Compared Aug 28, 2026
Square Online alternatives
Seven places to move the website half of a small shop, judged on the assumption most of these lists never make: the till on the counter is staying exactly where it is.
Most people typing this are not shopping for a new register. The counter works, the card reader works, the payouts arrive. What has stopped working is the website half — it cannot be found, or it cannot take the kind of order the shop actually needs. So this page judges each option on two jobs and no others: can it be found, and can it take the money. Everything at the counter stays. One thing to be clear about before the table: this page is about where the website half goes next, not about what you are leaving. The rows below are the alternatives; what Square Online itself does and charges is on Square’s own pages, and our comparison of it is its own page, dated and sourced. What this page also will not do is reprint anybody’s rate card. Fees move, they differ by the country you trade in, and a percentage copied here in August is a liability by November — so the number that usually decides this purchase, what a platform charges for pointing checkout at a payment account you chose yourself, belongs on the page you are linked to, on the day you buy. Each row below carries one sentence the provider published about itself, read on Aug 28, 2026 and linked at the foot, and one line from us about who that sentence suits. It is not an audit of the product behind it; for that, open the link. The order is shape rather than merit — it starts with the row that leaves your existing site alone and ends with the two that sell you a shipping operation.
What this page judges
- Getting found
- Half the job, and the half a checkout widget cannot do. A shop that lives on local search needs pages worth ranking — services, areas, hours, the actual work — not one page with a cart dropped into it. So the question for each row is how much site you end up with, and whether the pages are yours to shape.
- Taking the money your own way
- Whether checkout can point at a payment account you already hold, and what the platform charges for letting it. This is where a second layer of cost tends to sit, and it is rarely the number on the poster — so find the fee section of the page you are linked to and read it before you compare monthly prices.
- What changes at the counter
- The premise here is that the register stays. So each row is also asked what it forces on the shop: a second catalogue to keep in step by hand, a new payments relationship you did not come here for, or nothing at all. We judged the website half — if a till integration is what you actually need, make it the first question you ask each company, because it is not one we tested.
The seven, in their own words
| Platform | Best for | In their words, and what we make of it |
|---|---|---|
| Ecwid by Lightspeed | A shop whose website already exists and is not the problem — the only thing missing from it is a working cart | Its pricing page answers the fee question in its own words: “No, we don’t charge any setup or transaction fees on any of our plans.” (Aug 28, 2026). Judge Ecwid on the rest, then. The shape it suits is subtraction: if the site you already have ranks and reads well, rebuilding it to get a checkout is work you do not need to do. |
| Wix | An owner who wants to push the layout around personally over a weekend, and would rather buy the site, the marketing tools and the store from one company than assemble them | Its eCommerce page says “Get everything you need to build, run and scale your business—on one AI-powered eCommerce platform.” (Aug 28, 2026). Read “everything you need” as the shape of the offer: one product meant to cover both halves this page judges, on one bill and one login. Fair enough if that is what you want out of a weekend of work — and settle the fee question on the pricing page rather than from that sentence. |
| Squarespace | A service business that wins work off a portfolio — a photographer, a design studio, a salon — with a few products rather than a catalogue | Its support page on fees opens by splitting the bill in two: “There are two types of costs for completing a sale through Squarespace: payment processing rates and Squarespace transaction fees.” (Aug 28, 2026). That distinction is the most useful thing you can take off this page, and it is theirs rather than ours — the platform’s cut and the processor’s cut are separate charges, and a comparison that merges them will mislead you. Read it, then take your own two numbers off that page on the day you buy. |
| Naratake | A local business replacing the website half and nothing else — a restaurant, salon or trade that wants ordering, table reservations, per-staff appointment slots or quote requests inside the site, with the register left exactly as it is | The middle of this list in shape: you do replace the site, but you are not buying a shipping operation to get one. What you get is a working multi-page site — 40 industry starting points, 15 design styles, 111 components — with online ordering, table reservations, appointment booking by staff member and time slot, and quote requests as blocks in the editor rather than apps you install. Switch ordering on and the back office carries a register as well, ringing from the same catalogue the site sells from, so counter sales and web orders sit on one board. The AI is bring-your-own-key and belongs to LocalSite Studio, our desktop app on that same editor: it drafts the hero, the SEO lines and the item descriptions, or rewrites the one block you right-click, on your own Anthropic, OpenAI or DeepSeek account, so the provider bills you at its own price and neither plan on this row sells you AI usage. On the fee question the answer is structural rather than generous: card payment on a published site runs through your own Stripe account, so the money goes from your customer to you without passing through us, and there is nothing here for us to take a percentage of. Two things to settle before you compare prices. You open that Stripe account and paste both live keys, which is the mechanism the sentence above rests on. And the write side of a published site — the order, the table reservation, the appointment, the quote request landing in an inbox, card payment — is part of the full delivery, which runs on Storefront Pro; on Storefront you can build and preview it, and what publishes is the same site with the write side removed. Downloading the site source is on Storefront Pro as well. Every number in this row comes off our pricing page, linked at the foot with the others. |
| WooCommerce | A shop with a developer on call, or an owner who already runs WordPress and would rather own the checkout than rent it | Its home page says “WooCommerce is the open-source commerce platform for WordPress that gives you full control: of your checkout, your data, your costs.” (Aug 28, 2026). Read “full control” as both halves of the bargain: nobody stands between you and your processor, and nobody does the hosting, the updates or the security either. That second half is a real job. It is cheap only if somebody is already doing it — and a genuine bargain if that somebody exists. |
| Shopify | A business that actually ships — dozens of parcels a day, carrier rates, stock counts and returns, rather than a shopfront that needs to be found and take a card | Its pricing page says “Shopify is an all-in-one commerce platform that lets you create an online store, accept payments, and sell on social channels and in person—all from one dashboard.” (Aug 28, 2026). Read “all-in-one” as the trade this row asks of you: you buy the machinery for a shipping operation whether or not you run one. Worth every penny if parcels go out daily; expensive furniture if the website only has to be found and take a card. |
| BigCommerce | An online operation already at the size where somebody tends the back office full time and the gateway rate was negotiated rather than accepted | Its pricing page describes the customer for one of its plans as “High-volume businesses with $1M+ in annual sales.” (Aug 28, 2026). Read that as the yardstick it measures buyers by — how much you sell, rather than which features you want. So the thing to settle first is which band you expect to be in a year from now, and what happens on the day you cross into the next one. Right for an operation where somebody already tends the back office full time. |
Who this page is not for
If what you actually want to replace is the register, this page is sorted on the wrong axis for you: everything above assumes the counter is fine and only the website has to move, and a page written for someone changing card processors would rank these in a completely different order. One exception before you go: our own row ships a register inside the site, so a counter question is not out of scope for it — and the page that argues that properly is our Square Online comparison rather than this one. If you ship physical products at volume, a percentage is the smallest number in the decision next to inventory, carrier rates and a returns workflow — buy from whoever has already built those and stop reading. If the site you have already ranks, do not rebuild it to get a checkout; adding a cart to what exists is the cheapest correct answer on the page. And if the catalogue has to stay in step between the counter and the web without anybody keying it twice, ask that of each company first and let it eliminate rows before price does — our answer to that question is one catalogue rather than two held in step — typed once, and sold from at the counter and on the web. Now our own row. What ships is our own register: switch ordering on and the site’s back office carries one, ringing from the same menu the site sells from, taking cash with change due and card-present through a Stripe Terminal reader on your own Stripe account, and closing the shift with a Z-report of expected drawer against counted. Counter sales and web orders sit on one board in one database, so the catalogue is typed once rather than twice. Card payment on a published site runs through that same Stripe account, which you open once and connect with both live keys — if you would rather somebody set payments up for you, make that the first thing you ask each of the others. Then pick the plan by where the write side has to run: the order, the table reservation, the appointment, the quote request landing in an inbox and card payment are part of the full delivery and go live on Storefront Pro at $79/month or $758/year, while Storefront at $49/month or $468/year is the plan that builds and previews them — so set our plans against somebody else’s on that line rather than cheapest against cheapest, and know it here rather than after the card was charged.
Questions people actually ask
Do I have to leave Square altogether to change the website?
No, and that assumption is what this whole page is built on. The register, the card reader and the payouts are one relationship; the website is another, and the second can move without the first. What decides how painful that move is has nothing to do with either company: it is who holds the domain. If it is registered to you, at a registrar in your name, changing the website is a DNS change and the printed menus, stickers and van livery stay valid. If it belongs to the platform, you are also reprinting everything with your address on it. Check that before you compare a single price. One thing this page cannot help with: we did not read Square’s own pages for this list on Aug 28, 2026, so nothing here characterises what its website product costs or does.
How do I find out what a platform charges when I bring my own payment account?
Open its pricing or fees page and look for the sentence about third-party, external or open payment providers — that is usually where the charge sits when there is one, and it is often printed on the same page as the headline 0%. Two things make a figure copied into a roundup worthless: the rates differ by the country you trade in, and they change without anybody telling the person who wrote the roundup. So take the number off the page on the day you buy, not off this one. The middle column above quotes one sentence from each provider, read on Aug 28, 2026, with the link at the foot; use the link for the number. Ours is 0% for a structural reason rather than a generous one: the payment never passes through us.
If a platform takes 0%, what am I still paying on each sale?
Card processing, which nobody on this page or any other can make disappear. Two different companies take money out of an online sale: the website platform, which is what “0% transaction fees” is talking about, and the payment processor, which moves the money and charges its own percentage plus a fixed amount per order. A platform advertising 0% is telling you about its own cut and saying nothing about your total. That is why the interesting question is not who charges 0% but whose processing you are allowed to use — if you can bring an account you negotiated yourself, the 0% is worth something; if you have to use theirs, the rate you cannot shop for is the real price.
Will changing the website cost me the search traffic I already have?
It can, and the damage is almost always self-inflicted rather than caused by the new platform. Three things protect you. Keep the same domain — a new one starts from nothing. Write down every page that currently brings you anything, and make sure each of those addresses still exists on the new site or redirects permanently to the page that replaced it. And keep the words: a rebuild that quietly deletes the service pages, the area pages and the hours is not a redesign, it is a smaller site. Being found is mostly not a feature you buy from a builder. It is pages that answer what people type, at addresses that do not change under them.
Why are there only seven?
Because seven is how many pages we opened. A list like this is easy to lengthen by paraphrasing other lists, and that is how a claim travels for years without anybody rereading the page it came from — including after the company has rewritten it. We would rather hand you seven rows, each carrying a sentence the provider wrote about itself and read on Aug 28, 2026, than fifteen rows built out of somebody else’s summary. If a name you expected is missing, do the thing we would have done: open its pricing page and read the fee section yourself.
Where these numbers came from
Every claim above was read off the provider’s own page on Aug 28, 2026. Pages change without notice; if one of these is out of date, the linked page is the one to believe, not us.
If the register stays and the website has to move
Naratake gives you a working multi-page site with online ordering, table reservations, per-staff appointment slots and quote requests built into it, and card payment runs through your own Stripe account, so we take nothing out of a sale. See which plan runs them on a published site — and what each one leaves out.