AfterShip vs Square

AfterShip is a post-purchase platform for ecommerce brands, started in Hong Kong around 2011 to 2012 by Teddy Chan, Andrew Chan and Dante Tsang after Teddy built a script to cut where-is-my-order emails in his own store. It raised a $66M Series B led by Tiger Global in 2021. Its core job is keeping shoppers informed after checkout and reducing support tickets about deliveries, returns and delays.

The suite is sold as separate products: Tracking (branded tracking pages, delivery notifications, estimated delivery dates and analytics across 1,300+ carriers), Returns (self-serve returns and exchanges), Shipping (label printing and rate comparison), Protection (shipping insurance), plus personalization and warranty tools. AI features and an MCP server give assistants read access to shipment and return data. Each product has its own tiers, and the Shopify App Store versions are priced differently from direct plans.

AfterShip fits Shopify, BigCommerce and WooCommerce brands that ship thousands of orders a year and want to turn tracking emails and pages into a marketing channel. Brands mainly needing cheap labels should look at Shippo, Easyship or ShipStation, and EU merchants often pick Sendcloud.

Buying tip: in mid-2026 AfterShip cut its direct Tracking plans from four to three, renamed Pro to Premium at $59 a month billed yearly, and moved to annual shipment quotas (6,000 a year on both paid tiers). API and webhooks start on Premium. On Shopify, compare the app's own plans, which include a free tier for 50 shipments a month.

Square is the payments and commerce platform of Block, Inc., the San Francisco company founded in 2009 by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey. It started with a card reader that plugged into a phone and has grown into an all-in-one system for small and medium businesses: point of sale, online store, invoices, appointments, payroll, team management, banking, loans and loyalty.

The core POS app is free, and businesses pay per-transaction processing fees at flat rates that differ for in-person, online and keyed-in payments. Square sells its own hardware, from mobile card readers to Square Register and Square Terminal, and offers editions for restaurants, retail and appointment-based services with paid Plus and Premium tiers per location that add advanced features such as kitchen displays, inventory tools and multi-location management. Square Online, Invoices and Appointments share the same catalog and customer directory.

Square suits brick-and-mortar businesses such as cafés, salons, shops and food trucks that want to start taking payments the same day. It operates only in a limited set of countries, including the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Japan, Ireland, France and Spain, and is not available to businesses in Turkey. Flat rates become expensive at high volume compared with interchange-plus pricing, and account holds can occur. Toast is a stronger restaurant specialist, Shopify POS fits omnichannel retail brands, and Stripe is better for online-only software businesses.