Wix wins for most online stores. It offers 80+ payment gateways, native multi-currency checkout, subscriptions and abandoned cart recovery from the same $27 per month plan, and an AI onboarding that generates a stocked product catalog before you touch a single setting manually.
Squarespace wins for one specific seller: a solo creative selling a small physical product catalog to a domestic audience, who prioritises design quality above everything else and will never need to sell internationally. Outside that profile, Wix delivers more selling capability at every comparable price point.
1. eCommerce Pricing and Transaction Fees
Wix starts cheaper at entry. Squarespace’s Advanced plan at $25 per month with 0% fees on everything makes it competitive at mid-tier, but Wix reaches that same fee-free position for physical products at $14 per month.
Wix
Wix charges 0% platform transaction fees on physical product sales across every paid plan, including the entry Core tier at $14 per month. You only pay the standard payment processing rate to Wix Payments or your chosen gateway.
The fee structure that catches sellers off guard is on subscription products, which run through Wix’s Pricing Plans feature. The Core plan charges a 4% transaction fee on every subscription order. At Business ($27 per month), that drops to 2%. Business Elite at $48 per month eliminates the fee entirely.
What that means in practice:
- 50 subscribers at $30 per month on Core: $60 per month in fees, plus $14 plan cost
- Same scenario on Business ($27 per month): $30 per month in fees, saving $17 per month net
- Same scenario on Business Elite ($48 per month): $0 in fees, saving $42 per month net versus Core
Before choosing a plan, run the subscription fee calculation against your actual or projected subscriber count.
The breakeven between Core and Business hits at roughly 15 active subscribers. The breakeven between Business and Business Elite hits at roughly 70.
Squarespace
Squarespace currently offers three tiers in the US. Basic at $12 per month is the cheapest entry point on either platform, but the 2% physical store fee and 7% digital content fee make it genuinely viable only for testing, not for active selling.
Core at $17 per month removes the physical product fee entirely and drops digital to 5%. Advanced at $25 per month reaches 0% on everything, including digital content and memberships, making it the most cost-efficient fully fee-free option between the two platforms at that price point.
The digital content fee is the number most worth modelling before you choose a tier. A creator selling $3,000 per month in digital downloads on Basic pays $210 per month in fees alone.
Moving to Core at $17 per month saves $193 net that month, and Advanced at $25 eliminates the remaining 5% entirely.
2. Abandoned Cart and Subscriptions
Both features directly generate revenue by recovering sales already in progress or locking in recurring revenue. The tier at which each platform unlocks them is one of the clearest capability differences between the two.
Wix
Wix unlocks both abandoned cart recovery and subscription product selling at the Business plan, which costs $27 per month on annual billing.
I found this to be the most important plan threshold for any store with growth ambitions, because both features address revenue that is otherwise lost rather than revenue you have to work to generate.
Abandoned cart recovery sends automated emails to customers who added products to the cart and left without completing the purchase. Industry benchmarks suggest recovery rates of 5% to 15% on those emails.
For a store generating $10,000 in monthly revenue, recovering even 5% of a typical 70% cart abandonment rate adds roughly $350 in recovered sales per month. The $27 plan pays for itself in that context, before anything else it includes.
Subscription products through Pricing Plans let you sell monthly or annual access to anything: a coffee subscription, a digital product membership, a recurring service. The 2% transaction fee at Business level is a real cost to plan for, and Business Elite at $48 per month eliminates it entirely for stores where subscriptions are central to the revenue model.
Squarespace
Squarespace’s Advanced plan at $25 per month is where the full commerce feature set lands, including abandoned cart recovery, subscriptions, and 0% fees on everything. That is $2 per month less than Wix Business.
The subscription fee comparison is where Squarespace Advanced pulls ahead for high-volume subscription sellers. Wix Business at $27 per month still carries a 2% subscription transaction fee. Squarespace Advanced at $25 per month charges nothing on subscription orders.
At 100 active subscribers paying $30 per month:
- Wix Business: $27 plan + $60 in subscription fees = $87 total
- Squarespace Advanced: $25 plan + $0 in fees = $25 total
The crossover point where Wix Business becomes more expensive than Squarespace Advanced sits at roughly 10 active subscribers at $30 per month.
3. Payment Gateways and Multi-Currency Checkout
This is the most consequential structural difference for any store selling to customers outside a single domestic market.
Wix
Wix supports over 80 payment gateways, covering region-specific processors across Latin America, Southeast Asia, Europe, and beyond.
If you need to accept a local payment method in Brazil, Japan, or Indonesia, Wix almost certainly supports it through one of its gateway options.
The multi-currency feature is built into the platform natively. From the Accept Payments screen, a Multi-Currency button activates a converter widget that displays prices in local currencies for international visitors.
When I set up the coffee shop store during testing, this was surfaced alongside the payment provider selection with no additional app required.
That native integration matters in a way that is easy to understate. Multi-currency display reduces the friction of international purchasing by letting customers see familiar prices rather than converting from a foreign currency in their head. It is a conversion optimisation feature that most smaller platforms charge extra for or do not offer at all.
BNPL through Afterpay, Affirm, and Klarna is available via Wix Payments, though each requires a separate merchant application and carries a 6% + $0.30 fee per transaction, more than double the standard card rate. Plan accordingly if BNPL is a material part of your checkout strategy.
Squarespace
Squarespace’s payment gateway options are limited to approximately five: Squarespace Payments, Stripe, PayPal, Square, and Apple Pay.
For a domestic seller in the US, UK, or Western Europe, those options cover the majority of how customers want to pay. For a seller who needs regional payment methods in markets those gateways do not serve, Squarespace has no solution.
The multi-currency situation is the most significant eCommerce limitation on the platform. Squarespace does not support multi-currency checkout at any tier. The store operates in a single currency, and customers are charged in that currency regardless of where they are located.
Third-party extensions like TinyCurrency and SF.Digital’s Currency plugin can display prices in a visitor’s local currency on the storefront, but they explicitly cannot change the checkout currency.
Customers see a localized price on the product page, then reach checkout and are charged in the store’s base currency with their card issuer converting the transaction automatically. That disconnect between displayed and charged currency creates trust issues at the most critical point in the purchase journey.
For a UK-based creative selling to a domestic audience, this is not a problem. For any store with meaningful international revenue or growth ambitions beyond a single market, it is a structural limitation that no plan upgrade resolves.
4. Product Management and Inventory
Both platforms handle unlimited or near-unlimited product catalogs competently. The differences show up in how quickly a store can get stocked and how deep the management tools go.
Wix
The AI product catalog generation is where Wix’s eCommerce setup experience genuinely separates itself from every competing platform I have tested.
During my coffee shop setup, the AI generated 9 categorically appropriate products with descriptions, variants, and filter attributes, including a Bag Size filter that I never specified, before I performed any manual product work.
Every other eCommerce platform drops you into a blank product page and tells you to get started. Wix gives you a working first draft to edit, which is a fundamentally different starting position for a first-time store owner facing the intimidation of an empty catalog.
Product type flexibility covers the full range of modern selling from one catalog:
- Physical products with inventory tracking and back in stock requests
- Digital files for downloadable content
- Print-on-demand merchandise through a third-party partner with no inventory held
Performance data is embedded directly in the product editing view. I can check how a specific product is performing across the last 30 days without leaving the product page, which is a small UX decision that adds up across the week-to-week operations of a real store.
Squarespace
Squarespace’s product management is clean, well-designed, and capable for a store of moderate complexity.
Up to 6 product options and 250 variants per product covers the needs of most sellers, and the product detail page design is among the best-looking of any platform at this level.
Product reviews are built into the platform natively, which is a genuine advantage over Wix where reviews require installing a third-party app. For a store where social proof matters at the product level, not needing an app for basic review collection is worth noting.
Print-on-demand is available through the Printful extension rather than being built into the core catalog. It works, but it sits outside the native product management flow. Squarespace also has no AI product description generator or AI catalog generation at setup, meaning the work of writing copy and populating products is entirely manual from day one.
5. Multichannel and Store Marketing
Selling beyond your own website and marketing to existing customers are both capabilities that compound over time. The platform gap here is significant.
Wix
Multichannel selling on Wix connects your store to Facebook, Instagram, eBay, and Amazon through apps in the Wix App Market.
Your product catalog, inventory, and orders sync across channels from the same dashboard where you manage everything else. For a store trying to reach customers where they already spend time, this is a meaningful acquisition channel that requires no separate platform to manage.
The Semrush integration is the standout marketing differentiator. Keyword research is available directly inside the Wix dashboard without a separate paid subscription.
For a store owner trying to rank product pages for terms customers are actively searching, having search volume and keyword data at the point of writing product descriptions and page titles removes a significant workflow friction.
Email marketing through Wix Email Marketing is native but priced separately from the website plan. Removing Wix branding from campaign footers requires the Essentials email tier at $10 per month minimum. Factor that into your real monthly cost from day one rather than discovering it after launch.
The loyalty and referral programs available on Business Elite at $48 per month are meaningful for stores at a growth stage where repeat purchase rates matter. Neither is available on Squarespace at any tier.
Squarespace
Squarespace’s marketing tools are polished and consistent with the rest of the platform’s design-forward approach.
Email campaigns use the same design engine as the site, producing visually strong communications without design work. Promotional pop-ups, announcement bars, and product waitlists are all built in.
The multichannel gap is real. Facebook and Instagram product selling is available via extensions rather than native sync, and eBay and Amazon selling are not supported at all. For a store whose growth strategy includes marketplace and social selling, Squarespace’s closed extension model imposes a ceiling that Wix’s app market does not.
There is no equivalent to Wix’s Semrush integration. Keyword research requires a separate tool and manual application of findings to the site. SEO optimisation for product pages is technically capable but entirely unguided compared to Wix’s in-dashboard tooling.
6. Store Design and Checkout Experience
Squarespace’s design advantage is real and visible. The question for a store owner is whether it translates into better conversion or just better aesthetics.
Wix
Wix’s AI site generation during eCommerce setup produces a genuinely on-brand result. In my coffee shop test, the AI selected a rust and terracotta colour palette, chose atmospheric imagery appropriate to the brand, and generated a design that reflected the tone of voice I described in the onboarding chat.
That is contextual generation rather than template filling, and it accelerates setup in a way that is hard to replicate manually.
The open canvas editor gives you more design freedom on product pages than Squarespace’s structured approach.
If you want an offset layout, overlapping elements, or a product page that diverges meaningfully from a standard format, Wix allows it. The risk is that this freedom requires discipline: it is easier to create an inconsistent or cluttered result on Wix than on Squarespace.
Mobile responsiveness sometimes requires manual adjustment because total design freedom on desktop means the platform occasionally makes wrong stacking decisions for phone screens. Checking the mobile view and correcting layout issues before launch is a standard step in any Wix store build.
Squarespace
Squarespace’s product pages are among the best-designed of any platform at this level. Each product detail page supports over 40 types of content blocks, including videos, Instagram feeds, calendars, and related product carousels.
The structured grid prevents the layout problems that open canvas editors can create, and global style controls enforce brand consistency across every page without user intervention.
On-domain checkout is available from Core upward, meaning customers never leave your site during the purchase process. This is a conversion advantage compared to platforms that redirect to a third-party checkout URL, and it is included at the entry eCommerce tier.
The design ceiling matters most for creative businesses and premium brands where the visual quality of the store directly affects how customers perceive the products. For a jeweller, photographer selling prints, or luxury goods brand, Squarespace’s design quality is a genuine business argument rather than just an aesthetic preference.
| Scenario | Better fit |
| Entry eCommerce | Wix |
| 0% physical product fees from | Wix |
| Subscriptions from | Wix |
| Abandoned cart from | Wix |
| Multi-currency checkout | Wix |
| Payment gateways | Wix |
| Multichannel selling | Wix |
| AI product catalog generation | Wix |
| Advanced eCommerce | Depends on store model |
Wix wins. The three strongest reasons are payment gateway breadth at 80+ options versus Squarespace’s five, native multi-currency checkout that Squarespace cannot offer at any tier, and a $27 per month Business plan that unlocks abandoned cart recovery, subscriptions, and multichannel selling that Squarespace does not match until $39 per month.
Squarespace earns the recommendation in one specific scenario: you are a solo creative, jeweller, or photographer selling a small physical product catalog to a domestic audience, design quality is your primary commercial signal to customers, and you have no plans to sell internationally or through social and marketplace channels.
For that seller, Squarespace Core at $17 per month with 0% physical product fees and a polished store design is a focused, cost-effective choice.
