Part 2 | Best website builder for maker-led in-person workshops: loyalty programs and email marketing

If you're just joining us, welcome to Part 2 of our 4-part series reviewing the core features of a website builder for workshops, classes, and courses! If you'd like to catch up and meet the Studio owner we're finding a new platform for, head over to the introduction here. 

Part 1 covered tickets, bookings, and deposits. This part goes deep on loyalty and email marketing: what each platform actually rewards, what it costs to run, and where you'd be adding a whole extra subscription just to keep track of your own customers.

Square keeps this refreshingly simple, honestly. Loyalty and email are already part of the subscription you're paying for, no separate charge tacked on. Customers can join at the register, at checkout, or when paying an invoice, just by handing over a mobile number, then track their points and rewards through Cash App. You can run up to 15 rewards per program, exclude specific items or categories from earning points, and set points to expire if you want people back sooner rather than later. On top of that, Square includes unlimited email campaign sends and 500 texts a month, and it auto-builds "smart groups", think new customers, lapsed customers, regulars, straight from your sales data, so you're not stuck building lists by hand. It'll even fire off a Google Review request after someone's visit and tie your campaign performance back to real sales, in person and online.

Wix lets customers earn points for a bunch of different actions: newsletter sign-ups, referrals, reviews, birthdays, whatever you decide should count, at whatever conversion rate you set. But here's a real gap worth knowing before you count on it: customers can't join the loyalty program at the register. It's online-only enrollment, so someone standing right in front of you has to pull out their phone instead of just signing up while they checks out. And the good stuff, tiers, point expiration, is locked to the $39/month Business plan; Wix's cheaper $29/month Core tier doesn't get it. Email pricing works by send volume instead of list size: free up to 200 emails, $10/month for 500, $24/month for 5,000. It's worth really looking closely at your current email campaigns and what email campaigns you might want to run. On Wix, automated emails like a welcome series or abandoned-cart recovery draw from the same monthly pool unless they're one of Wix's pre-built "business transactional" automations. Real usable volume can run lower than the number on the pricing page once your automations are actually live.

Shopify has no native loyalty program at all, at any plan tier. Once again, Shopify's own blog says outright that you need a third-party app. The dominant one is Smile.io: free up to 200 orders a month, then $15/month for 500 orders, climbing to $79/month once you want gift-card or subscription rewards (all on top of whatever you're already paying Shopify. Remember that before that free tier looks too good to be true). And that free tier caps at orders, not customers or points, so a workshop studio running frequent low-ticket classes could hit it faster than the number suggests. Email is the flip side here: Shopify Email is native and free for the first 10,000 sends a month, dropping to just $1 per 1,000 after that. That's a real cushion next to Wix's 200 free sends, with built-in automation templates for abandoned carts, welcome series, post-purchase follow-up, and birthday or VIP outreach. It's the pattern you'll see across all of Shopify: strong ecommerce mechanics, and a separate subscription the moment you want to reward someone for coming back.

Squarespace has no native loyalty feature either, same as Shopify. The most visible option here is a third-party tool called Offerwhere, and it's the priciest option of any platform we've covered: $40/month for just 1,000 transactions, climbing to $112 and then $373 a month, with no free option at any level. Email tells a similar story. Squarespace Email Campaigns is native and reasonably capable, with welcome and abandoned-cart automations built in, but there's no free tier at all beyond a trial capped at three campaigns. Paid plans start at $7/month for 500 emails and scale up by volume, with unlimited contacts included at every tier. Of the four platforms, Squarespace is the only one with zero free option for loyalty or email. Whatever it's good at elsewhere, this isn't where it saves you money.

If keeping regulars and repeat wholesale accounts coming back matters to your bottom line, Square is genuinely the simplest answer here: loyalty and email are both already included in what you're paying, nothing separate to manage. Wix comes close, with more ways to earn points, but mind the in-person enrollment gap and that $39/month tier gate. Shopify can get you there too, its email is properly generous, but loyalty always means bolting on Smile.io as its own line item. Squarespace has no free tier for this part of the business.

Next up: the operational side, inventory, point of sale, Faire and wholesale, staff access, and design. This is where a lot of real day-to-day headaches live: overselling a workshop kit that was actually out of stock, wondering whether a part-time assistant should really have access to your billing, or hunting for a way to upload your actual brand font instead of settling for whatever's built in.