Squarespace vs Shopify: Which for an Australian Store?

Squarespace and Shopify solve two different problems that look like one problem from the outside. Squarespace is a website builder that can take payments. Shopify is a store that comes with a website attached. The decision is less about which is prettier and more about where the store is headed: a handful of products that rarely change, or a catalogue you expect to grow, restock, and sell across more than one channel.

This guide uses current Australian pricing from each platform's own pages, transaction-fee terms from their documentation, and Core Web Vitals data from Google's Chrome UX Report. Every number links to its source.

The short version

If you want the answer without the detail:

Sources: Squarespace pricing, Shopify AU pricing. Squarespace AU plan prices are billed annually.

Squarespace is the right call when the website matters more than the store. Shopify is the right call when the store matters more than the website. The rest of this guide explains why, and what each one costs once the hidden lines are added in.

Where Squarespace wins

Squarespace makes a better-looking site with less effort. The templates are designed, not just responsive, and a non-designer can land on something that looks considered without hiring anyone. For a business where the brand and the story carry the sale, that head start is worth real money.

It blends content and commerce in one place. A florist, a photographer, a studio, or a consultant can run a portfolio, a blog, a booking page, and a small shop from a single editor, with one bill and one login. Shopify can do content, but pages and blogging are the weaker half of the product. On Squarespace they are the strong half.

It suits a catalogue that stays small and stable. If you sell ten to fifty products that do not change often, you do not need inventory automation, variant matrices, or a POS. You need a site that looks good and takes a card. Squarespace covers that with less overhead than Shopify asks for.

The trade-off arrives the moment you outgrow "small and stable." Squarespace has no real depth in inventory, shipping logic, or multichannel selling, and its app ecosystem is a fraction of Shopify's. It is built to be enough, not built to scale.

Where Shopify wins

Shopify is built for the store first. Inventory, variants, SKUs, stock tracking, discounts, shipping rules, and tax all sit in the core product rather than in add-ons. A catalogue with hundreds or thousands of products, sizes, and colours is routine on Shopify and painful on Squarespace.

It sells everywhere your customers are. Shopify pushes the same catalogue to Instagram, TikTok, Google Shopping, and marketplaces, and its POS runs the in-person side with the same inventory behind the counter and online. For a business with a physical shop, that single stock system is the reason to choose it.

Its app store fills any gap the core leaves. Reviews, subscriptions, loyalty, upsells, email, advanced SEO: Shopify has roughly 8,000 apps against Squarespace's short list of extensions. That depth is a double edge, which the cost section gets to.

It charges no platform fee on sales, as long as you use Shopify Payments. Shopify Payments runs Australian cards at 1.75% + 30c on the Basic plan, and Shopify takes nothing on top (Shopify AU pricing). That is the cleanest fee structure of the two platforms, until you look at what happens when you do not use Shopify Payments.

The costs both platforms hide

The sticker price on each pricing page is the smallest part of the bill. Three cost layers do the real damage, and neither platform advertises them.

Squarespace's 3% cut on the cheap plan

Squarespace's Business plan, the entry point for a proper online store, charges a 3% transaction fee on every sale on top of card processing (Squarespace transaction fees). On A$10,000 a month in sales, that 3% is A$300 a month, or A$3,600 a year, going to Squarespace before your card processor takes its share. Removing it means moving to a Commerce plan at roughly A$26 a month or more, where the platform fee drops to 0%. Many small sellers stay on Business without noticing the cut.

Shopify's gateway surcharge and app creep

Shopify's 0% platform fee only holds if you use Shopify Payments. Connect a third-party gateway such as PayPal and Shopify adds 2% on the Basic plan, 1% on Grow, and 0.6% on Advanced (Shopify third-party fees). On A$10,000 a month, that surcharge alone is A$200 a month on Basic.

Apps are the larger leak. The average Shopify store runs several paid apps for email, reviews, upsells, and SEO, adding A$100 to A$300 a month. Once apps, processing, and the subscription are combined, a store doing A$20,000 a month pays around A$500 a month to run Shopify, roughly ten times the headline A$42. 70% of Shopify owners underestimate their annual platform costs by 30% to 50%.

Theme ceilings and speed

Both platforms hand you a theme, and a theme is a box. Squarespace templates are the more restrictive of the two, since the design freedom that makes them easy also caps how far you can push them. Shopify themes give more room but still constrain checkout, layout, and page speed to what the theme system allows. Standard Shopify plans do not let you edit the checkout at all; that needs Shopify Plus at A$3,700+ a month.

Speed is where the theme tax shows up in real numbers. Core Web Vitals are Google's three measures of how fast a page loads, how stable it is while loading, and how quickly it responds to a tap, and Google uses them as a ranking signal. On mobile, 75.22% of Shopify sites and 67.66% of Squarespace sites pass Google's Core Web Vitals (Search Engine Journal, CrUX June 2025). Roughly a third of Squarespace stores fail Google's own performance bar. That matters because 53% of mobile visitors abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to load. If you pay for traffic through Google or Meta ads, a slow store loses a share of it before the first product renders.

The third option once you outgrow both

Neither platform is the end of the road. Both are rentals, and both charge in proportion to your success. When your monthly platform and app bill passes roughly A$500, the maths that made a template attractive starts working against you, because the fee rises with revenue while the cost of serving you stays flat.

The alternative is to own the store. A custom or headless build puts a purpose-made storefront in front of a commerce engine, so you keep the reliability of a proven checkout without the theme ceiling or the percentage fees. Australians spent $82.6 billion online in 2025, up 14% year on year. If a store is growing anywhere near that pace, so is its platform bill.

The Flower Room, a Newtown florist, hit that point on BigCommerce. We rebuilt the storefront on Next.js and put Shopify behind it, so customers get a fast site that carries the shop's character while staff keep the Shopify admin they already know. The catalogue changes daily with whatever looked best at the market, the checkout stays on Shopify's rails, and the store no longer pays a platform to host a template it had outgrown. That is the honest third answer to "Squarespace vs Shopify": at a certain size, the right platform is one you own.

Launching a first store rather than migrating an existing one is a different starting point, closer to a Shopify theme in cost. Our ecommerce website design service covers that end, from A$3,997.

Which one to choose, by seller type

The right platform depends on what the store is and where it is going.

Choose Squarespace if you sell a small, stable range and the site does double duty as a portfolio, blog, or brand home. A photographer selling prints, a studio taking bookings alongside a few products, or a maker with a dozen SKUs gets a better-looking result for less effort. Start on a Commerce plan rather than Business to avoid the 3% cut once sales are steady.

Choose Shopify if the store is the business. A growing catalogue, real inventory, in-person sales, or selling across Instagram and marketplaces all point to Shopify. Use Shopify Payments to keep the platform fee at 0%, and watch app subscriptions, because they are where the bill grows.

Choose a custom or headless build if you are already paying A$500 a month or more in platform and app fees, need checkout or design control a theme cannot give, or want to stop renting the thing your business runs on. The upfront cost is higher and it pays back by removing the monthly fees that scale with your revenue.

Shopify Alternatives for Australian Businesses

Seven Shopify alternatives with AU pricing, transaction fees, and a three-year cost comparison, including the option most guides leave out.

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Sources

• Squarespace pricing page - Current plan structure and commerce features
• Squarespace: Transaction fees and payment processing rates - 3% Business plan fee and Commerce plan terms
• Shopify AU pricing page - Plan prices in AUD and Shopify Payments card rates
• Shopify Help Center: Third-party transaction fees - Gateway surcharge by plan
• Search Engine Journal: 2025 Core Web Vitals CMS Rankings - Squarespace and Shopify CWV pass rates from CrUX
• StackCompare: Shopify Pricing 2026 True Cost - App and processing cost breakdown
• Appwrk: How Much Does It Cost to Build a Shopify Store (2026) - 70% cost underestimate finding
• Google / SOASTA: Mobile Page Speed Benchmarks - 53% mobile abandonment at three seconds
• Australia Post eCommerce Report - $82.6B online spend, 14% YoY growth