Every online store owner today wishes to have a flourishing business with loads of traffic on their website. The one thing that can help them achieve this endeavour is by selecting the right eCommerce platform. The problem is, there are lots of options available to store owners today, due to which it becomes difficult to select a platform that can be best for your online business. However, one thing is for sure, selecting the right platform can influence the prosperity of the store and ensure that there is a constant inflow of active customers to your store. Due to the ever-increasing competition in the eCommerce industry, today, store owners need a platform that is adaptive to innovations and trends. Today, a growing number of store owners are questioning the effectiveness of Squarespace. The question is, whether it can be a competitive option providing more advanced eCommerce solutions. In case if that is not the case, then what is the next best option to port your online store on? We have tried to answer all these questions in the forthcoming sections of this blog. We have provided an exciting overview of Squarespace to Magento peculiarities and not to forget the migration steps from Squarespace to Magento. We promise that after reading this piece of content, you will be able to decipher the importance of Magento development services for creating an online store.
Let’s start off with the understanding of both the platforms before proceeding further with the differences and the steps for migration.
Ever imagined how do you wish to look at your future eCommerce business? Are you looking to build a professionally-looking yet straightforward website or you want a robust, feature-packed online store? Regardless of the option you select, both of them can be employed for successful eCommerce business. Remember, the more integrated functionality the platform offers, the higher are the chances to be in customers’ preferences.
Squarespace
Squarespace has won lots of store owners’ hearts. This website builder and blogging platform is perfectly fit for bloggers or small website owners. If you wish to showcase creativity and provide a visually stunning experience to your customers, opt for Squarespace.
Magento
Magento, being an open-source solution is considered to be the most flexible eCommerce platform. On the other hand, Squarespace is a website builder that consists of basic in-built features. The target audience for Magento eCommerce stores is large enterprise businesses with high goals. It provides superlative functionality. It also consists of loads of helpful alternatives that assist in building your ideal eCommerce store. Magento is considered to be amongst the top eCommerce technologies. It consists of an all-inclusive shopping cart, including promotions, private sales, and customer segmentation.Now, that you have got a basic overview of both these technologies, it is time to come to their features. So, let’s get started.
User Friendliness
Squarespace is nothing but a hosted website building that has become an ideal choice for portfolio and blogging platform for content-based sites. When it comes to user-friendliness, it is straightforward to maintain the store. The only thing required to start is to register on Squarespace. On the other hand, Magento requires technical know-how and skillsets to get effective results. It is one of the complete eCommerce solutions with the main target being large online stores. Here, you have two options: Either you need to have the technical know-how to manage your eCommerce store, or you need to spend a considerable amount on hiring an experienced developer.
Attractive Templates
Magento is one of the best when it comes to advanced, fully customizable eCommerce templates. Roughly all the themes in the Magento extension store are customizable and responsive. At present, there are 121 free templates which are easily accessible on Magento Connect. You can avail the paid template extensions anywhere between $80 to $100.Whereas, Squarespace provides a wide array of responsive and professional-looking templates. You require minimal coding or web development skills to create a fantastic website. As far as distinct, state-of-the-art themes are concerned, Squarespace is a leader that provides a superlative user experience on your website.
Mobile-readiness
Today nearly ¾th of users across the globe are preferring mobile-friendly websites. 96% of customers are complaining that the websites that they browsed were non-responsive to mobile devices. Both platforms have resolved this concern by providing mobile-responsive websites. In turn, that assists in converting more leads into sales.
SEO Optimization
Magento wins the race here as it provides hundreds of SEO settings that are quite unorthodox. The prominent ones being, canonical tags for products and categories, products and homepage meta tags, edit of robot.txt files, image optimization, etc.On the other hand, Squarespace’s SEO capabilities are higher than average. You can customize site and page titles, navigation titles, differentiate pages, add Alt tags to images, and create an attractive & user-friendly blog. However, when compared to Magento, Squarespace has more basic level SEO capabilities while Magento has advanced.
Prices and Additional Costs
Magento offers two pricing options. The first one being, Magento CE (Community Edition) which is freely available to download and use. It is best for small or medium-sized organizations. The other option is Magento EE which is a great choice for large enterprises.
Regardless of these two pricing options, Magento is free to download and use. There are also a variety of plug-ins that are available for an additional cost.
On the other hand, Squarespace has several pricing plans. One of them is Basic eCommerce that costs $30 every month for building eCommerce stores.
As far as payment gateways are concerned, Magento is incomparable. It takes advantage of its open-source capability by providing both free and paid gateways. Some of the popular ones, being Braintree, Google Checkout, Authorize.Net, etc.
Whereas, there is nothing to boast about as far as Squarespace’s payment gateway is concerned. It had only one payment gateway known as Stripe until December 2016. However, fortunately, Squarespace introduced PayPal integration that has been a bonus.
All in all, it has got to be said that both the eCommerce platforms are very different. Both of them target distinct businesses and objectives.
It is challenging to decide which one of the two is better as it depends on your perception.
In case you wish your eCommerce store to grow, the best choice to migrate from Squarespace to Magento. The reason being, Magento is considered to be the number one platform for developing eCommerce stores today.
Let’s now divert our attention to the steps to migrate from Squarespace to Magento.
• Register the Cart2Cart account.
• Opt for Squarespace as your source cart. Then input the URL and credentials of the store.
• Select Magento as your target cart and input the URL of the store. Next, download the Connection Bridge. Unzip it and upload it to your Magento root folder.
• Select the entities you wish to migrate.
• Commence a free demo migration.
• Instigate full migration, and the migration is complete.
If you wish to migrate from Squarespace to Magento, opt for a professional Magento development company to carry out the migration process without any data loss!
