need an email address and create a password in order to sign up for the free plan.

There are two parts to getting started with Wix, the first is setting up your account by answering the following questions during the signup process:

  • What type of website are you starting
  • The name of your site
  • You will then be asked if you want to buy a domain
  • What the goal of your site is (ecommerce, portfolio etc)
  • Which apps you would like to add

Once all of these have been answered, you will gain access to your admin dashboard and will be greeted by a short setup guide to help you learn the basics about the Wix platform and the number of options here does depend on how you answered the earlier questions.

The second part of the process is to set up the frontend of your site using the ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) tool, which is once again a simple process as you just need to input the following information:

  • Entering your business info (name, address etc)
  • Choose a logo template
  • Pick a theme (colors, fonts etc)
  • Choose a template
  • Which pages you would like to add
Wix Admin Dashboard

Once you have done all of this, the basic foundations of your Wix store are all set up and you are left to start building and managing it as you want.

The Wix admin dashboard is pretty easy to use, although the layout does seem to change every few months but it is still easy to navigate around due to the sidebar navigation menu.

With the navigation menu, it does depend on how many Wix apps you have installed as to the number of options that are displayed and if you have a lot of apps, it can get quite full, which makes navigation a little more challenging.

Squarespace

Getting started with Squarespace is just as easy as you only need an email address and create a password, you will then be taken through the onboarding process, which allows you to choose the options that you want for your site and if you are looking to sell, make sure to select the product options.

You will also have the choice to build your own site design from scratch or use one of the pre-built templates.

Once you have completed this process, you will be taken through to the admin dashboard and on first impressions, it looks like there is no setup guide but if you have selected the store options during the setup process, these are all available if you click on the selling heading and covers all the basic things you need to start selling.

The dashboard itself is very well-designed and is far less cluttered than the Wix dashboard, we also found it much easier to navigate as the sidebar navigation is well-labeled and any options not found here will be in the settings section.

Squarespace admin dashboard

Inventory Management

Being able to manage your stock efficiently and effectively is a hugely important part of running an online store and there are three main areas to this, which are:

  • Adding products
  • Organizing your Products
  • Managing your inventory

Wix

Creating a new product on Wix is a very simple process but before you can start setting up your new product, you first need to tell Wix whether it is a physical or digital product as the pages are slightly different.

But whichever option you choose, the add new product page is still very easy to use as Wix has opted for a single-page layout that flows nicely from section to section, with the physical product page offering some nice options, including:

  • A custom text field for personalized products
  • Product options for variations
  • Pre-order
  • Subscriptions
Wix Add New Product

Organizing your inventory is equally as simple. They have opted for collections rather than categories but they operate in the same way. The only real downside is that you can’t have sub-collections, which is a bit limiting.

When it comes to inventory management, Wix is a little bit limited in terms of bulk tools as they only offer an inventory manager, if you want to edit any other aspects of your product such as price or title, you will need go in and edit the product individually.

Squarespace

Creating a new product with Squarespace is very simple, just click the add new product button from the selling section and you will be asked what type of product you want to create.

This is where Squarespace shows its flexibility when it comes to product types as there are a total of eight to choose from and each of the add new product pages are tailored to that product type, for example, downloadable products includes an option to upload a file.

The add new product page is very simple and well-designed, just like the rest of the Squarespace dashboard and uses a single-page layout, which has a good workflow and isn’t overly complicated.

Squarespace add new product page

Organizing your inventory on Squarespace could be better as it feels like categories are a bit of an afterthought as creating them is done through the add new product page and managing them is done through the shop page in the customizer.

It would have been nice to see a section in the sidebar for categories to make managing them easier and another drawback is that you can’t create sub-categories.

Inventory management is one area where Squarespace really shines as product titles, stock levels and prices can all be managed directly on the product overview screen, which removes the need for bulk editors and makes the process a lot easier.

Another thing that we liked is that different product types are grouped together under tabs and this makes finding your products super simple, we were really impressed the inventory management set up and it is much better than the one that Wix offers.

Managing Orders

Wix

The Wix order management system works pretty well as there are a couple of bulk tools that allow you to change order statuses, export orders and print order information. You can also filter your orders by fulfillment status, which can make managing orders a lot easier.

Squarespace

As with the inventory management, order management is very simple and easy to do as orders can be printed directly from the order overview screen and or statuses updated and this can be done on individual orders or in bulk, which can save a lot of time.

Summary

Wix

Pricing
Features
Website Builder
Support
Hosting & Performance
Ease of Use

Wix Pros

• Good set of features
• Full site customizer
• Pricing
• App Marketplace
• 24/7 Support

Wix Cons

• Can’t change themes easily
• Performance
• Lack of sub-collections

3.6

Squarespace

Pricing
Features
Website Builder
Support
Hosting & Performance
Ease of Use

Squarespace Pros

• Easy to use
• Good website builder
• Good features
• Sell different product types
• Pricing

Squarespace Cons

• Limited payment gateways
• lack 0f sub-categories
• Can’t change between pre-built templates

4.2

Conclusion

Wix vs Squarespace – which is one is better?

While Wix and Squarespace are similar in many areas, Squarespace does come out on top for a couple of reasons:

  1. It is the easier platform to use – this includes site customization and running your store, it just feels a lot more intuitive to use than Wix
  2. Performance – Squarespace stores load considerably quicker than Wix stores, which has a big impact on user experience and the faster sites load, the better their conversion rates

There are areas where Wix is stronger such as offering more payment gateways and 24/7 support that includes being able to speak to someone but we just feel that Squarespace offers the better overall package and it would be the one we would choose to build a site/store.

ShopWired Logo
3.6/5

EcommerceGold Score

ShopWired Logo
4.2/5

EcommerceGold Score

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Hi, I'm Paul, the Owner and Founder of EcommerceGold.
I ran my own Ecommerce Business for over 7 years and now help others start their own online retail empires!