We Put Big Cartel vs Squarespace to the Test: Which Will Win in 2024?

Squarespace Pros and Cons

Big Cartel Pros and Cons

Pricing and Value for Money: The winner is… Squarespace

Although it doesn’t offer a free plan, Squarespace’s ecommerce plans are excellent value for money given the many features they offer.

 

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There’s no better feeling than knowing you’re getting plenty of bang for your buck, and this is especially true when selecting an ecommerce builder. You need to make sure it’s a good return on investment, right from the very start.

Big Cartel’s plans are cheaper than Squarespace’s, with its paid packages starting at a very reasonable $9.99 per month. Even its most advanced plan only costs $19.99. Plus, it’s one of the only ecommerce builders to offer a free plan, so you won’t have to spend anything to get started if you don’t want to.

However, if you dig deeper, it quickly becomes clear that Big Cartel’s offerings are limited. The free plan is restrictive, and if you do opt for one of the paid packages, you don’t get much for the price you pay.

Big Cartel’s features are fairly basic, and its inventory capacity is unimpressive. Even on the most advanced plan, you’ll only be able to feature up to 500 products at any one time, which isn’t ideal if you’ve got a large catalog.

Squarespace is more expensive, but it’s much better suited to stores with a larger inventory – indeed, you’re able to sell unlimited products on all three of its ecommerce plans. In fact, compared to Big Cartel, Squarespace offers a wider range of tools to help you scale your store, so you’ll be less likely to outgrow the platform.

Despite the steeper monthly outgoing, Squarespace offers the better value for money in the long run, which is why it scored an impressive 4.4 out of 5 in this category. In this case, you definitely get what you pay for.

One thing to note is that Squarespace doesn’t have a free plan, but you can still take it for a spin with its free 14-day trial. And in our opinion, the lack of a free plan isn’t a deal-breaker –Squarespace is worth paying for, especially because it’s as close to a professionally designed site you’ll get without actually hiring an expert.

Ease of Use: The winner is… Squarespace

Despite the initial steep learning curve, Squarespace is straightforward and easy to use once you know your way around. You also don’t need any prior coding knowledge to get the most out of it.

 

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Onboarding

Out of the two, Big Cartel has the easiest onboarding process. After selecting your plan and entering your details, you’ll be directed to a dashboard with various prompts designed to make setting up your store a breeze. It feels very beginner-friendly, and you won’t have to guess your way through the setup process.

Getting started with Squarespace is less clear-cut. After choosing your template, Squarespace does display a quick tutorial popup, and there is a setup checklist on the editor page, but it’s harder to work out where things are and how to begin editing. It’s worth it in the long run, though, as one of our users pointed out during testing:

‘For someone fresh to website building, Squarespace does appear a little intimidating. But stick with it – it’s great, and you’ll become so familiar with it within hours.’

Managing your store

Once you get to grips with Squarespace’s editor, it’s actually one of the easiest platforms out there, and affords a generous amount of creative control over your store’s design.

In fact, the more you use it, the easier it gets – which is why we gave it a score of 4.2 in our ease of use category. To give you an idea of the competition, that’s better than both Wix and Shopify, which are our top two ecommerce builders (scoring 4.0 and 3.5 respectively).

The secret to Squarespace’s success is that you can make a visually stunning website in a matter of hours, without having to know a single line of code. Plus, its What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor means that you can view changes as you make them, so there’s less chance of error.

Big Cartel, on the other hand, isn’t as straightforward as it first appears. Despite its helpful onboarding process, it only achieved a score of 3.7 in our ease of use testing.

This is because it needs a bit more technical know-how than you’d expect. Its templates are quite basic, so some coding knowledge is essential if you want to take your store to the next level.

This will be frustrating for beginners and experienced designers alike, especially if you want some creative control over how your store looks. You can still build something without venturing into coding territory, but be warned – it won’t carry the same ‘wow’ factor that you’d get with one of Squarespace’s more versatile templates.

Website Design: The winner is… Squarespace

Squarespace is famous for delivering beautiful, high-quality websites. Although Big Cartel’s templates are clean and attractive, there’s really no competition here!

 

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Squarespace is the reigning monarch of website design, and our highest-scoring ecommerce builder (alongside BigCommerce) in terms of design functionalities. It has a whole host of beautiful templates to choose from, each boasting the trappings necessary for building a captivating online store.

Squarespace splits its templates by industry, so there’s a starting point for everyone, regardless of what you’re planning to sell. However, you don’t need to feel confined to templates that only cover your specific area. You can pick whichever one appeals to you most, and then adjust it to match your needs.

Squarespace’s drag-and-drop editor gives you a large amount of creative control over your store, so you can move elements with a simple click, as well as add extra pages. You can also easily tweak your fonts and color schemes so that they represent your brand and business.

All Squarespace templates are very image-centered. If you don’t have any hi-resolution images of your own, Squarespace has partnered up with Getty Images, so you can use stock photos instead. These are mostly free, although some will charge a small fee for usage.

In contrast to Squarespace, Big Cartel looks a little plain. It only has 19 templates to choose from, and although they all feature clean and attractive designs, they pale in comparison to Squarespace’s visually stunning layouts.

It’s also pretty hard to make them more exciting. Customization is limited by the theme you choose, and the editor only allows you to make small changes, such as adjusting your logo, colors, basic layout, and font sizes. If you want to do anything more drastic, you’ll have to dig into the code – not the most user-friendly way of customizing your store!

Unlike Squarespace, Big Cartel’s templates don’t support product zoom or product videos. 93% of consumers say that visuals play a large role in their buying decisions, and without these extra features, there’s a higher chance that customers won’t take the risk of purchasing a product they aren’t sure about.

Ecommerce Features: The winner is… Squarespace

Despite not being a dedicated ecommerce website builder, Squarespace delivers a strong suite of features to make selling a breeze. Big Cartel has a more limited offering that covers the basics, but doesn’t go the extra mile.

 

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When it comes to ecommerce features, the differences between Big Cartel and Squarespace quickly become obvious, with Squarespace offering a much more comprehensive list of capabilities.

Squarespace Ecommerce Features

Big Cartel Ecommerce Features

Below, we’ll look at the finer details of the features both of these platforms offer, and most importantly, those that they don’t! Click on the small plus sign next to the headings to dig deeper into each one.

Overall, Squarespace offers the most comprehensive package of ecommerce features, from top-notch inventory management to useful plugin extensions. They outpace Big Cartel, which is basic and overly reliant on app integrations to boost performance.

Big Cartel is satisfactory for small sellers who aren’t looking to grow too much, but if you’re hoping to turn your hobby into a business, you’ll quickly outgrow this platform. Squarespace offers more sophistication and scalability – and it looks good doing it.

Payment Options & Transaction Fees: The winner is… Squarespace

Squarespace offers more payment options than Big Cartel, and you can escape transaction fees if you opt for either the Basic or Advanced Commerce plans. It also supports offline selling too!

 

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Big Cartel and Squarespace both offer a number of payment options to ease your customers through the checkout process. Out of the two, Squarespace is compatible with more payment gateways than Big Cartel.

On the other hand, Big Cartel has no transaction fees, even on its cheapest plan. With Squarespace, you’ll be charged an extra 3% unless you upgrade to the Basic or Advanced Commerce plans.

Payment Gateways

When using a third-party payment gateway, more often than not, your customers will need to leave your website in order to complete their purchases. This isn’t always convenient, and makes the checkout process more cumbersome.

However, this isn’t the case with Squarespace. Customers won’t need to navigate to another web page to complete their payment, which makes for a much better user experience.

Big Cartel doesn’t offer this, but if you have Stripe enabled, customers that use Apple Pay can take advantage of Instant Checkout. This means they can complete their purchase without even having to leave the product page. Handy, right?

Despite this, Big Cartel loses points in other areas, such as its lack of a customer login function. Nowadays, visitors want to checkout with just a few clicks. The option to save your details and payment options makes this simple and straightforward. Because Big Cartel doesn’t have the means to store this kind of data, potential customers will need to re-enter everything each time they want to make a purchase.

Website and Marketing Features: The winner is… Squarespace

Squarespace offers a more developed set of website and marketing features to help your store grow.

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Although ecommerce features are the most important thing when building an online store, there are other website elements that can really add to your success and help you grow your strategy. They’re responsible for boosting your marketing, and encouraging visitors to your store.

Click on each heading below to take a look at the extra website features Big Cartel and Squarespace offer.

Performance and Security: The winner is… Squarespace

Squarespace is fully PCI-DSS compliant and comes with a free SSL certificate, as well as DDoS protection to help your store withstand hackers or malicious internet attacks. Big Cartel does just about enough to keep your site secure, but its lack of PCI compliance means you’ll have to do a lot of the legwork.

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Even with a website builder, setting up an online store is a time investment. The last thing you want is for all of that hard work to turn to dust as a result of shoddy security measures. Any builder worth its salt should come with a host of added extras to protect your website and your data from external threats.

Both Big Cartel and Squarespace come with a free Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate. This means that the connection between a browser and your website is secure, and visitors can rest assured knowing that their data is safe. This is a must-have for any ecommerce site, as customers will have to input sensitive payment details if they want to make a purchase.

Squarespace takes security seriously, which is why it carries out regular scans across all of its websites as well as providing DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. This is when bots work to overwhelm a website with a surge of fake traffic, which can cause sites to crash and prevent visitors from accessing your store. This is particularly harmful in the ecommerce sector, as every minute your site is down is another minute you’re not making any sales.

Of course, no site can promise a 100% uptime guarantee, but Squarespace and Big Cartel put on a pretty solid performance. Both are well-equipped to deal with a high volume of traffic, so you won’t need to worry about prolonged downtime.

One important thing to note is that Squarespace is fully PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliant. This means that it follows and meets all official standards for organizations that handle credit card or payment details.

However, Big Cartel isn’t. As a result, the responsibility for adhering to these guidelines falls entirely to you. Not only is this a lot of work, but it’s also a lot of pressure. Other ecommerce platforms and builders usually take care of this for you, so you can focus on running your store and making sales.

As your store grows and develops, you might find that the ecommerce builder you first started out with no longer provides everything you need. But the big question is, how easy is it to switch between the different providers?

Unfortunately, there’s no magic button that allows you to transfer a full website over to Squarespace or Big Cartel. For both of these platforms, you’ll need to make the switch bit by bit.

To get started, sign up with your new plan and select one of their templates. Because you can’t transfer your pre-existing layout, you’ll need to do your best to imitate it using the editor that comes with your new provider.

Next, you’ll need to copy and paste your text across, before reformatting it. Luckily, both Squarespace and Big Cartel allow you to import your products directly into your new website using a .csv file, so you won’t have to spend hours uploading pictures and typing out descriptions.

Here’s what you’ll need to do to import your products to Squarespace:

1. Head to the Home Menu, click Commerce, and then select Inventory.
2. Click the Import button in the top right-hand corner.
3. Click Download CSV template (Squarespace uses a special CSV format).
4. Copy your products into the CSV template.
5. Navigate back to the Inventory panel and select Import
6. Drag and drop your completed .csv into the Upload Squarespace CSV box.
7. Uncheck the Update product quantities (this stops the import adjusting your stock levels)
8. Review the results – you can fix any errors by editing your .csv file and uploading the correct one.
9. Click Save.

With Squarespace, you can also import blog posts and pages from WordPress, Blogger, or Tumblr. You can find in-depth instructions on how to do this in the Squarespace Knowledge Base.

If you’re importing products into Big Cartel, here are the steps you’ll need to follow:

1. Navigate to the Products tab,
2. Click the Import products link.
3. Upload the .csv file downloaded from your previous platform, containing your product details.
4. Once the upload is completed, Big Cartel will send an email summary straight to your inbox.

Help and Support: The winner is… Squarespace

Squarespace offers a huge range of support options to go alongside its extensive Knowledge Base. Given that Big Cartel only offers email support, it struggles to compete.

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Unless this isn’t your first rodeo, there’s a good chance that you’re going to come up against a couple of roadblocks when you first start building your ecommerce store. In these instances, your builder’s support functionality is crucial.

When it comes to help and support, Squarespace is miles ahead of Big Cartel. It has a wide range of options to get you out of any sticky situation, including live chat and email support – you can even get in touch with them via Twitter. They don’t currently offer telephone assistance, but considering the many ways you can contact them, this is a minor gripe.

Compared to Squarespace, Big Cartel wilts. Its only means of customer support is via email, available Monday to Friday, between 9am and 6pm. It might seem like they also offer live chat because of the little box in the bottom left-hand corner of your dashboard, but this is really just its email line in a different guise. Any answers to queries submitted here will be sent straight to your inbox, hours later.

If you encounter any issues outside of these hours, you’ll have no choice but to turn to Big Cartel’s Help Center. This is clear and easy to navigate, but it’s very text-based, so visual learners might find it harder to understand.

If you prefer to find answers for yourself, Squarespace also has a Knowledge Base, and this is where it really shines. It’s an excellent source of information, and makes use of both written instructions and video tutorials. In our opinion, it’s more comprehensive than Big Cartel’s own knowledge base, and should be your first port of call if you get a bit stuck.

Big Cartel and Squarespace both wear an ecommerce hat, but that doesn’t mean that they’re each suited to building and supporting the same kinds of stores. The one that’s best for you will depend entirely on the store you’re trying to build. Here’s a quick summary of everything we’ve covered:

We recommend Squarespace for small to medium businesses that are looking to grow and scale beyond casual selling. It’s ideal for anyone who wants a visually rich website, capable of hosting hi-res images that put their products front and center.

On the other hand, Big Cartel is better-suited to artists and other independent sellers who need a platform for individual items. Its basic ecommerce features and limited inventory won’t feel too restrictive, and the cheaper monthly cost will appeal to users who plan to sell as a hobby or side hustle.

Our overall winner is Squarespace. Despite being a website builder with additional ecommerce functionality, it holds its own against top competitors thanks to its surprisingly in-depth selling features and beautiful designs. It might be a bit pricier than Big Cartel, but it delivers top-notch quality, and you definitely get what you pay for.