AfterShip vs Squarespace

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.

Squarespace is a website builder founded in 2003 by Anthony Casalena in New York. Known for polished, design-led templates and an all-in-one approach, it hosts websites, online stores, blogs, portfolios, scheduling, email campaigns and member areas under one subscription. Squarespace was taken private by the investment firm Permira in 2024.

Commerce features include physical and digital products, subscriptions, inventory, discounts, abandoned cart recovery, shipping and tax tools, and checkout through Squarespace Payments, Stripe or PayPal. Acuity Scheduling, which Squarespace acquired, handles appointments and classes. Email Campaigns, member sites with gated content, domains and SSL are built in. Blueprint AI generates a starting site from a few answers about the business. Since 2025 the plans are named Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced, replacing the older Personal, Business and Commerce tiers; Basic charges a transaction fee on store sales, while the higher tiers remove or lower it and add features such as subscriptions and advanced shipping.

Squarespace suits photographers, designers, restaurants, consultants and small boutiques that value aesthetics and want minimal maintenance. It is less flexible than WordPress, its e-commerce is behind Shopify for large catalogs, and complex layouts can be slow to build. Wix offers more apps and design freedom, Shopify is the default for serious online stores, and Webflow suits designers who want fine control. Because its payment options rely on Stripe and PayPal, sellers based in Turkey face practical limits for commerce.