BigCommerce vs Squarespace

Over the last few years, it has been noticed that selling goods online is much more efficient as compared to traditional selling methods, so small startups, companies, merchants etc are interested in selling goods online. Online selling and purchasing can be done using an e-commerce platform but it is really difficult for individuals to make e-commerce stores as it requires a lot of skills and resources. Hence to solve this problem, many organizations have provided e-commerce building platforms which make it easy to create e-commerce stores with advanced functionalities. Two such platforms are BigCommerce and Squarespace which provides different services to build e-commerce stores for selling goods online.

BigCommerce is an e-commerce platform which provides different services to its users like creating online stores, hosting websites and web applications, search engine optimization etc. It is listed in the NASDAQ platform list. It was founded by Eddie Machaalani and Mitchell Harper in 2009 for the online selling of products. It became one of the top companies in Australia for providing software as a service.

Advantages of BigCommerce

• It provides drag and drop features to build websites easily.
• It supports multiple currencies to buy and sell goods.
• It provides PayPal integration for payment options.
• It gives AMP (Accelerated mobile pages) the ability to make it responsive for mobile platforms.  

Disadvantages of BigCommerce

• It puts a limit on sales according to the plan chosen by the customer.
• It does not have multi-lingual capabilities.

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 BigCommerce and Squarespace:

	BigCommerce	Squarespace
1.	It can be understood as a SaaS platform which is used for creating online stores, SEO, marketing facilities etc.	It is a website building company which provides software as a service.
2.	It was founded by Eddie Machaalani and Mitchell Harper.	It was founded by Anthony Casalena in New York.
3.	It provides a standard plan for $29.95	Its subscription plan starts at just $16 per month.
4.	It provides a trial of 15 days for its customers.	It offers 14 days free website trial to its users.
5.	It provides only 12 free themes.	It provides more than 100 free templates.
6.	It comes with advanced SEO features to rank the websites for Search Engine Result Pages (SERP).	SEO tools are simple and easy to use.
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 provides nearly 46 payment gateway options.	It comes with only 4 payment gateways.