BigCommerce vs Squarespace

BigCommerce is a hosted e-commerce platform founded in Sydney in 2009 and now based in Austin, Texas. It is a publicly listed company and, in 2025, its parent company renamed itself Commerce while keeping BigCommerce as the platform brand alongside the product feed service Feedonomics and the visual site builder Makeswift. Its pitch against Shopify is openness: no transaction fees on orders through its embedded payment providers, open APIs and strong headless and B2B capabilities.

The platform includes more out of the box than most rivals: product options and variants, faceted search, customer groups and price lists, multi-currency and multi-storefront management. Core, Growth and Scale plans have fixed monthly prices but cap sales (GMV) per tier and charge a small fee on orders through outside payment providers, so a growing store is moved to a higher plan or to Performance, which adds custom pricing and contract terms. Channel Manager connects listings to Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping and social platforms.

BigCommerce suits mid-market brands, B2B wholesalers and companies building a headless storefront with Next.js or a CMS. Beginners usually find Shopify easier, with a larger theme and app ecosystem, while WooCommerce gives more control to teams that want to self-host. For Turkish merchants, local payment, marketplace and e-fatura integrations are thin, so local platforms such as ikas or T-Soft are often more practical.

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.