Marzipan vs Squarespace: Which is Better for Wine Clubs?

If you've built your winery's site on Squarespace, you already know it does one thing beautifully: it makes a good-looking website quickly, with no developer needed. For a brochure site, a tasting-room landing page, or selling the odd case online, it's a fine choice.

Wine clubs are where it runs out of road.

This article explains where Squarespace struggles with drinks subscriptions, what you end up bolting on to cope, and when Marzipan is the better fit.

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What Squarespace does well

Credit where it's due: Squarespace is one of the best website builders there is. The templates are elegant, the editor is genuinely easy, and for content, images and a simple shop it's hard to beat for the money. If your DtC is mostly one-off case sales with a club as a small side line, it can be enough.

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Where Squarespace struggles with wine clubs

Squarespace's subscriptions were built for the simplest case: the same product, billed again on a fixed cycle. A wine club isn't that. It's a different selection each shipment, tiers that receive different wines, members who want to skip a quarter or change their address, and the odd allocation that sells out.

In practice, on Squarespace that means:

• Same product only. Subscriptions repeat the identical product, with no native way to send a different, curated selection each cycle.
• Limited cadences. Billing runs on standard intervals; the quarterly and bespoke schedules wine clubs actually use aren't well supported.
• No member self-service. Members can't pause, skip, swap or manage their own club from an account area, so that falls to you.
• No allocations, tiers or events. Limited releases, tier logic and member tastings all live outside the platform.

To make any of this work, you end up bolting on a third-party subscription tool (Subbly or MemberSpace are the usual choices), plus, often, a separate email and CRM tool. Each is a monthly cost, and none of them share data cleanly, so your member, order and event records end up scattered across systems.

Co dělá Marzipan jinak

Marzipan is built for drinks subscriptions from the ground up, so the things Squarespace needs add-ons for are simply the defaults:

Varying contents work natively: different wines each cycle, different tiers, adjustable per shipment, no developer required.

Members manage themselves: pause, skip, swap, upgrade, update addresses, all from their own account.

Events, tastings and allocations are built in, tied to member data rather than a separate tool.

One platform: subscriptions, CRM, events and orders in one place, so you're not exporting between systems to see who your best members are.

EU hosted and GDPR-friendly, built in the UK for UK and EU producers.

When Squarespace makes sense

• Your site is mainly a brochure, with occasional one-off case sales
• A club isn't central to how you sell, or it's the same product every time
• You want the simplest possible website with no separate systems to run

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Kdy má smysl Marzipan

• Wine club or subscription memberships are central to your DtC business
• Your shipments vary, with different wines each cycle and different tiers
• You want members to manage their own subscriptions
• You run events and tastings and want them tied to your member data
• You're selling into the UK or EU and want EU hosting and GDPR built in

Závěr

Squarespace makes a lovely website. For a real wine club (varying contents, member tiers, self-service and events), it leans on bolt-on tools that add cost and split your data across systems. Marzipan does the club, the members, the events and the CRM in one place, hosted in the EU, from £199/month with no transaction fees on order value.

If a wine club is central to how you sell, it's worth seeing Marzipan in practice.

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Související

Compare Marzipan vs Shopify and Marzipan vs WooCommerce, or read our guide to wine club software for wineries.