Ep. 12: Which should I use, Squarespace or Shopify?
About this Episode
Ring riiing! ☎️ In this episode of #1800HEYPUNO, Cécile Charlot, a branding + marketing consultant living in L.A. and founder of Frenchologie, asks the question: “Which should I use, Squarespace or Shopify?” We get this question A LOT! So often that Puno created a fun lil flowchart quiz (flashback Teen Vogue) to help her (and you!) figure it aaaaall out.
Whether your site is content-based or e-commerce focused, by the end of this episode you should have a good sense of which platform will work for you or your clients. Saa-weeeeet!
⭐️ Don’t forget to check out our Squarespace Design Course⭐️
🎨 Check out Cécile Charlot’s website here! And take a peek at her blog Frenchologie.
👋🏼 If you like what you see, hit Subscribe on YouTube.
Transcript
Intro
Puno: [Phone Rings]. Hello.
Cecile: Hello.
Puno: Hello. Who is this?
Cecile: This is Cecile. Hi Puno.
Puno: Hey, you're on speaker.
Cecile: Yes. Hi everyone.
Puno: So where are you calling from?
Cecile: I'm calling from Los Feliz.
Puno: Oh, so we've got the time zone difference. Are you on the other side of LA?
Cecile: I've in downtown away. I'm not that far. So pretty close.
Puno: So close.
🎵Music 🎵
Puno: Well, it's good to have you on the 1-800-HEY-PUNO. I'd love to hear a little bit more about you and what you're up to.
Cecile: Yes, it's been a while since we've seen each other. The last time was 2015 I attended your awesome Instagram class. Since then, a lot has been going on. Back then, I was doing marketing. I've been pretty much doing a whole career of marketing and high tech. I worked for a long time for Microsoft and then LiveNation entertainment when I moved to LA. Then I stopped, I decided it was time to try something new. I'm doing consulting in marketing for smaller brands, fashion ,and lifestyle mostly. I just partnered with a couple of other French people to create an agency called 1817 creatives.
Puno: Oh, what does 1817 mean?
Cecile: So 1817 is a creative and strategic agency. I partnered with a couple of fellow French people. There's a couple that's married. He's a photographer and she's a creative director. He used to be a firefighter in Paris and she used to be a policewoman. Those two numbers to call both emergency services are 18 and 17, so that's the name.
Puno: I love that. And I'm curious, what is your question for today?
Cecile: My question for you is this. So I've had a lot of clients that have been telling me that they've been using Shopify as a platform. I myself as a marketer and have built several Squarespace websites for clients... I've minimally used the e-commerce feature. That has made me wonder, what really is the difference between Squarespace and Shopify? Is Shopify, much better with e-commerce than Squarespace?
Puno: So that is a great question, and I get that question a lot. I have a checklist that I always go through and I ask to determine which one that they should do.
Puno: Oh, hello. You want to say hi? Here we go. Hi.
Puno: Both platforms are amazing. Squarespace originally started as more of a content-based site, but it has slowly integrated a lot of e-commerce. Shopify has always been an platform, and they're great and they're huge and they have a lot of great third party plugins, et cetera.
Puno: The questions that I typically ask, and you probably already ask your clients this as well, is first, are they a content or an e-commerce platform? Obviously, they're e-commerce.
Puno: The next question that I ask is, how many SKUs do they have? On Squarespace, you have unlimited products. Same thing with Shopify, but Squarespace does have like a 200 product limit per product page. I've had actually a client that had like multiple SKUs. I think it ended up being about 300 products, but you can figure out a way to hack it because it's just 200 products per page.
Puno: So the next question is, since it's a consumer packaged goods product, do they need a subscription? Fortunately, Squarespace just came out with subscriptions. Did you see that?
Cecile: I actually didn't know about it.
Puno: Yeah, it's awesome. It's not super customizable, but you can be like, okay, I want a product or a digital product and do a subscription for every month or every other month or whatever. So, now they have subscription. The other question I ask is, are there any specific features that you need or plugins that you use. The two examples I always give, do you plan on doing wholesale? Do you have to use some kind of third party app in order to do a lot of wholesale? Is there any kind of really specific fulfillment that you need? Because Squarespace is pretty limited in those e-commerce features. If there's any kind of weird customization thing, like my brand is tinker and I have a watch and I want to customize the band and the interface and the color of the band, all of those things, then yeah, you definitely need a lot more customization, and that would be more of a Shopify thing.
Puno: This next question is huge: do you want control of the website? Do you want the ability to create and update the site whenever you want? You're like, you know what, I want to change that word from and to and yeah, and I want to do that whenever I want to.
Puno: I find that a lot of clients are so frustrated with the freelancer process of like, I need to email you and then I, you know, I know you can't answer my email in an hour. So if they're like, God, I really do want control, then they might still be in the Squarespace world.
Puno: The next question I ask is budget. Shopify is twice the price, typically, especially if you want a lot of customization. Do you work with a lot of developers or....?
Cecile: Sometimes I bring them in to do some customizations, but so far my clients have just had pretty basic needs outside of the e-commerce bit. If I have to, I'll bring in someone.
Puno: When I was doing Squarespace sites, I had one Shopify client, and I did have to bring in a developer. Until you find that right developer that is on time, does really great work, it's like the most frustrating thing because you're outsourcing something so there's another layer of time that the client has to wait for a response....I just didn't want to do that to my business. That's why I was just like, if the recommendation is you should do Shopify, then I was like, I don't think that I'm going to be the right person. I can help you with design, but you're going to have to find a developer.
Cecile: That helps you filter your clients.
Puno: Yeah. And it's just like, you know, I want to set myself up for success though.
Cecile: For sure, sure.
Puno: The other thing too is it is that maintenance cost. Any change that you want, unless you want to dive into the code and unless it's in the actual dashboard, you're going to have to hire a developer or someone else to update it for you. Now you can customize the dashboard in Shopify, but you're going to be paying for that. Money, money, money, you know.... So much money.
Cecile: For small brands, it makes a big difference, right?
Puno: Yeah. Where are you in terms of the budget? Is it under $10,000 or is it above $10,000. If It's above $10,000 then yeah, Shopify, that's an easy one. If it's under, and I found that a lot of my clients were way under 10,000, they were like $3.000 to $5,000, then I was like, you're definitely in the Squarespace camp.
Cecile: Squarespace all the way.
Puno: Otherwise you're getting a very, very templated Shopify page and you're not going to be able to afford any of the customizations.
Puno: Then the next question is, if this site was already existing, how many monthly views do you have on your website right now? If they're like, oh, we have over 10,000 monthly views, then you're like, oh, well you're pretty established. You can probably get a lot of sales and maybe you need a lot more analytics because of that. If you don't have 10,000 views, then spend that money on marketing. Spend that money on getting people to your website. I did a Shopify site, it was $20,000 and then I was looking at their analytics, and it was maybe [getting] 2000 visitors a month. I was like, Dang, there's nobody coming to your website, you know? If you don't have the monthly views, then definitely spend that money on marketing, on your Instagram account, on Pinterest, on email marketing, on sales, whatever you have to do. Maybe even do more wholesale clients until it makes more sense to pay for a super customized website.
Puno: The last part is if they're just starting out with their site and they've never done this before, I feel like just creating a website on Squarespace, allowing them to iterate whenever they want to, having that customization.... That's so important when you're growing your business. An example is, one of my good friends, she has a jewelry site called J Hannah, and about two years ago we designed it on Squarespace. It wasn't until last year that she was like, I need to move to Shopify and here are the five bullet points of why. She knew exactly which features she needed, what analytics that she was looking for, what plugins that she needed in order to grow her business, and she had enough revenue and profit to pay for that website. It was an obvious answer. I think if you don't have those obvious answers, go on Squarespace because once your business is thriving, you're going to want to redesign your website. What was even more important was, if you look at her current site and what the Squarespace site was before, they were very similar in layout, but there was just a few things that we just couldn't really get with Squarespace.
Puno: In the back end, there was a lot of things that Squarespace couldn't do, and she finally knew what those things were. When she made her website on Shopify, it was no back and forth. She didn't have to waste any money on any development because she knew exactly what she wanted. Until you have those reasons, I don't think a lot of people realize how much it just starts stacking up .
Cecile: The question about which customization they might need or plugins they might need.... Some people just don't know what they don't know.
Puno: Right. If they don't know, then they don't need to focus on that.
Cecile: That's right.
Puno: I'm always like, just focus on marketing. That's the harder part. You know?
Cecile: I agree, yeah. Marketing is where a lot of attention should go. I mean, that's what's bringing people to you.
Puno: You can't just make it and be like, well, the algorithm will serve me. You're fooling yourself.
Puno: Just press 18 on your phone, just press 17 on your phone, redirect to a fireman if you need it, but if not, you need marketing.
Cecile: We'll put out your business fires! Am I a marketer or what?!
Puno: So many planes... water. Well, thank you so much for calling in.
Cecile: Thanks for having me. So exciting. I love to hear your perspective.
Puno: Yeah, and congratulations on your agency.
Cecile: Thank you.
Puno: I'll sprinkle you later.
Cecile: That has to become something.
Puno: I'm surprised, c'mon on guys. Sprinkle you later. Fire!
Puno: Okay, well thanks for watching. Type it in. Just be like ilovecreatives.com/1-800-HEY-PUNO.
Outro
Puno: So you want to binge some videos? These are good. After you click subscribe, you should probably click that one. That one's really sick. That's sick! Sick!
