Squarespace stores: beautiful, with catches

Comparison table

The facts in one place first. Figures as of July 2026.

The prettiest templates, and where they stop selling

Open the Squarespace template gallery and for a moment you feel like you are in a design studio's portfolio. This is where it genuinely leads, and I will come back to it. The trouble starts when you try to turn that beauty into a working store in a country where people expect to pay cash to the courier and collect their parcel from a pickup point.

Squarespace is a fully hosted American SaaS website builder with a strong commerce layer. You install nothing and host nothing, and Squarespace handles operations, SSL and security. It is built primarily for the American and Western European markets, though, and that is the problem. To make it concrete I will use Czechia as the test case throughout, because the local expectations there are easy to name and the platform fails them in a way you can price. The interface is not available in Czech (Squarespace localises into dozens of languages, and Czech is not one of them) and prices are not converted into crowns.

Dollar pricing and a cut of your sales

Squarespace has four tiers and bills in dollars. Entry level Basic costs 16 USD a month paid annually, but it also takes 2 percent of every physical product sale and 7 percent of digital content and memberships. That fee only disappears from the Core tier at 23 USD, where the cut on physical products is zero and you pay only your payment processor's rate. Above that sit Plus at 39 USD and Advanced at 99 USD a month.

Be clear about what that 2 percent on Basic is. It is not a payment processing fee, it is an extra commission the platform itself takes. On small volumes it looks harmless. On turnover in the hundreds of thousands it is a tax that hosted local platforms in that market do not charge. Anyone who wants Squarespace without a cut of sales has to start at Core or above, and add Stripe or PayPal fees on top.

Squarespace Payments does not cover every country

Here is the first big catch, and it is worth checking for your own country before anything else. Squarespace's own gateway, Squarespace Payments, works only in a named list of countries: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, Finland, Austria, Italy, Portugal, Australia and New Zealand. Czechia is not among them. A Czech merchant is left with Stripe or PayPal, full stop.

In practice that rules out the local gateways, Comgate and GoPay, and above all cash on delivery, which a solid share of customers there still use. The instant bank transfer button local shoppers are used to is off the table as well. Card via Stripe, or PayPal, and the choice ends. For a store aimed at ordinary local customers, that alone is a good enough reason to look elsewhere. Run the same check wherever you are: if the platform's own gateway does not cover you, everything downstream gets harder.

Local carriers and invoicing are not coming

The second catch is shipping. Squarespace has no native integration with Packeta, PPL, Balíkovna or the other Czech pickup point networks, meaning collection points, label generation and cash on delivery, all of which local platforms ship as standard. It aims at American and international carriers, not at a pickup box ecosystem that has grown past 15 thousand locations in one small country.

The third catch is invoicing. There is no generation of local invoices carrying the statutory identifiers a Czech tax document needs, and no link to local accounting. To be clear, this has nothing to do with fiscal cash registers, which Czechia abolished on 1 January 2023. It is ordinary local invoicing and accounting integrations, which simply are not there and would have to be handled by hand or through another tool.

Getting out again: 2,000 products and 3 variants

Before you walk in anywhere, it pays to know how you get out. With Squarespace the answer is unpleasant. The export is partial. Content exports to XML in WordPress format, but images often do not travel and remain as links to Squarespace servers, which stop working once you cancel the site. So download the photos in advance.

The catalogue has a hard ceiling. The export handles a maximum of 2,000 products, carries only physical and service products (digital products and gift cards not at all) and at most 3 variants per product, with the rest added by hand. On top of that there is no direct content transfer between versions 7.0 and 7.1 apart from products. It is classic hosted platform lock in, and it is fair to know that up front rather than at the moment you want to leave.

Who Squarespace does suit

I do not want to talk Squarespace down, because at one thing it is genuinely excellent. The templates and the design are among the best on the market and for a visually demanding brand that is a strong argument. From Core upward you pay no commission on physical products, and hosting, SSL, a blog and selling digital products and memberships all sit under one roof.

It suits a brand selling mainly abroad, typically into the United States or Western Europe, where the gateway and the carriers work. It suits a portfolio, a presentation site or a service business with a handful of products alongside, where looks matter more than cash on delivery. For that type of site Squarespace is a sensible choice and there is no reason to condemn it on principle.

Where I would not recommend it is an ordinary store in a market it does not support, one that needs cash on delivery, pickup points and compliant local invoices. There you get pushed into a corner and end up gluing together things that come included elsewhere.

How a local platform handles it

If you like the idea of a good looking hosted store but you do not want to lose local operations, comparing a local platform makes sense. Behio has the Czech payment gateways (Comgate, GoPay), cash on delivery, Packeta and the Zaslat aggregator covering PPL, DPD, GLS and Balíkovna, plus invoicing with export into Pohoda, the accounting format most Czech businesses use, all included. The interface is available in Czech, Slovak and English and prices are in crowns, so exchange rate risk disappears.

And because the storefront is generated as real Next.js code you can export and self host, you are not locked into a template layer the way you are with Squarespace. Design happens either in a visual editor or directly in the code.

The verdict

Common questions