The underlying difference
Squarespace is very well designed for portfolios, service businesses, restaurants or personal brands with a small store. Its visual editor is comfortable and its templates are polished. The store is just one more part of the website.
Shopify is the other way around: everything revolves around the catalog, the checkout and order management. Content exists (pages, blog, metaobjects), but it serves the goal of selling. If your main goal is to generate revenue online, that focus matters more than any other comparison.
Catalog and product page
Shopify lets you model your catalog in detail: variants (up to 3 options and 2048 variants per product), metafields for specifications, metaobjects for structured content such as size guides or ingredient sheets, automated collections based on rules and configurable filters with Search & Discovery.
That keeps a catalog of hundreds or thousands of products manageable for your team and easy to browse for customers. With a small catalog the difference is less noticeable; with a growing one, it is very noticeable.
A practical example: a beauty brand that wants to show ingredients, how to use and skin type on each product. In Shopify each piece of data is a metafield, ingredients can be reusable metaobjects with their own description and customers can filter the collection by skin type. Everything is edited in the admin and the theme always shows it in the same place.
Order management, inventory and operations
Once the store starts processing orders every day, what saves the most time is not design but management. Shopify has an admin built for that: orders with fulfillment and shipping statuses, returns, inventory by location (up to 10 on standard plans and 200 on Plus), staff accounts with permissions and sales reports.
Shopify Flow, free on all main plans, automates repetitive tasks: tagging risky orders, alerting you when a product runs low, flagging repeat customers or moving sold-out products to the end of a collection. And integrations with ERPs, third-party warehouses and marketplaces usually have a direct Shopify connector.
If you handle few orders today this seems secondary. When they multiply, it decides how many hours your team spends in the admin.
Checkout, payments and conversion
Shopify's checkout is one of its strengths: optimized and tested at huge scale, with Shop Pay as accelerated checkout and Shopify Payments in Spain for cards and other methods without an external gateway. It can be customized with branding on all plans and with extensions on every step on Shopify Plus.
On top of that you get native marketing automations with Shopify Messaging, such as abandoned cart or welcome emails, and Shopify Flow to automate internal processes at no extra cost.
Growth: international, B2B and retail
This is where they differ most. Shopify includes Markets on all plans to sell in several countries with their own currency, language and prices, and Translate & Adapt to translate the store. Shopify adds hreflang automatically for each language and market.
It also has native B2B (up to 3 catalogs on standard plans and unlimited on Plus) and Shopify POS to sell in a physical store with the same inventory and customers as the online store. If any of these scenarios is in your plans, start on Shopify so you do not have to migrate later.
- Markets to sell in several countries
- Translate & Adapt for translation
- Native B2B with catalogs per customer
- POS for physical retail with unified inventory
- Broad ecosystem of ecommerce apps
Design and editing
Both platforms let you edit the site without coding. In Shopify, Online Store 2.0 themes work with sections and blocks you add and reorder in the theme editor, and a custom theme can have exactly the sections your brand needs.
Squarespace has a very free-form visual editor, designed for laying out content pages. Shopify is more structured, which in turn makes the store more consistent and easier to maintain when there are many products and several people editing.
In Shopify, the theme code is also accessible. That lets you build a custom theme, with sections designed for your brand, instead of depending on what a template allows. For a brand that wants to stand out visually without giving up the structure of a serious store, that is an important advantage.
Apps and integrations
The Shopify App Store has a very broad catalog of ecommerce apps: reviews, loyalty, subscriptions, logistics, invoicing, marketplaces or customer service. Almost any ecommerce tool used in Spain integrates with Shopify.
That does not mean you should install many. Each app adds a fee and often code that slows the store down. The advantage is having options when you need them and being able to pick the best fit, or build a custom app if none does the job.
How to decide
Choose Squarespace if your site is mostly content or services and the store is an add-on with few products. Choose Shopify if online sales are the core of the business, if your catalog will grow or if you are thinking about international, wholesale or physical retail.
As for pricing, both platforms change their plans often. For Shopify, the reference is shopify.com/pricing. Compare the total cost: subscription, payment fees and the apps you will need in each case.
- Is the store the center of the business or an add-on?
- How many products will you have in a year?
- Will you sell outside Spain?
- Do you or will you sell to businesses?
- Do you or will you have a physical store?
Frequently asked questions
Is Shopify harder to use than Squarespace?
Not day to day. Managing products, orders and content in Shopify is simple. The difference is that Shopify has more ecommerce features, and therefore more options in the admin.
Can I move from Squarespace to Shopify later?
Yes. Products and customers are migrated, the design is rebuilt and URLs are redirected with 301s. The bigger the site grows, the more work it takes.
Which one is better for SEO?
Both allow solid SEO. In Shopify you control titles, descriptions, URLs and the theme's structured data, and hreflang is added automatically in multilingual stores.