Shopify
Best for: A catalog that will grow, and orders as the main daily work.
The stronger store of the two, and the one that does not need replacing when the range grows.
Platform comparison
Shopify vs Squarespace Compared
Squarespace makes beautiful sites and will sell things. Shopify makes stores and will publish pages. Both are fully hosted, so this comparison is not about servers. It is about which half of your site is the important one.
The short answer
If somebody at your business will spend most of their week in the orders screen, choose Shopify. If they will spend it on the pages, the photography and the brand, and the shop is a curated range rather than a catalog, Squarespace is a fair choice and a pleasant one to work in.
Side by side
| Shopify | Squarespace | |
|---|---|---|
| Built to be | A store | A website, with selling added |
| Hosting and updates | Included | Included |
| Catalog size it suits | Small to very large | Small and curated |
| Design out of the box | Good, and theme led | Its strongest card |
| Stock, variants, shipping rules | Core functionality | Present, and less comfortable at scale |
| Where people get stuck | Wanting behavior the platform will not allow | The catalog growing past what the shop side enjoys |
The question underneath this one
People usually arrive at this comparison because they want a site that looks good and also sells. Both will do that. What separates them is what happens in year two, when the range has grown and somebody is doing stock and shipping every morning. Choose for that week, not for the launch.
And whichever you pick, keep the two things that outlive platforms in your own hands: the domain name, registered to you, and business email at that domain, separate from the site. Those make a future change a project rather than a crisis.
The three routes, as they apply here
Squarespace and Shopify are both the first column. The other two are worth knowing about before you commit.
WooCommerce
Best for: Wanting the site and the store to be files you own.
The self-hosted route. More control and more responsibility. See WooCommerce hosting.
A build by AldoMedia
Best for: A brand site with unusual selling attached to it.
When the design matters as much as the selling and neither platform will do both properly, that is a build. It is what AldoMedia does.
Deciding between the two?
Tell us what you sell and how much of it. If a hosted platform is right we will say which one, and if the honest answer is that neither fits, we will say that too.
Shopify and Squarespace questions
Should I use Shopify or Squarespace for my online store?
Shopify if the store is the business: a growing catalog, stock to track, shipping rules, and orders as the main thing the site does. Squarespace if the site is a portfolio, a studio or a brand presence that also sells a limited range, where how the site looks is doing most of the work.
Does Squarespace include hosting?
Yes. Like Shopify, it is fully hosted, so servers, updates and the certificate are part of the subscription and there is no hosting plan to buy alongside it. Register your domain separately at a registrar all the same.
Is Squarespace good for a large catalog?
It gets harder as the catalog grows. Squarespace is at its best with a limited, curated range presented well. Once you are managing variants, stock across many products and complicated shipping, a platform built around a catalog will take less of your week.
Can I sell on Squarespace and move to Shopify later?
Yes, and it is a rebuild rather than a transfer: the design does not move. Export products and customers, rebuild the front end, and plan redirects from every old URL to its new one so the search visibility you built does not go with the old site.