Big Cartel vs Squarespace

Over the last few years, companies are shifting from traditional marketing to digital media marketing as it is more effective in gaining new customers. Companies are establishing their digital presence on different platforms including social media, blogging sites etc. Each and every company has created their own websites to provide information to potential customers, or to sell products through e-commerce stores, making websites or web applications is a complex and time-consuming task which requires coding skills. Hence to solve this problem, many organizations have provided website building and content management platforms which make it easy to create web applications. Two such platforms are Squarespace and Big Cartel which provides different services to build websites, web applications and e-commerce stores.

Big Cartel is a website building platform which is used to create online stores to sell products and services, it was mainly created for artists to sell their work online. It was founded by Matt Wigham (CEO) and Eric Turner in the year 2005. Its headquarter is located in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was named in Forbes in 2018 in the list of America’s Best Small Companies. It has developed a large number of applications and has many clients all over the world.

Advantages of Big Cartel

• It has a simple interface which is easy to learn for beginners.
• It supports third-party plugins.
• It can be accessed from a website and from an iOS app.

Disadvantages of Big Cartel

• It has limited customizing features.
• It does not provide any analytic tool for tracking performance.

Squarespace can be understood as a website building company founded by Anthony Casalena in 2004. It is an American company which provides its software as a service. It has a large number of pre-designed templates which can be used for making interactive websites. It also provides hosting services along with domain names and other features. It is used due to its drag and drop capabilities.

Advantages of Squarespace

• It comes with drag and drop features which makes it very easy to use.
• The loading time of this platform is very low so it is a quick platform.
• It provides immediate customer support.
• It has good back-end managing features which provide good control of functionalities.

Disadvantages of Squarespace

• It does not have any free plan like some other platforms such as Wix or Drupal.
• It is not an open-source platform.
• It does not have advanced marketing and SEO tools.

Below is a table of differentiation between Big Cartel and Squarespace:

	Big Cartel	Squarespace
1.	It can be understood as an e-commerce store-building platform which provides the necessary tools to sell products and services online.	It is a website building company which provides software as a service.
2.	It was founded by Matt Wigham and Eric Turner.	It was founded by Anthony Casalena in New York.
3.	Its subscription plan starts at just $9.99 per month.	Its subscription plan starts at just $16 per month.
4.	It does not provide any support to its customers	It has dedicated support and backup options for its customers.
5.	It provides a free plan to its customers.	It does not provide a free plan but offers 14 days free website trial to its users.
6.	It provides less number of free templates as compared to Squarespace	It provides more than 100 free templates.
7.	It does not charge any transaction fee on payment.	In the Business plan, a transaction fee of 3% is charged but in the Basic and Advanced plans, no transaction fee is charged.
8.	It requires knowledge to add interactivity to your online store.	It supports drag and drop functionality with a large number of customizing options.