The short version: Shopify Basic and Squarespace Core are both $29 a month billed annually, both take 0% commission, and both start card processing at 2.9% plus 30¢. At that price the money is identical and the decision is purely about what you are building. Shopify is a store with a website attached; Squarespace is a website with a store attached. The trap in this comparison is Squarespace's cheaper $19 Basic plan, which carries a 2% store transaction fee: it stops being the cheaper option the moment you sell more than $500 a month.
Figures came from each company's own pricing pages in July 2026.
They approach the same problem from opposite directions, and for a food business the direction matters more than the price.
Shopify starts with commerce. Products, inventory, orders, shipping, payments, and analytics are the core product, and the storefront is the surface you sell through. Everything is built outward from the checkout.
Squarespace starts with the site. Its reason to exist is that pages look good with almost no effort, and commerce was added to a website builder rather than the other way round. If your business needs an About page, a story, photography, and a way to buy, that ordering is genuinely correct.
For a food seller specifically:
Same four disclosures on both.
| Shopify | Squarespace | |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription | $29/mo Basic billed annually, $39 monthly · Grow $79 · Advanced $299 | $19/mo Basic · $29/mo Core · Plus $49 · Advanced $99, all billed annually |
| Free trial | 3 days free, then $1/month for 3 months | 14 days free |
| Platform fee | $0 with Shopify Payments. 2% per order if you use another processor | 2% online store fee on Basic (and 7% on digital content and memberships). 0% on Core and above |
| Card processing | From 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic · 2.7% Grow · 2.5% Advanced | From 2.9% + $0.30 |
Both have a 2%, and they trigger on completely different things. Shopify's 2% is a penalty for bringing your own processor. Squarespace's 2% is simply the price of its cheapest plan. Only one of them is avoidable by upgrading.
Only if you barely sell anything, and the crossover is low enough to catch most people out.
Basic is $19 a month with a 2% store fee. Core is $29 with none. The upgrade costs $10 a month, so it pays for itself once 2% of your sales exceeds $10:
$10 ÷ 0.02 = $500 a month in sales.
Above $500 a month, the $29 plan is genuinely cheaper than the $19 plan. Worked out over a year:
Card processing sits on top of both columns identically, so it does not affect the comparison.
Which means the practical advice is blunt: if you are running a real food business, do not buy Squarespace Basic. It is priced for someone selling occasionally, and at $2,000 a month it costs $360 a year more than the plan above it. Our breakdown of Squarespace's transaction fee works through where it applies.
The 7% digital content fee on Basic deserves the same treatment. If you sell recipe e-books or a paid newsletter alongside the food, 7% is a very large number, and it also disappears on Core.
Shopify's own tiers hide a version of the same trap in the other direction. Advanced is $299 a month against Basic's $29, a difference of $3,240 a year, and what it buys on the processing line is 2.5% instead of 2.9%. That 0.4-point saving does not cover the upgrade until you are past $810,000 in annual sales. The Grow plan at $79 is closer: $600 a year more for 0.2 points off, which needs $300,000 a year to break even. Neither is a plausible upgrade for a food business selling under six figures, so if you move up a Shopify tier it should be for the features, never for the rate. That is the same reasoning that makes Squarespace Core the right buy and Squarespace Basic the wrong one: read what the money actually buys, not where it sits on the page.
This is a smaller difference than the prices but it changes how well you can evaluate.
Squarespace gives you 14 days free. That is enough to build real pages, load your actual products, take a test order, and decide with something you have used.
Shopify gives you 3 days free, then charges $1 a month for 3 months. The dollar-a-month period is generous in money terms and it is not a trial in practice, because you have already entered card details and the clock is running on a subscription. Three days is enough to click around, not enough to migrate a catalog.
The practical approach is to prepare before you start either clock: product photographs, descriptions, prices, and your shipping or pickup rules written down. A trial spent hunting for photographs tells you nothing about the platform.
Once you are comparing Shopify Basic against Squarespace Core, the money is a wash and the question becomes what you are actually building.
Question one settles most food businesses. A bakery whose customers arrive because they saw a photograph is a website with a buy button. A hot sauce brand shipping nationally with twelve SKUs and variant packaging is a store.
There is a third answer worth naming, because a lot of local vendors land on it: neither. If almost all your orders are collected in person and almost none are shipped, you are paying $348 a year for shipping infrastructure and a design system to solve a scheduling problem. Running one month of your real orders through a flat-fee storefront alongside a trial of either of these is the cheapest way to find out which of the three you are.
Neither platform touches this, and it catches people who move from a market stall to shipping.
Selling in person means handing someone a product and answering questions out loud. Selling online means the label carries the whole conversation: what is in it, what allergens it contains, how much of it there is, and who made it. Your state's cottage food rules set most of that, and the net-quantity statement follows federal packaging conventions that NIST's packaging and labeling program maintains through the model regulations states adopt.
The practical version: get your label right before you build the store, because relabelling a hundred jars costs more than either subscription. Neither Shopify nor Squarespace will warn you about any of it.
One rule survives every platform choice: your label obligations come from your state, not your software, and neither of these platforms checks a single word of what you print.
Our breakdown of what Shopify really costs a cottage food business covers the app-stacking problem, which is where Shopify's real price shows up.
The honest threshold: Shopify earns its keep the month you need apps, wholesale, or shipping zones; before that month it is rent on rooms you have not furnished.
Our look at Squarespace alternatives for food vendors covers who eventually outgrows it.
If the website is the point, the food ordering is occasional, and design is part of your brand, Squarespace is the better buy. A wedding-cake baker with a portfolio is the textbook case.
Both are built to put products in a box and send it somewhere. Local food selling is a different shape, and this is where both start to strain.
That first one is the recurring problem. A vendor at a Wednesday market, a Saturday market, and porch pickup on Sunday needs three schedules and three cutoffs, and on both platforms you end up encoding that in product names or hoping people read the order notes.
If that describes your week, Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 processing published up front, and it handles pickup at each place you sell with its own schedule and cutoff, local delivery with a radius and a route, and sales tax calculated, filed, and remitted in all 50 states. The honest bounds: it does not ship nationally, it is not a website builder, and there is no app ecosystem or abandoned-cart recovery. If you need a designed marketing site or national shipping, these two do things it does not. You can run a week of real orders through it next to whatever you use now and compare the totals directly.
More food sellers than you would think end up paying twice, and it is worth checking before you do.
The common version is a Squarespace site for the brand and a separate ordering tool for the transactions, because the site came first and the ordering came later. That is roughly $29 plus whatever the ordering costs, and it is often the right answer: your marketing site and your checkout genuinely have different jobs, and forcing one tool to do both usually compromises the one you care about less.
The version that is not worth it is paying Shopify $29 for a store you use as a website, or paying Squarespace for commerce you never turned on. Look at what you actually use in a month and price that, rather than the setup you imagined when you signed up.
Whichever way you go, take the shop name seriously before you print labels. The USPTO's trademark basics covers how to search existing marks and what registration actually protects, and it is far cheaper to find a conflict now than after two years of building a following under it.
Basic is $29 a month billed annually or $39 monthly, Grow is $79, and Advanced is $299. Card rates start at 2.9% plus 30¢ on Basic. The trial is 3 days, then $1 a month for 3 months.
Basic is $19 a month billed annually, Core $29, Plus $49, and Advanced $99. The free trial is 14 days. Card processing starts at 2.9% plus $0.30 on all plans.
On Basic, yes: 2% on online store sales and 7% on digital content and memberships. On Core and above, the store fee is 0%. Payment processing is separate and applies on every plan.
Core, once you sell more than $500 a month, because the 2% store fee on Basic exceeds the $10 price difference. At $2,000 a month, Basic costs $360 a year more than Core.
Yes. Shopify applies a 2% fee per order when you use any processor other than Shopify Payments. It is waived entirely if you use theirs.
Squarespace Core for most, since food sells on photographs and a small catalog does not need Shopify's depth. Shopify if you ship nationally or carry many products with variants. Neither handles multi-location pickup well.
Both offer local pickup as a fulfilment option. Neither handles several pickup locations with separate schedules and cutoffs, which is the actual requirement for a vendor selling at more than one market.
At the tier most food businesses will buy, these two cost exactly the same: $29 a month, 0% commission, 2.9% plus 30¢. So price is not the deciding factor and you should stop treating it as one.
Pick Shopify if you are building a store: national shipping, many products, an app for every gap, and room to grow. Pick Squarespace Core if you are building a brand people buy from: strong pages, small catalog, and a site that looks finished without design work.
The one clear mistake is Squarespace Basic. Its 2% store fee makes it more expensive than the $29 plan above $500 a month in sales, which any real food business clears. The cheap plan is the expensive one, and the pricing page does not put it that way.
