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. Although this isn’t as visual, it does help to keep your listings tidy and streamlined. These alternatives will be displayed as miniature thumbnails on-screen, so customers can see all their options on one page.īecause you can technically feature an unlimited number of products and a range of different variations of each, Squarespace also comes with a ‘content manager’ that helps you to oversee and organize your stock levels, all in one convenient place.īig Cartel also gives the option to add different variations, but you won’t be able to display them as small thumbnail images on your product page – instead, they’ll appear as drop-down lists. This means you can feature items in different colors and sizes, both of which are pretty essential if you sell clothing, for example. Squarespace caters to this, providing space for unlimited products, as well as accommodating product variants. These categories are fine for a side hustle or hobby store, but you’ll want more if you’re a full-time ecommerce business.
If you opt for the free Gold plan, you’ll be able to sell up to 5 products, whereas the Platinum and Diamond packages allow for 50 products and 500 products respectively.
Otherwise, it’s a bit like picking a restaurant that doesn’t serve any food.īig Cartel is limited in this area, and the number of products you can feature will depend on the plan you select. The main purpose of a store is to sell your products, so you need to make sure you choose a builder that can accommodate your items. 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. This will be frustrating for beginners and experienced designers alike, especially if you want some creative control over how your store looks. Its templates are quite basic, so some coding knowledge is essential if you want to take your store to the next level. This is because it needs a bit more technical know-how than you’d expect. Despite its helpful onboarding process, it only achieved a score of 3.7 in our ease of use testing. 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.īig Cartel, on the other hand, isn’t as straightforward as it first appears. 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. 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). 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. 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.
You can take a look at their full score breakdown below, or read on further, where we’ll be digging deeper into each builder. We’ve tested each builder thoroughly, trying out all of their features so we can confidently report which one comes out on top. It’s a great choice for hobby sellers – artists in particular. But that doesn’t mean you should rule Big Cartel out completely.
Squarespace delivers a better all-around experience and offers more sophisticated ecommerce features, making it perfect for small to medium businesses. Out of the two, it’s clear that Squarespace is the overall winner – it scored an impressive 4.5 out of 5 in our research, compared to Big Cartel, which only scored 3.1. Squarespace is primarily a website builder that offers ecommerce functionality, whereas Big Cartel is a platform for ecommerce stores only. To help you out, we’re going to compare two of the biggest hitters side-by-side: Squarespace and Big Cartel.Īlthough they both have their strengths and weaknesses, Squarespace and Big Cartel have been designed to fulfill very different needs. Choosing the right ecommerce builder for your online store is a big decision, especially with so many great options out there.