How to Easily Migrate from Squarespace to Shopify. Non-Techie Friendly Guide [2022]

6 min readFeb 22, 2017

The market of shopping carts is growing extremely fast nowadays and, it’s not weird, that choosing the one that is suitable exactly for you is a big issue. In this short review, we want to highlight some advantages and disadvantages of two eСommerce platforms: Squarespace and Shopify, in order to help you decide whether it is worth migrating from Squarespace to Shopify.

How to Choose Between Squarespace vs Shopify?

Are you going to build a website or an online store?

When choosing between Squarespace and Shopify, the first question you need to ask yourself is — what is your final purpose? Is it a powerful and dynamic website with basic eCommerce functionality or a complex and smart online store?

At first sight, Squarespace and Shopify platforms seem to be similar as they both let you sell goods in your web store, but their initial purposes differ a bit. Squarespace is, first of all, a website-builder that was created to build and maintain content-based websites. But it allows you to sell products online with the help of the plugin. And Shopify, in its turn, was originally designed as a solution for making its own web store. Your choice should mostly depend on the answer to a question that you need exactly: an advanced website with an elementary store or a complex store with a simple site? Which one is more suitable for you? Let’s decide together…

Why Squarespace?

Squarespace is a great choice for small businesses or people who don’t mind to take a chance and start selling online; this platform, by the way, can be very useful in starting a personal website or blog as it offers a wide range of customization features.

Besides, it is famous for its good looking and skilfully designed themes and templates which can make your display look quite beautiful and unique. Ecommerce tools, offered by Squarespace will help you to build a functional, but not-so-advanced store.

Main features:

Unlimited cloud hosting for no extra charge;
Modern and responsive to mobiles templates;
Style Editor;
Template Switching;
Free Typekit fonts and discounted Getty images;
Built-in Mobile Websites;
Drag-and-Drop Interface;
Facile and responsive Image Loader;
Audio Collections;
Dropbox File Synchronization;
Content Downloading;
Direct Editing;
Custom CSS.

Why Shopify?

If you are looking to build a complex, but easy-to-use online retailer to sell products — Shopify is a good way to go. If compared with Squarespace, which was designed to build non-eCommerce websites, Shopify suits better to create a more advanced online store, offering you a wide range of features and tools.

In addition, Shopify provides you with full control over the coding of your site (HTML and CSS), when with Squarespace you can edit CSS and certain bits of HTML. Unfortunately, the Squarespace support team reserve the right not to handle you fully if you edited the CSS of your site.

Main features:

24/7 support;
Increased selection of third-party apps (more than Squarespace);
More than 70 payment gateways;
Automatic calculation of EU VAT;
PayPal integration;
More than 100 themes;
Flexible shipping rates;
Automatic taxes;
Shopify Mobile;
Quick import of large catalogs;
Full blogging platform;
Mobile commerce;
Your own domain name;
Free SSL certificate (even on non-commerce pages);
Integrated and customizable SEO.

Watch our video tutorial to see how easy it is to automatically migrate from Squarespace to Shopify with the help of the Cart2Cart migration tool:

Squarespace or Shopify? Platforms Comparison

Main Advantages of Shopify over Squarespace

Using Shopify you can export products unlike in Squarespace.
There are a lot of third-party apps integrated with Shopify.
With Shopify, you have many more options in payment gateways.
If you wish to sell products in-store or at some venues, there are some Point of Sale options available in Shopify; meanwhile, Squarespace can’t offer this feature to you yet.
Shopify gives you more advanced control over the HTML and CSS of your website.
Due to the automatic calculation of EU VAT for your products, you are able to sell to European Union countries without any troubles.
Shopify also offers better support than Squarespace, including phone support 24/7.
Shopify has quite a better approach to SEO (Shopify SEO scores 98 when Squarespace-91 according to eCommerce platforms research in Feb.2017).
Shopify also has a higher level of user satisfaction 99% versus Squarespace’s 96% satisfaction score.
There are more templates available in Shopify.

Key Advantages of Squarespace over Shopify

There are more templates available for free than in Shopify.
Squarespace is a better and more elegant solution if you are to show your images mostly.
A bit easier in use.
Squarespace monthly plans are slightly cheaper and you can sell an unlimited quantity of products for less price than in Shopify.

So which is better? It depends on your purposes and the look you want to give to your store. As it has already been mentioned, the key difference between Squarespace and Shopify lies in eСommerce functionally.

What we can advise to you: if your target is building and growing a complex web store, Shopify is the right platform to choose, it will help and support you with its advanced tools and infrastructure.

You can easily automate the process of Squarespace to Shopify migration by making use of the Cart2Cart Store Migration App.

Until recently, there hasn’t been any reliable tool to transfer data from Squarespace to Shopify. Fortunately, Cart2Cart established the support of Squarespace migration and now offers an amazing opportunity to migrate all your data to Shopify automatically in terms of a few hours

Find more details here: Squarespace vs Shopify: Which One Should You Choose to Sell More in 2020?

What is Cart2Cart?

Cart2Cart is the world’s #1 shopping cart migration tool that performed over 150,000 successful migrations. It lets you migrate SquareSpace’s store data to more than 85 e-Commerce platforms with no programming or developer skills needed. The service can more than help you to move products, orders, customers, categories, product images and variants, CMS pages, and other related entities across various shopping carts automatically.

Hopefully, this short comparison review has helped you somehow. If you are ready to migrate from Squarespace to Shopify with Cart2Cart, there are only a few simple steps to follow.

How to migrate from Squarespace to Shopify

Get your store ready for migration.

In other words, install your Shopify store without additional modules or modifications and make it available online. Besides, find your current Squarespace store credentials.

Set up your Source & Target stores

To proceed with the further steps, go to the Cart2Cart official website and fill in a few required fields and options.

Choose what entities you want to migrate

Perform Free Demo migration

Launch Full migration and wait for results

That is it. Simple and fast. The migration process will take a couple of hours, and what’s important, it will not affect your current Squarespace store performance — users will be able to make purchases during the whole process of data transfer.

Check out our infographic to get a better understanding of the migration process via Cart2Cart: