Shopify Vs Squarespace: Which Platform Fits A Store That Plans To Grow

Squarespace is a strong website builder that also sells products. Shopify is a commerce platform that also builds websites. In a Shopify vs Squarespace decision for a small store, the two are close at the entry price and close on the basics. The gap shows up in catalog size, inventory across locations, selling on marketplaces and checkout, once a store has real order volume.

So the question to ask isn’t which editor feels easier this afternoon. It’s how much you expect the store to sell two years from now, how many products and variants it’ll carry, and where those sales will happen. If the answer is about what it sells today, all on your own website, Squarespace is a reasonable home. If the answer involves a second warehouse, a retail counter, Amazon or a catalog that keeps branching into sizes and colors, Shopify is the platform you won’t have to leave.

Shopify has four store plans, priced in US dollars (opens in new tab). Basic is $39 a month, Grow is $105 and Advanced is $399, or $29, $79 and $299 a month if you pay yearly. Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 a month.

Squarespace also has four plans, and every one of them sells products. Each Squarespace plan (opens in new tab) comes at two prices, one for annual billing and one for monthly: Basic at $19 or $25 a month, Core at $29 or $39, Plus at $49 or $65 and Advanced at $99 or $139. You can pay for any Squarespace plan monthly or annually (opens in new tab), and annual billing comes with a free custom domain for the first year.

Watch the plan names when you compare Shopify and Squarespace. Basic, Plus and Advanced exist on both platforms and mean very different things. Squarespace Plus runs $49 or $65 a month, and Shopify Plus starts at $2,300.

Squarespace Core’s two prices, $29 and $39, are the same as Shopify Basic’s yearly and monthly prices. That’s the tier where most small stores actually compare Squarespace vs Shopify, because Squarespace Basic charges a transaction fee and leaves out discounts, automated tax and shipping labels.

Squarespace replaced its older Personal, Business, Commerce Basic and Commerce Advanced plans with Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced (opens in new tab), and it’s rolling the new plans out in waves (opens in new tab). If your Squarespace store is on a legacy plan, your fees may differ from the ones below.

Squarespace Basic charges a 2% commerce transaction fee (opens in new tab) on every sale of physical products, services and donations. Core, Plus and Advanced charge none. The fee applies whether you take payment through Squarespace Payments, Stripe or PayPal, and with Stripe it shows up as a separate application fee (opens in new tab).

That makes the upgrade from Squarespace Basic to Core cheap to justify. Core costs $10 to $14 a month more than Basic, depending on billing, and 2% of $500 to $700 in monthly sales covers that difference. Above roughly $700 a month in sales, Core costs less than Basic once you count the fee.

Shopify works the other way. With Shopify Payments, Shopify charges no transaction fee (opens in new tab) on top of the card rate. If you use a third-party payment provider instead, Shopify adds 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. On $10,000 a month in sales through an outside processor on Shopify Basic, that’s $200 a month, or $2,400 a year.

Card rates are nearly identical across the two platforms. The online standard rate is 2.9% plus 30¢ on Shopify Basic (opens in new tab) and on Squarespace Basic and Core (opens in new tab), so a $50 order costs $1.75 in card fees on either. The rate drops to 2.7% plus 30¢ on Shopify Grow and Squarespace Plus, and to 2.5% plus 30¢ on Shopify Advanced and Squarespace Advanced. Shopify Plus goes to 2.25% plus 30¢.

A few Squarespace fees don’t have a Shopify twin. American Express and some commercial cards cost 3.2% plus 30¢ (opens in new tab) on every Squarespace plan, and Squarespace’s standard card rates apply only with Squarespace Payments. Digital products, which on Squarespace means courses, video pages and member sites, carry their own fee of 7% on Basic, 5% on Core, 1% on Plus and nothing on Advanced.

At the entry tier, Shopify vs Squarespace is close to a tie on price, as long as you’re past Squarespace Basic and on Shopify Payments. Higher up, Squarespace costs less for the same card rate: Squarespace Advanced and Shopify Advanced both charge 2.5% plus 30¢ online, at $99 or $139 a month against $299 or $399. Fees alone won’t settle this below Shopify Plus, so let the rest of the comparison decide it.

Squarespace ecommerce covers more on its entry plan than many owners expect. Every plan includes order, inventory and catalog management (opens in new tab), unlimited products, gift cards, invoicing, courses, memberships and subscriptions, checkout on your own domain, abandoned cart recovery, out-of-stock notifications, point of sale, Facebook and Instagram catalog sync, and Printful print-on-demand.

Squarespace Basic leaves out automated tax, discounts, quantity limits, Google Shopping, shipping labels, carrier-calculated shipping and Squarespace’s commerce APIs. Core adds those, plus commerce analytics, product waitlists and third-party commerce integrations (opens in new tab). Plus and Advanced add no commerce features beyond Core apart from reserved carts and countdown timers for product releases, which start at Plus. What you buy above Core is mostly lower card and digital product fees.

Shopify’s entry plan covers the same basics. Abandoned checkout recovery, gift cards and selling on social and marketplaces (opens in new tab) are on all four Shopify store plans, and Shopify’s own Shopify Subscriptions app (opens in new tab) is free in the App Store.

Squarespace wins on team seats at the low end. Squarespace Core and higher allow unlimited contributors (opens in new tab), and Squarespace Basic allows two, including the owner. Shopify Basic includes no additional staff accounts (opens in new tab), Grow includes 5 and Advanced includes 15.

Squarespace subscriptions come with rules a growing subscription business runs into. A customer can buy only one subscription product at a time (opens in new tab) and can’t add other types of products to the same order, and subscriptions run only through Squarespace Payments or Stripe. Download products can’t be sold as subscriptions, and stock levels and quantity limits aren’t available for subscription products (opens in new tab). If subscriptions are a sideline, that’s fine; if they’re the business, those limits shape your offer.

Yes, once products start branching into many versions. A Shopify product can have up to 2,048 variants and three options (opens in new tab), such as size, color and material. A Squarespace product can have up to six options and 250 variant combinations (opens in new tab).

Squarespace allows more options per product, and Shopify allows far more combinations. A shirt in 5 colors, 8 sizes and 3 fits is 120 variants, which fits on either platform. A pair of pants in 6 colors, 10 waist sizes and 5 inseams is 300, which is over Squarespace’s 250 and well under Shopify’s 2,048.

Shopify raised its limit from 100 variants per product to 2,048 on October 15, 2025 (opens in new tab). Product count is less of a constraint on either. Every Squarespace plan sells unlimited products, though a store page on a current Squarespace site holds up to 10,000 products (opens in new tab), hidden products included.

Shopify tracks stock separately at each location (opens in new tab), meaning any physical place where you sell, fulfill orders or keep inventory. Basic, Grow and Advanced each allow 10 inventory locations (opens in new tab), and Plus allows 200. That’s the setting a second warehouse, a retail shop or a 3PL needs.

Squarespace tracks stock per item or variant (opens in new tab) and lowers it automatically after each purchase. It sends low-stock alerts by email and app notification, lets you cap quantities per order from Core up, and on Plus and Advanced can hold an item in a shopper’s cart for 5 to 20 minutes. For a store that ships everything from one shelf, that covers it.

Both platforms include point of sale on every plan. The Squarespace app works as a point of sale in the US and UK (opens in new tab), with Tap to Pay on your phone and no separate reader needed. Square Reader works in the US only, and you’ll need a Square account even to record cash sales. Tap to Pay and Square Reader sales update your inventory, and Pay Links don’t.

Every paid Shopify plan includes basic in-person selling (opens in new tab), with in-person card rates starting at 2.6% plus 10¢ on Basic, 2.5% plus 10¢ on Grow and 2.4% plus 10¢ on Advanced. POS Pro, Shopify’s fuller retail version, is an add-on at $89 a month for each location, billed yearly.

Marketplaces are the bigger gap. Shopify’s own Marketplace Connect (opens in new tab) lists your products on Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Target Plus, the last two in the United States only. It isn’t accepting new Etsy connections right now, though existing Etsy sellers can keep using it.

Squarespace’s built-in channels are Facebook and Instagram catalog sync on every plan and Google Shopping from Core up (opens in new tab). Its Etsy option is a one-time import, not a sync (opens in new tab), so a sale on Etsy means adjusting your Squarespace stock by hand. If marketplaces are part of your two-year plan, plan on Shopify.

Apps follow the same pattern. Shopify says its App Store (opens in new tab) lists more than 16,000 apps. Squarespace offers Squarespace Extensions (opens in new tab), third-party tools for tax, drop shipping, SEO and social marketing that connect on every plan and are built and run by the companies that make them.

Squarespace gives you a styled checkout with sensible settings. You can skip the cart (opens in new tab), set a cart reserve timer on Plus and Advanced, choose where Continue Shopping goes, set a minimum order, number your orders, add phone and custom form fields, add an email signup, set a default country, post your store policies and restyle the page.

Some things stay fixed. You can’t remove the Continue Shopping button, change the text on the Continue Shopping or Checkout buttons, or edit the default text in checkout fields. Express checkout itself has no on/off switch, though you can add or remove Apple Pay, Google Pay and Link one at a time in your payment settings. Custom code on the cart page is possible, but Squarespace support won’t help with it.

On Shopify, the deeper changes depend on your plan. Checkout UI extensions (opens in new tab) on the information, shipping and payment steps are available only on Shopify Plus. For a store below Plus, the checkout gap between Squarespace commerce vs Shopify is smaller than it looks, and it widens once you’re big enough for Plus to make sense.

You can, through Shopify’s Buy Button (opens in new tab), which is included on every Shopify plan. It creates buy buttons you can place on a website that isn’t on Shopify, and it needs a supported payment gateway for your store’s country.

On the Squarespace side, the button goes into a Code block, and Squarespace runs JavaScript and iframe code in code blocks (opens in new tab) only on Core or higher. You’d be paying for a Squarespace plan and a Shopify plan at the same time, which makes sense for a site that’s mostly content with a handful of products.

Can you keep your Squarespace domain with Shopify? Yes. You can connect a Squarespace domain to Shopify (opens in new tab) without moving it. In Squarespace’s DNS settings, save any MX or TXT records you want to keep, such as the ones for your email, then delete the existing records. Add an A record for @ pointing to 23.227.38.65 and a CNAME for www pointing to shops.myshopify.com, then connect the domain under Settings > Domains in Shopify.

To transfer the domain’s registration (opens in new tab) to Shopify instead, you’ll need to wait 60 days after registering it, transferring it or changing the registrar contact details. A transfer can take up to 20 days, or 5 for many extensions, including .com, .net and .ca. Shopify doesn’t host email and doesn’t copy custom DNS records, so connect the domain first and transfer it later if you want visitors to see no errors.

Choosing for today’s editor has a price, and you pay it if you move. A Squarespace to Shopify migration (opens in new tab) means moving products, customers, past orders, reviews, blog posts and pages, and Squarespace’s exports don’t carry all of it.

The product export leaves out featured images, variant images and alt text, and it caps out at 10,000 physical and service products. Reviews can’t be exported. Blog posts and pages export only as a WordPress file, which Shopify can’t import, and the customer export drops notes and saved addresses except the address from each customer’s most recent order.

Your URLs change too. A page at /policies/shipping-policy on Squarespace lives at /pages/shipping-policy on Shopify, so every old address needs a redirect set up before launch. That’s the step that lets you keep your search rankings through the move. Squarespace may also lock a domain for 60 days after registration or contact changes, and you should disconnect it from Squarespace before connecting it to Shopify or risk SSL errors.

A Shopify migration covers more than products: redirect mapping, customer accounts and order history, and reconnecting tools like Klaviyo, reviews and analytics. If you’re also weighing Wix, our guide to moving from Wix to Shopify covers what Wix exports and what changes shape in that move. If you’re working out whether your store has outgrown its first platform at all, start with our guide to replatforming.

Pick Squarespace if the store is a part of a website more than the whole of it, and you expect it to stay that way. That means a catalog that fits within 250 variants a product, one place you ship from, sales on your own site and social, and products like courses, memberships or downloads that Squarespace builds in. Choose Core over Basic once you’re selling more than about $700 a month, because the 2% fee on Basic costs more than the upgrade.

Pick Shopify if, two years from now, you expect any of these: stock in more than one place, a shop counter selling from the same inventory as the website, Amazon, eBay or Walmart, products with more than 250 variants, or enough volume that checkout changes on Plus are worth paying for. Is Shopify better than Squarespace for a small store that will stay small? Not by much, and Squarespace’s editor and built-in content tools are a fair reason to stay.

If Shopify is on your list, the other comparison worth making is Shopify vs WooCommerce, which turns on who does the work of running the store.

If you’ve already decided, BLKDG handles moving a Squarespace store to Shopify, from the URL and redirect map through a custom Shopify theme, Klaviyo and analytics setup, and monitoring rankings after launch.