If you’ve spent any amount of time researching a new website, there’s a good chance you’ve ended up staring at two browser tabs: Squarespace in one, Shopify in the other, wondering which one you’re supposed to choose. Then you Google it, and things become significantly less helpful.

One article tells you Shopify is obviously superior because it has approximately 47,000 ecommerce features you may never use. Another tells you Squarespace is prettier. Someone on Reddit says they built an entire international empire on one of them. Your friend’s cousin apparently hates both.

Very useful.

I design websites on both Squarespace and Shopify, and I don’t have a loyalty oath to either platform. The question I’m interested in is much simpler:

What does your business actually need the website to do?

Because the best website platform isn’t the one with the longest feature list. It’s the one that supports the way your business works now, gives your customers a good experience and doesn’t make running the thing unnecessarily painful once your designer hands it back to you.

For most Australian small businesses, the decision becomes much easier once you stop comparing software and start comparing business models.

The short answer:

Squarespace = services | Shopify = serious ecommerce

If your business is primarily service-based — you’re a designer, consultant, creative studio, practitioner, photographer, architect, building designer, coach or another business where the website’s main job is to explain your expertise and generate enquiries — I will usually lean towards Squarespace.

If the primary purpose of your website is to sell physical products at volume, manage inventory, ship orders, integrate with retail, run promotions and potentially expand into multiple markets, I will usually recommend Shopify.

That doesn’t mean Squarespace can’t sell products. It absolutely can. It supports ecommerce, payments, products, subscriptions and a range of commerce functionality. Likewise, Shopify can be used to build much more than a very functional-looking online shop.

There is overlap.

But they have different centres of gravity.

Squarespace is fundamentally a website platform with commerce capabilities. Shopify is fundamentally a commerce platform with a website attached to it.

That distinction matters.

Why I often recommend Squarespace for service businesses

For a service-based business, the sale rarely happens because someone saw a big green “Add to Cart” button.

The customer needs to understand who you are, what you do, who you work with, why your approach is different, what your work looks like and whether they trust you enough to make contact.

That means your website needs room for storytelling, positioning, imagery, case studies, editorial content, service pages and a really clear customer journey.

Squarespace does this extremely well.

I particularly like it for creative and founder-led businesses because you can build something that feels highly visual and brand-led without creating a website that becomes terrifying for the owner to update afterwards.

And that last bit matters more than people think.

I’m not particularly interested in building somebody a technically brilliant website that requires them to phone a developer every time they want to change a sentence.

For many small businesses, the ability to log in, change some copy, add a new project, publish a blog or update an image themselves is incredibly valuable.

Squarespace also has built-in SEO tools including editable page titles and descriptions, automatic sitemaps, SSL, structured data and Google Search Console integration. So the idea that you automatically need WordPress or another more technical platform “for SEO” is increasingly outdated.

Of course, having SEO tools does not magically make your website rank. I wish. It still needs strategy, useful content, good site structure, clear service pages and an understanding of what your customer is actually searching for.

Squarespace can absolutely handle ecommerce — up to a point

This is where I think Squarespace occasionally gets dismissed too quickly.

If you run a primarily service-based business but also want to sell a handful of products, digital resources, workshops or other offers, I would not automatically move the entire website to Shopify.

Squarespace supports online selling and has native payment options in Australia, along with Stripe and PayPal integrations. It can also collect GST and support tax-inclusive pricing.

For a creative business selling a curated collection of products alongside services, that may be more than enough.

Where I start looking harder at Shopify is when the products stop being a small part of the website and start becoming the business itself.

If you have hundreds of SKUs, variants, significant inventory, multiple sales channels, retail locations, complicated fulfilment requirements or plans for substantial ecommerce growth, I don’t want to force Squarespace to become something it wasn’t primarily built to be just because I prefer the way the homepage looks.

That is where Shopify starts earning its keep.

Why Shopify wins when ecommerce gets serious

Shopify has been built around the mechanics of selling. Products, variants, stock, orders, customers, checkout, shipping, discounts, inventory, reporting and sales channels all sit at the centre of the platform rather than around the edges.

Its Australian Basic plan currently includes a full online store, unlimited products and inventory management across up to 10 locations. Shopify also has integrated point-of-sale tools that can sync online and physical retail inventory, customers and orders.

So imagine you have a homewares brand.

You sell online, have a showroom in Byron Bay, pop up at trade events occasionally and perhaps wholesale down the track.

Someone buys the last vase in-store.

You do not particularly want the website cheerfully selling the same vase to someone in Perth five minutes later.

This is the kind of operational problem Shopify is designed around.

And once your ecommerce business becomes more complicated, those operational capabilities matter considerably more than whether we can make one particular heading sit three pixels further to the left.

Although obviously I will still care about the three pixels.

Shopify is also stronger if international growth is part of the plan

For an Australian business with serious ambitions to sell internationally, Shopify has another advantage.

Shopify Markets can customise things such as currency, pricing and product availability for different geographic markets. Customers can be shown local currencies when the appropriate payment setup is used, which makes the platform much better suited to businesses that are actively managing international ecommerce.

Squarespace Commerce can sell internationally and supports different store currencies, but a Squarespace store operates in one store currency at a time.

If 95% of your customers are in Australia and an occasional person from New Zealand places an order, that difference may mean absolutely nothing to you.

If your business plan says Australia this year, US and UK next year, it starts becoming much more relevant.

This is why I always come back to the same point:

Choose for the business you are genuinely building, not the fantasy multinational corporation you may theoretically become in 2037.

You need enough room to grow.

You do not need enterprise infrastructure to sell twelve candles.

Which is better for design: Squarespace or Shopify?

This is usually where Squarespace gets the automatic vote.

And yes, Squarespace has earned its reputation for visually strong, editorial-style websites. Its design system works particularly well for service businesses, portfolios and brands where large imagery, typography and storytelling need to do a lot of the work.

But Shopify websites do not have to look like generic Shopify stores.

With the right theme, art direction and customisation, a Shopify website can be incredibly beautiful.

The difference is more about what is happening underneath.

On Squarespace I can often approach the site from:

What is the strongest way to tell this brand's story?

On Shopify there is an additional layer:

What is the strongest way to tell this brand's story while helping somebody navigate, filter, compare and buy products efficiently?

Design still matters enormously.

It just has another job.

And in ecommerce, I am very wary of sacrificing usability because somebody saw a wonderfully avant-garde website where nobody could actually find the cart.

Your customer should not have to participate in an escape room to buy a linen cushion.

What about SEO: is Shopify or Squarespace better?

This is another area where there is a lot of fairly dramatic internet commentary. Both platforms have solid built-in SEO foundations.

Squarespace automatically handles elements including sitemaps, SSL, structured data and clean URLs, while allowing you to manage metadata and other on-page settings.

Shopify also automatically generates sitemaps, canonical tags and SSL, and allows optimisation of page titles, descriptions, URLs and image alt text across pages, products, collections and blog content.

So I would not choose between Squarespace and Shopify based purely on somebody declaring that one is “better for SEO”. Your platform is only part of the equation. A beautifully optimised technical website containing three vague paragraphs about “bringing your vision to life” is still not going to suddenly dominate Google.

SEO comes from understanding what your audience is searching for and building useful, well-structured content around those searches. For a service business that might mean individual service pages, location-based content, case studies and useful articles. For an ecommerce business it may mean strong product descriptions, collection pages, category structure, useful guides and content that answers purchasing questions.

The platform gives us the tools.

The strategy gives Google something worth finding.

What does each platform cost in Australia?

This is where I would encourage you not to make the decision based on twenty dollars a month.

At the time of writing, Squarespace advertises Australian website plans starting from around AUD $17 per month when billed annually. Shopify Basic currently starts from AUD $42 per month on annual billing or $56 month-to-month.

There can then be payment-processing fees, transaction fees and additional costs depending on the plan, payment provider, apps and functionality you use. Squarespace’s current Australian payment rates and commerce transaction fees vary by plan; Shopify’s card and third-party transaction fees also vary between plans.

But I would look at cost in context.

If Shopify saves a product business hours every week managing inventory and orders, paying a little more for the platform is not the expensive choice.

Likewise, if you run a consultancy and need four good service pages, a journal and an enquiry form, paying for a complicated ecommerce ecosystem that you don’t use is hardly strategic financial management.

The cheapest software and the most cost-effective software are not always the same thing.

Think about what happens after the website launches

This is something I discuss with clients a lot.

When we’re designing the website, everyone is understandably focused on what it will look like on launch day.

I’m also thinking about Tuesday morning six months later.

Who is adding the new service?
Who is publishing the article?
Who updates the product price?
Who adds the new collection?
Who manages the stock?
Who changes the image when you suddenly decide you hate it?
Because you will.

Running a business means your website will evolve.

For service businesses, I love Squarespace partly because clients can generally manage normal content updates without needing significant technical knowledge.

For ecommerce clients, I like Shopify because the backend is built around the things they will spend every day managing: products, customers, inventory and orders.

A good platform should reduce friction behind the scenes as well as look good out the front.

So, which one would I choose for your business?

If you are a consultant, interior designer, building designer, architect, photographer, creative studio, wellness practitioner, personal brand or other service-based business, I would usually start the conversation with Squarespace.

If you're a service business that also sells a few products, I would still seriously consider Squarespace.

If you're a product-led business where ecommerce is the main revenue model, particularly if you have meaningful inventory, product variants, retail ambitions, significant order volumes or international expansion plans, I would probably start with Shopify.

But there are plenty of businesses sitting somewhere in the middle.

And that is where I would stop asking:

Which platform is better?

and start asking:

Which platform is better for the way my customer needs to interact with my business?

That is a much more useful question.

The website needs to fit the business, not the other way around

One of the mistakes I see small businesses make is choosing technology first and then trying to bend the business around it.

Someone tells them they have to use Shopify.

Or Squarespace.

Or WordPress.

Or whatever platform currently has the loudest person explaining websites on TikTok.

I would rather understand the business first.

What do you sell? Who buys it? How do they buy it? What information do they need before making that decision? Are we trying to generate an enquiry or process a transaction? What needs to integrate with the website? Who is going to manage it? Where is the business heading?

Then we choose the technology.

Because your customer genuinely does not care which platform your website runs on.

They care that it loads, makes sense, looks credible, answers their questions and makes it incredibly easy to do whatever you want them to do next.

And preferably that they don't need a treasure map to find the contact button.

That is the bit that matters.

NEED HELP WORKING OUT WHICH WEBSITE YOUR BUSINESS ACTUALLY NEEDS?

At Cat Gerke Creative, I design strategic Squarespace and Shopify websites for creative, service-based, founder-led and product businesses across Australia.

The platform is never my starting point.

I look at your brand, customer, content, offers, business model and how people need to move through the website first. From there, we can work out whether Squarespace, Shopify or simply a better version of what you already have is the smartest next move.

You don't need to arrive knowing exactly what you need. That's part of my job.

LET'S TALK ABOUT YOUR WEBSITE →