A Squarespace Alternative for Sellers Paying a Different Rate on Every Kind of Sale

It is the best looking option here by a distance and one of the cheapest. Shopify is the specialist and prices by revenue band. Wix meters the site itself, down to whether its cheapest paid plan may sell at all. Squarespace does neither of those. It takes a percentage of the sale, and the percentage depends on what kind of thing the sale was.

Judgment is the gap. Whether your product data is fit to sell from. Which fields you will regret not having in two years. How tax ought to behave the first time you ship somewhere new. What happens to an order after it has been paid for. Software decides none of that and neither platform claims to.

Probably you should not, and that is the answer we give more often than not. The case only exists once the store has stopped being the whole business. If your orders still land in a spreadsheet that somebody reconciles by hand on a Friday afternoon, and the fee lines have started to look like a real number rather than a rounding error, it is worth an hour. Otherwise stay where you are.

We cannot give you a revenue crossover, because the fee that matters depends on your mix rather than your turnover. So do the sum instead. Take a year of orders, split them into physical and digital, apply your tier’s two rates, and add the tax calculation percentage. If that total is a meaningful fraction of seven hundred a month, the conversation is worth having. If it is a rounding error, it is not, and we would rather you found that out here than on a call.

Shape decides this, not size. A single line of physical goods can sit on Squarespace at real volume and be served perfectly well. A business selling courses, memberships and boxes at the same time has three different rates running through one checkout, and that is the shape that eventually needs a different answer.

Better website builder, yes, and by a wide margin. The templates and the editor are ahead of anything Zoho ships and we are not going to argue about it. That is the wrong comparison though. We are not selling you a website. We are selling the thing the website writes into.

That is the single strongest reason to pick it. Commerce writes into Books, CRM and Inventory as a first class citizen rather than through a connector that somebody has to keep alive. If you already run Zoho, this is less a migration than a completion.

Catalog structure and product data come first, then the storefront on top of them, then tax and shipping rules set against real fulfillment costs, then a month of live trading with somebody watching it. After that, continuing work on whatever the store turns out to need rather than whatever we guessed it would.

Yours, in your name, billed to you. We work inside it. If you decide to stop working with us, the store, the data and the license stay exactly where they are and there is nothing to hand back.

We can, and there is a caveat that belongs up here rather than at the end. Your product data and your customer records come across cleanly. Your Squarespace design does not, because it is theirs. Expect the new storefront to be a rebuild, and budget the time for it honestly instead of hoping.

None on ours. The figure is monthly, the billing is monthly, and you can stop at the end of any month. Your Zoho license runs on whatever term you agreed with Zoho, which is a separate arrangement that we do not sit inside.

Squarespace, almost certainly, and saying so costs us a sale we would rather not make badly. Two people selling physical goods on a tier with a zero percent store fee are being served properly and cheaply. Come back if the digital side grows, or if the accounts start needing a second pair of hands.

It happens, and nothing has gone wrong when it does. Zoho suits a business up to a point.

Seven hundred dollars a month, whatever the headcount. That figure covers the catalog, the storefront, the rules underneath both, and the people who keep all three current.