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Are you on Wix, Squarespace, or Weebly? If so, you may be wondering if your platform can truly support your long-term goals.
Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly are three of the best known website builders available to prospective eCommerce businesses, and for good reason too. All three have done a great job at marketing themselves as approachable and easy to navigate platforms for those making their first foray into running a business or selling online.
Whilst the three platforms have their differences, they take up a similar space in the landscape of eCommerce, and the businesses that trade on them are often in a similar position too - Small businesses making their first steps into eCommerce, or setting up eCommerce as an extension of an existing website.
Because Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly all market themselves as non-complex platforms, that allow users to set up an eCommerce store in an afternoon, the majority of businesses that trade on them prioritise ease of use over the opportunities a more malleable eCommerce platform enables. This is to say that they are great tools to get yourself moving, but no well-experienced professional would use them by choice.
On paper, each of the three platforms can fulfil your needs of building an eCommerce store for your business, and if that’s where your goal ends, good for you! But anyone who wants to take eCommerce seriously, and scale their business to 6, 7, even 8 or more figures, will have to move to another platform sooner or later.
To those only familiar with those more entry-level eCommerce platforms, it would seem an introduction to Shopify is in order.
Shopify is a cloud-based eCommerce platform that, like Wix and Squarespace, allows users to sell online. However, unlike those platforms, eCommerce is not an extension of Shopify’s offering. It is the offering. Therefore, Shopify is the eCommerce platform of choice for both entrepreneurs and for enterprise level businesses, making it simultaneously the most well-known and well-respected eCommerce platform in the modern day.
Whilst competitive platforms exist, such as BigCommerce, Magento, or SalesForce Commerce Cloud, they all have their own specific business cases, whereas Shopify is a great choice no matter what shape your business takes.
Additionally, Shopify has taken steps to become the beating heart of businesses outside of just eCommerce - with retail POS, B2B sales, and more all becoming part of its offering in recent years.
Shopify is bursting at the seams with benefits to eCommerce businesses
First and foremost, scalability.
Seeing similar levels of use with both entrepreneurs and enterprise-level businesses, it should be no surprise that Shopify prides itself on its ability to scale businesses. With a robust infrastructure that can handle large sales volumes, and the ability to implement nearly any eCommerce feature you can think of, Shopify is perfect for businesses looking to grow.
Leading from this, despite being the platform of choice for eCommerce giants such as Gymshark and Represent, Shopify primarily markets itself as the eCommerce platform for entrepreneurs. This is because Shopify is well-known for being user-friendly, even for those without technical skills. In this regard, it may be more technical than Wix, Squarespace, or Weebly, but it’s still built with the inexperienced in mind.
In fact, we firmly beleive that the only benefit Wix, Squarespace, or Weebly has over Shopify is that it’s easier for those new to eCommerce to make their first store.
On the other hand, Shopify’s marketing tools, web development capabilities, superior performance and discoverability, all whilst remaining only slightly less user-friendly than Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly, make it a much more powerful hub for your business.
It’s common for businesses trading on Wix, Squarespace, or Weebly to eventually feel restricted by the nature of the platform they’re trading on. Whether you need stronger inventory management or want to employ more complex eCommerce features, you’ll eventually find that the best route for your business is to move to a different platform.
Any business transition can be daunting, but Shopify goes the extra step to make migrating seamless. And, unlike moving to Magento, BigCommerce, etc, the transition to Shopify will feel more like an upgrade to your eCommerce platform than a change. This is due to the simplicity of Shopify’s checkout system, which is shown to convert better than any other eCommerce platform, and the total cost of ownership being lower than its major competitors too. Shopify allows users to future proof their business and scale their eCommerce ventures as their business grows, all whilst maintaining a similarly user-friendly interface,
We worked with Kids outdoor-wear brand, Roarsome, to help them transition from Squarespace to Shopify. The brand found that they were growing faster than Squarespace could keep up with and had decided to reinvest into their eCommerce venture in order for growth to be maintained.
The transition to Shopify went smoothly and gave Roarsome a refreshed hub to run their business and further express their brand’s character.
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