When comparing Shopify vs Squarespace, the Slant community recommends Shopify for most people. In the question“What are the best e-commerce website builders for a small businesses?” Shopify is ranked 1st while Squarespace is ranked 2nd.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to customize & update
Squarespace's WYSIWYG tools are intuitive and support drag & drop functionality allowing you to change existing layout or add an article quickly.
Pro Responsive templates
Squarespace templates offer an optimal viewing experience depending on the width of the browser window so they will work and look great both on desktop and mobile devices.
Pro Lots of flexibility
Squarspace allows complete creative control over how you want your website to look and function. It can be a complete website.
Pro Extensive styling options
Pro Detailed real-time metrics
Squarspace offers detailed metrics, that can also easily be accessed from your phone via an iOS app.
Pro Attention to detail
Squarespace has a bunch of small nice-to-haves that make it a pleasure to use, like automatically getting a screengrab when adding a video so that the site doesn't load the whole video before the user has clicked on it, or a sign-up process that's sane among other things.
Pro Lots of good example projects
Squarespace offers a great selection of highly polished templates across a variety of categories and styles.
Pro Great support
Squarespace promises to answer all question within an hour.
Cons
Con Not a website builder
Often on your web hosting site there is a quick install via cpanel such as prestashop. In other other words, as part of your own website on your own hosting you can have e-commerce functionality. Shopify is a different matter... basically your shop is on shopify co hosting, so technically its not a website builder; rather it's like a stall you set out on someone else's turf.
Con Dependent on a third-party host
This is dependent on a third-party host, instead of creating a site that you can deploy on your own server.