Shopify vs Squarespace Commerce: which one to sell products on

Before comparing a single feature, look at what each platform takes out of every sale. A transaction fee is not a line item you notice once, it is a percentage that comes off your revenue on every order for as long as you use the platform, and it compounds with your card processing rate whether you sell ten orders a month or ten thousand.

Once the fee question is settled, the real job for a small business selling products online is the same regardless of platform: a checkout that does not lose customers halfway through, product pages that can actually rank in search, a way to plug in the ad and email tools you already use, and a real answer to what happens to your catalog if you ever move somewhere else.

Shopify and Squarespace Commerce both do the core job. Where they diverge is in how they price the parts around it, and how much of your store actually comes with you if you leave.

Shopify's pricing page names four plans: Basic at CA$37 a month billed annually or CA$49 monthly, Grow at CA$99 or CA$132, Advanced at CA$389 or CA$517, and Plus starting at CA$3,400 a month. Online card processing runs from 2.8 percent plus 30 cents on Basic down to 2.15 percent plus 30 cents on Plus, and a separate fee applies if you process payments through a provider other than Shopify Payments: 2 percent on Basic, dropping through 1 percent and 0.6 percent to 0.2 percent on Plus.

Every plan includes unlimited products, a built-in checkout, in-person selling tools, and an AI assistant the page calls Sidekick. Grow adds five staff accounts and up to 50 percent off shipping rates; Advanced adds fifteen staff accounts, live third-party shipping rates, and regional pricing customization; Plus adds unlimited staff accounts, full checkout customization, up to 200 point-of-sale locations, and unlimited B2B catalogs. The page states all plans include over 200 real-time reports, email and SMS marketing tools, customer chat, marketing automation, abandoned checkout recovery, storefront translation, and localized selling through Shopify Markets.

Shopify's help center separately documents product export as a CSV file, noting the file excludes product images entirely and only carries a custom SEO title or description if you set one manually on the product page first.

Squarespace sells its store features across the same four general plans it uses for content sites: Basic at CA$30 monthly or CA$21 annually, Core at CA$45 or CA$32, Plus at CA$59 or CA$46, and Advanced at CA$139 or CA$109. Card processing runs 2.9 percent plus 30 cents on Basic and Core, 2.7 percent on Plus, and 2.5 percent on Advanced, each plus 30 cents. The online store transaction fee sits at 2 percent on Basic and drops to 0 percent starting on Core, meaning the fee gap between Squarespace's entry tier and its second tier is larger than the gap between any two of Shopify's tiers.

Every plan lets you sell unlimited products and services, and Core and above add shipping labels, carrier-calculated shipping rates, discount codes, and payment plans. Marketing features scale by tier too: all plans include basic metrics and SEO tools, while Core and above add advanced analytics, form conversion insights, ecommerce-specific analytics, and a Mailchimp integration named directly on the page.

On getting your data out, Squarespace's export help page describes an .xml file for general site content that explicitly excludes several page types, naming store pages among them, so a merchant's catalog does not move through that export. A separate CSV export exists specifically under Commerce settings, limited to product name, description, price, variants, and SKUs, with images needing to be downloaded on their own.

Shopify's third-party payment provider fee only goes away if you use Shopify Payments, so a business that needs a different processor for its market or currency should add that fee, from 2 percent down to 0.2 percent depending on tier, on top of whatever it already pays that processor. Its own help pages also do not promise an automatic backup of your store: the deactivation article states plainly that you need to export your own CSV files and theme backup before closing an account, since data is only guaranteed for 2 years afterward and is not recoverable once deleted.

Squarespace's transaction fee structure rewards moving off its cheapest plan fast, since Basic's 2 percent store fee disappears entirely on Core. Its bigger limit shows up if you ever leave: the general site export explicitly does not include store pages, so your product catalog and store design are absent from that file, and the separate Commerce CSV export covers only bare product data, no images bundled in and no one-click way to move that catalog into a new platform.

Neither company's page, as read on 2026-09-26, describes a one-step migration path off its platform with your full catalog, images, and design intact.

Choose Shopify when you expect to grow past a basic catalog toward multiple staff accounts, in-person point-of-sale locations, or B2B selling, and you are willing to use Shopify Payments to avoid its third-party processing fee, or accept that fee as a known cost at your tier.

Choose Squarespace Commerce when your online store sits alongside a broader content or portfolio site you are already building there, your sales volume justifies moving straight to the Core plan to drop the transaction fee to zero, and you do not need the deeper point-of-sale or B2B features Shopify names on its higher tiers.

Whichever you pick, export a full backup of your product data on a schedule, not just when you decide to leave. Both companies' own documentation makes clear that recovering a closed or deleted store afterward is not guaranteed.