Shopify vs Wix vs Squarespace: Where to Sell in 2026

Short answer: if you sell products, start on Shopify. It is the cheapest of the three to test and the only one that ships with a channel for selling inside AI chats. Three months on Shopify Basic cost $3: $1 a month after a 3-day free trial, then $39 a month or $29 on yearly billing (shopify.com/pricing, read 24 September 2026). Wix's cheapest plan that can take payments is Core at $29 a month on yearly billing. Squarespace's cheapest plan without a platform fee on product sales is Core at $17 a month yearly, $27 monthly. On plan price alone, Squarespace is the cheapest of the three once the first year starts. Shopify wins if what you run is a store: unlimited products, its own checkout, and an AI-chat sales channel on every plan, which we saw switched on in our own Basic store from day one.

What this is based on. We run a real Shopify store, opened 20 September 2026 on the Basic plan, so the Shopify behaviour below is what we saw ourselves. We have not opened a Wix or Squarespace store. Every Wix and Squarespace fact here comes from the vendor's own pricing page, help center or blog, read on 24 September 2026 and linked where it is used. That is why this page has no scores. How we draw that line: how we test.

What we ran and what we only read

One caution on location. Our office is in Israel, and two of the three sites price by country. Wix's plans page showed us local prices with tax included, so the Wix dollar prices below come from Wix's own pricing guide on its blog. Check each pricing page from your own country before you budget.

Which plan can actually sell, and what it costs

The cheapest plan on each homepage is not always a plan that can sell. This is the entry point that takes an order and a payment:

Sources: shopify.com/pricing; Wix's plan cost guide and help center, which says a Light plan "won't be able to accept payments"; squarespace.com/pricing. All read 24 September 2026.

Three things in that table that are easy to miss:

• Wix's listed prices are yearly, paid in full. Its own guide says the prices on the pricing page "are for yearly subscriptions paid in full". Core at $29 a month is $348 on the day you start. Wix does offer a 14-day money-back guarantee (help center, 24 September 2026). Wix's free plan shows Wix ads and cannot sell.
• Squarespace Basic charges 2% on every product sale. Core is $5 a month more on yearly billing and charges 0%. So Core pays for itself at $250 a month in sales ($5 ÷ 2%), or about $400 a month if you compare the monthly prices ($8 ÷ 2%). If you plan to sell at all, budget Core.
• Shopify's 2% only applies if you do not use Shopify Payments. With Shopify Payments there is no third-party transaction fee. But Shopify Payments covers about 40 countries. Our own store is registered in Israel, and its Payments page offers no Shopify Payments option, so a store like ours pays the 2% on Basic. The details are in Shopify Payments: what it asks for.

What three months of selling costs you

If you are testing whether your products sell at all, the money that matters is how much you spend before you find out.

Our arithmetic from the pages above, read 24 September 2026. We could not see a monthly price for Wix, so the Wix row uses the only price it showed us. The Shopify row is what our own store's plan screen said after signup: "$1 USD/month until 23 December 2026".

The $1 period is the reason we tell product sellers to start on Shopify even though Squarespace is cheaper over a full year. Shopify's Help Center says it "doesn't extend or reset free trials or promotional pricing", so use the three months to sell, not to think about it. Our Shopify worth-it breakdown covers what the store costs after the $1 period and when Grow earns its extra $50 a month.

Card fees per sale

The plan price is the fixed cost. The card fee is the one that grows with you. With each platform's own payments service, in the US:

At the entry plans the three are close: about 2.9% plus 30 cents a sale. We have not taken a payment on any of them, so we will not claim which one is cheaper for your order size. Shopify did not show its per-plan online rate from our location. You will find it in your own Payments settings. Our Shopify fee calculator adds the plan and the fees up at your own volume.

Wix and Squarespace both add 1.5% on international cards. Squarespace also lists 5.45% + $0.30 for Klarna and 6% + $0.30 for Afterpay.

The AI part: which one sells inside ChatGPT

This is where the three differ most in 2026, and where the evidence is least even.

Shopify: built into the plan, and on in our store. Every Shopify plan lists "Sell in AI chats" (pricing page, 24 September 2026). Our Basic store had an "Agentic" sales channel in the admin from the first day, with "Allow Shopify to manage for me" switched on for ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. Shopify's Agentic Storefronts page says it is "enabled automatically for eligible stores", with the sale going through Shopify's own checkout. Two honest caveats. First, eligibility is real: our brand-new store's Shopify Catalog, which is what AI agents read, still showed 0 products after we added one, and Shopify's requirements include a public store and a sales history (what we measured). Second, Shopify's terms say it "may" charge a fee on some AI-channel sales, shown per channel in the admin. How to set it up: selling on ChatGPT with Shopify.

Wix: rolling out. Wix's own agentic commerce post (27 July, updated 26 August) says Stripe's Agentic Commerce Suite "is rolling out gradually" to eligible Wix merchants, and that PayPal's in-chat checkout is "anticipated to follow shortly". It does not say which plans or countries qualify.

Squarespace: not found. We found no Squarespace page about selling products inside ChatGPT or other AI agents. What it does offer is an "AI Visibility" tool on its pricing page, to track how your brand shows up in AI search, and a Squarespace GPT that hands a site description to its website builder. Useful, but that builds a site. It does not sell in the chat.

The AI assistants inside the builder

All three now sell AI help for running the site. Here is how each one is included, from the vendors' own pages:

• Shopify Sidekick is "included with your Shopify plan", with limits that "vary by plan". We ran it on our Basic store for five real jobs. It audited the store, wrote a discount, fixed SEO fields and generated a working custom app on Basic, though Shopify's Help Center says app generation needs Grow. It also set a discount to end an hour early, so check what it writes. The full test: Shopify Sidekick tutorial.
• Squarespace counts AI in credits: 10 one-time credits on Basic, 20 a month on Core, 120 a month on Advanced (pricing page). Its toolset includes Blueprint AI for building the site, AI writing, and an image studio.
• Wix lists a team of AI agents for stores (setup, SEO and marketing, customer chat, automation) plus AI product descriptions and packshots. Its post does not say which plans include them.

Shopify vs Wix vs Squarespace at a glance

Who should pick which

Who should skip Shopify

Shopify is built to sell products. If the site is a portfolio, a restaurant menu or a service business that mainly takes enquiries, you would pay $39 a month for a checkout you rarely use. Squarespace's and Wix's site builders are aimed at exactly that, and Squarespace Core costs $204 a year on yearly billing against $348 for Shopify Basic. Coaches and consultants who sell appointments are usually better served by a booking tool; our booking app guide compares the ones we built with.

Verdict

For a small business whose goal is to sell products, Shopify is the one to start on in 2026. It costs $3 to run for three months. It has no product cap from Basic. And it is the only one of the three whose pricing page lists selling inside AI chats on every plan, a channel we saw in our own store's admin. Squarespace is the cheaper yearly bill if the site matters more than the store. Wix makes sense mainly if you are already on it. Whichever you pick, the plan that can sell is not the cheapest plan on the page: Shopify Basic, Wix Core, Squarespace Core.