Square vs Shopify in 2026 — Fees, Countries, Catalogue Limits and Which to Use

On this page

• The short answer
• What changed in October 2025
• Plans and monthly cost, side by side
• Processing fees — and why the answer flips by country
• Where each one actually works
• Multi-currency: the single decisive difference
• Catalogue and inventory depth
• In person: Square POS against Shopify POS Pro
• Migrating between them, and what breaks
• What sellers complain about
• Scale, from the filings rather than the marketing
• Which one fits which seller
• Running both with FLUF Connect
• What FLUF Connect costs
• Sources and verification

The short answer

Square is a payments and point-of-sale company that grew a website builder. Shopify is an e-commerce platform that grew a card reader. Every meaningful difference between them descends from that. Square is the better answer if the majority of your revenue is taken in person, in one country, in one currency. Shopify is the better answer if you are selling online, across borders, with a catalogue that needs structure and an app for every process. In the middle — an online shop that also does markets and pop-ups — the honest answer is not one or the other but both, which is a real option and cheaper than most people assume.

What follows is the detail, sourced, with the numbers checked on 27 August 2026. Prices on both platforms are geo-served, so where a figure is country-specific we say which country.

What changed in October 2025

On 6 October 2025 Square replaced eighteen separate à-la-carte subscriptions — Square Online Plus and Premium, Square for Retail Plus, Square for Restaurants, the Square Appointments tiers and the rest — with a single ladder of Free, Plus and Premium, billed per location, spanning the whole product rather than one module of it (Square press release).

Two consequences matter more than the tidier naming.

Your processing rate is now a function of your subscription. This is new. Square used to charge every seller the same card rate regardless of what they paid monthly. Now a US seller on Free pays 3.3% + 30¢ online, and the same seller on Plus pays 2.9% + 30¢. The subscription buys the rate down, which means the true cost comparison against Shopify depends on your monthly volume in a way it did not before.

Migration is voluntary and one-way. Square’s help centre states that once you switch to the new plans “you will not be able to switch back” (Square). No forced-migration deadline has been announced. If you are on a legacy Square subscription, model the new structure against your actual volume before you move — the door only opens one way.

Shopify made a smaller change in the same period: the mid-tier plan formerly called “Shopify” is now called Grow. The ladder reads Starter, Basic, Grow, Advanced, Plus.

Plans and monthly cost, side by side

Square (per location, per month)

Sources: Square press release, 6 October 2025; squareup.com/gb/en/pricing and squareup.com/gb/en/online-store/plans, both checked 27 August 2026. Note that Square’s two UK pages disagree on the Premium figure — one renders £64/mo annually, the other renders “Custom”. Check against a live account before committing to that number.

Square’s zero-cost plan is a genuine storefront, not a trial. That is unusual and it is the strongest thing Square has to offer a small seller. The catch is per-location billing on the paid tiers: three shops on Plus is three times $49, not one.

Shopify (United Kingdom)

Source: shopify.com/pricing, checked 27 August 2026. Plus is banded rather than a single price — the pricing page’s own markup exposes tiers at £3,500, £5,500 and £7,000 above the £1,800 entry point.

Two line items on that table are routinely missed. Basic includes zero staff accounts, so a two-person business is really looking at Grow. And the third-party gateway surcharge — 2% on Basic down to 0.2% on Plus — is charged whenever you do not use Shopify Payments, on top of whatever your chosen gateway charges. It is still in force in 2026.

Processing fees — and why the answer flips by country

United States

Source: squareup.com/us/en/payments/our-fees, checked 27 August 2026. Two figures here are worth flagging because older articles get them wrong: the US in-person fixed fee is now 15¢, not the long-quoted 10¢, and the Free plan’s online rate of 3.3% + 30¢ is materially worse than the 2.9% most write-ups still cite.

United Kingdom

Sources: Square UK pricing; Shopify pricing and Shopify POS pricing, all checked 27 August 2026.

The comparison that actually matters

Online, UK cards. Square on its zero-cost Free plan charges 1.4% + 25p. Shopify’s cheapest online rate — 1.5% + 25p — requires the Advanced plan at £259/month billed annually. A UK seller doing online-only volume can be on Square paying nothing monthly and still beating Shopify’s best card rate. That is a genuinely surprising result and it is the fact most comparison pages miss.

In person, UK cards. Square 1.75% flat against Shopify Basic at 1.7% with no fixed fee. Near-identical on the rate — but Shopify wants a further £69 per location per month for POS Pro before you get real retail features, and Square’s equivalent is on the zero-cost plan.

The United States flips it. Square Free at 3.3% + 30¢ online is worse than every Shopify tier. A US seller comparing the free options is comparing Square’s most expensive card rate with Shopify’s cheapest subscription.

Which is why there is no global verdict. Work it out for your country and your channel mix, not from a headline.

Where each one actually works

Square operates in eight countries: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Spain, Australia and Japan.

Shopify sells into roughly 175 countries. The constraint there is not Shopify itself but Shopify Payments, which is available in a subset; outside it you use a third-party gateway and pay the 0.2–2% surcharge on top.

This is the largest structural difference between the two products and it resolves a great many comparisons before they start. Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Poland, the Nordic countries, most of Latin America, essentially all of Africa and most of Asia are Square-free territory. A seller in any of them is choosing between Shopify and something that is not Square.

Multi-currency: the single decisive difference

Square’s own help documentation is unambiguous. Charging customers in different currencies “is not available”. Payments “must be processed in your country’s official currency”, and cardholders may be charged conversion fees by their own issuer as a result. Sellers “must be located in the country where you activated your Square account”. And you cannot change an account’s currency — the only route to a second one is opening a separate Square account in another country (Square help centre).

The UK fee table above shows how this surfaces in practice: a UK Square account settles in pounds and charges every buyer in pounds, adding a 1.5% surcharge when the card is foreign. That is cross-border card acceptance, not cross-border selling.

Shopify’s answer is Shopify Markets: regional storefronts run from one admin, with local pricing, local languages and local currencies, and — with Shopify Payments enabled — buyers paying in their own money (Shopify Markets).

The cost is a currency conversion fee on non-domestic-currency transactions: 1.5% in the United States, 2% in France and 2% everywhere else. PayPal wallet conversions run at 3% in the US and France. Conversion fees are not refunded when you refund an order, which is a small detail with a real annual cost on a high-return category (Shopify help centre).

If you have any cross-border ambition at all, this section decides the comparison on its own. Square is a single-country, single-currency product by design, and no amount of clever configuration changes that.

Catalogue and inventory depth

Sources: Shopify variant-limit changelog, 15 October 2025; Shopify productOptionsCreate; Square Catalog API overview; Square CatalogItem reference; Square vendor management. All checked 27 August 2026.

Two details worth their own paragraph

The 100-variant limit is gone. Shopify raised it to 2,048 for all merchants with no plan gating on 15 October 2025. Shopify’s own changelog attaches a warning, though: stores using apps that are not on the current GraphQL product APIs “may have a downgraded or broken experience” with products over 100 variants. Check your app stack before you build a 500-variant product.

The options asymmetry is the migration killer. Square permits six item options per item; Shopify permits three, hard. A Square catalogue using four to six options cannot be represented in Shopify — and the failure mode is not an error message, it is silent. We come back to this below.

One more thing about Square’s catalogue that surprises people arriving from a marketplace: Square has no product taxonomy. A category on Square is just another object the merchant creates. There is no eBay-style or Etsy-style tree to map into, no required category attributes, no leaf nodes. Since December 2023 an item can also sit in multiple categories — the old single category_id field is deprecated in favour of an array. For anyone pushing a catalogue in from elsewhere, this makes Square unusually forgiving.

In person: Square POS against Shopify POS Pro

Casual in-person selling is included with every Shopify plan. The retail feature set — unlimited POS staff, roles and permissions, rich customer profiles, returns and exchanges at any location, inventory management, retail reporting, omnichannel — sits behind POS Pro at £69 per location per month, the same price monthly or annually (Shopify POS pricing).

Square’s equivalent capability starts at zero cost and scales through Plus and Premium, billed per location. For a single-site UK retailer the arithmetic is stark: Square Free at 1.75% in person and £0 a month, against Shopify Basic at 1.7% plus £25 a month plus £69 a month for POS Pro. The card rate favours Shopify by five basis points; the subscription favours Square by £94 a month. You would need to be turning over a great deal for five basis points to close that gap.

Square also has genuine retail depth Shopify lacks natively: first-party purchase orders and vendor management, automatic POs when stock runs low, five-decimal unit precision and selling by weight. If you run a deli, a hardware shop or anything sold by the metre, that is not a nice-to-have.

Shopify’s counter is everything that happens away from the counter — an app store with more than 16,000 apps (Shopify App Store), Shopify Flow automation free from Basic, and the multi-currency and multi-region machinery described above.

Migrating between them, and what breaks

Square to Shopify

Shopify’s importer still exists but has been renamed from “Store Importer” to Store Migration. It is free and Shopify-built, and it is currently early access, desktop only, with limited availability and a rating of 3.1 out of 5 from 71 reviews (Shopify App Store). The old store-importer URL now returns “not currently available”, so ignore any guide that links to it.

What it carries: titles, descriptions, variants, prices, compare-at prices, inventory levels, images, SKUs, barcodes, and customer names, emails, phone numbers and addresses.

What it does not: orders, collections, navigation, SEO data, blogs, pages, reviews and app integrations (Shopify help centre).

What breaks, per Shopify’s own documentation:

• Inventory by location does not migrate. Multi-site stock collapses to a single location.
• Prices by location collapse to the highest price for the product.
• Products with more than three options import with no options at all. Not an error — they simply arrive as flat products.
• Reviews cannot be exported from Square in the first place.
• Customer passwords never migrate. SEO URLs do not carry, so redirects must be mapped before the domain moves.
• Historical orders need a third-party tool.
• Square hardware is non-transferable — it is encrypted to work only with Square’s software (Shopify, updated 9 January 2026).

Shopify’s own timeline estimates are worth quoting to anyone who thinks this is an afternoon’s work: fewer than 100 products, two to five days; 100 to 1,000 products, one to two weeks; more than 1,000 products, three to six weeks or more.

Shopify to Square

There is no Shopify-specific connector. You use Square’s generic bulk item import, which takes an.xlsx or.csv file with required columns for item name, variation name, description and SKU, plus an enablement column per location for multi-site catalogues. The cap is 30,000 items per upload, and there are two modes: Modify, or Replace — which deletes your existing catalogue first (Square help centre).

Square’s documentation is explicit that “Excel and CSV file templates are the only supported file types” and that “custom templates aren’t supported” — meaning you cannot hand Square a Shopify export. You export Square’s own template, map your data into it, and re-import. Images do not come through the CSV; they are re-added by hand.

The CSV traps on both sides

Shopify’s product export is one row per variant, and Shopify warns that “sorting your CSV file in a spreadsheet program can cause product variants or image URLs to become disassociated”. Images in the export are URLs, not files, and they only resolve while your original store is still live — so if you close the Shopify store before the images land in Square, they are gone. If any single product has more than 100 variants the export is emailed rather than downloaded, and very large exports can time out. Imports are irreversible, there is no import history, the 15 MB file cap is real, headers are case-sensitive, and touching any variant column without also including the option name and value columns deletes existing variants (Shopify CSV documentation).

On Square’s side, the platform explicitly warns that opening its export in a spreadsheet mangles SKUs — scientific notation, dropped leading zeros. If your SKUs are numeric, that is a silent corruption waiting to happen.

What sellers complain about

Trustpilot, checked 27 August 2026: Square scores 3.7 out of 5 from 7,445 reviews, with 79% five-star and 13% one-star. Shopify scores 1.3 out of 5 from 5,032 reviews, with 87% one-star.

Do not read that as a quality comparison, and be sceptical of anyone who presents it as one. Reading through Shopify’s Trustpilot pages, the overwhelming majority of reviewers are not merchants at all — they are shoppers who bought from a scam store that happened to be hosted on Shopify and are angry that Shopify did not refund them. Square’s page is predominantly merchants. The 3.7-against-1.3 gap is largely a difference in who turns up to review, not in how well the platforms serve sellers.

A fairer quantitative comparison comes from Capterra, where the reviewers are business software buyers on both sides: Square Point of Sale scores 4.6 from 3,033 reviews and Shopify scores 4.5 from 6,707. What is interesting there is where each one’s lowest sub-score sits: Square’s weakest dimension is customer service at 4.3, and Shopify’s is value for money at 4.3. That is a tidy summary of both products’ actual reputations.

What the review sites are genuinely useful for is the themes.

The dominant Square theme is account holds and frozen funds, and it is specific and recent: reviewers describing more than $40,000 held for 120 days after a legitimate transaction (22 July 2026), $8,573 frozen for over four months (1 May 2026), an account closed with thousands still held (1 August 2026), and deactivation without notice (17 August 2026).

Set that against Square’s own payout documentation, which states plainly: “Square doesn’t have transfer limits with our standard or custom schedules. We won’t hold funds based on the amount, frequency, or type of transaction” (Square). Both are primary sources and they point in opposite directions. That tension is the most useful honest thing anyone can tell you about moving revenue onto Square, and it is a strong argument for not putting all of it there.

There is a structural reason for the pattern, and it is worth understanding rather than treating as malice. Square is a payment facilitator, not a merchant acquirer: your account is a sub-account under Square’s own master merchant ID rather than a merchant account in your name. Square does not underwrite you up front — it approves you instantly and reviews your transactions as they happen. That is precisely why onboarding takes minutes, and precisely why a first unusually large transaction on a young account can trigger a freeze. The convenience and the risk are the same design decision.

And Shopify is not exempt. Merchants report Shopify Payments reserves and holds in very similar terms — one describing a 20% rolling reserve held since around their hundredth sale, another six figures of payouts held without explanation, another banned on a 0.3% chargeback rate. Anyone telling you that moving to Shopify solves the frozen-funds problem is selling something. The honest conclusion from both sets of complaints is the same one: do not route all of your revenue through a single processor.

Secondary Square themes: generic support responses with limited escalation, weak assistance on chargeback disputes, and repeated verification-document requests on new accounts. On chargebacks specifically, one clarification is fair to Square — the issuing bank rules on a dispute, not Square. Sellers experience it as Square siding against them because Square is the only party they can speak to and there is no escalation path.

For reference on payouts: Square’s US standard schedule is next business day for payments taken before 5pm Pacific, instant transfer at 1.95%, and same-day deposit at 1.95% capped at $10,000 per transfer.

Scale, from the filings rather than the marketing

Both companies publish audited numbers, and they are more useful than any review score.

Sources: Block Q2 2026 shareholder letter, filed 5 August 2026; Block FY2025 Form 10-K, filed 26 February 2026; Shopify Q2 2026 results, filed 5 August 2026.

Two things to take from that. Square’s seller count is a real, audited figure — 4.5 million sellers is not a small business. And the growth rates are diverging: Shopify’s gross volume grew 32% year on year against Square’s 13%, from a base that is already 59% larger. Square is growing solidly inside eight countries; Shopify is growing quickly across the world. That is the same structural difference the rest of this page keeps arriving at, expressed in money.

One thing to be careful with: Block’s own 10-K also discloses that it “collect[s] and hold[s] reserves for a limited number of sellers whose businesses are deemed higher risk”. That is the formal, filed version of the complaint theme in the next section, and it is worth reading the two together.

Which one fits which seller

That last row deserves a number behind it. US e-commerce was 17.1% of total retail sales in the second quarter of 2026, seasonally adjusted (US Census Bureau, released 18 August 2026). Read the other way round: roughly 83% of American retail still happens in front of a person. The “online store plus a stall” pattern is not a fringe case. It is the majority of retail, seen from the other end.

Running both with FLUF Connect

The version of this comparison nobody sells you is that both platforms are channels, and FLUF Connect drives both.

In practice that means your Shopify catalogue can populate your Square item library, and stay in step with it, without either platform needing to know the other exists. Products go out to both. When something sells on one, FLUF clears it from the other so you do not sell the last one twice — the failure that omnichannel selling actually punishes.

Square’s catalogue shape makes it an unusually easy destination for this. Because Square has no fixed taxonomy and no required per-category attributes, there is nothing to map into and nothing to fail validation against — the contrast with a marketplace like eBay or Etsy, where a missing required attribute fails the listing outright, is stark. A Square item is a name, a description, a category you invented, and a variation carrying price, SKU and stock.

Two honest limits on this channel. FLUF drives Square’s catalogue, inventory and delist paths, and clears a Square listing when the item sells on another channel — but Square sold-detection is not yet wired, so a sale that happens on Square will not automatically clear your other channels. You mark it sold in FLUF and FLUF does the rest. And Square is not a relisting or offer-management channel; those features apply where the destination platform supports them.

The same applies in the other direction, and to the other {channel_count} channels FLUF drives — a Square catalogue can feed marketplaces, and a Shopify catalogue can feed both Square and everything else.

What FLUF Connect costs

FLUF Connect is £1 for 7 days, then plans from £9/month (Starter). The rest of your first month is charged after the seven days, so you are not paying more, just not all of it up front. There is no free plan.

Automation — relisting, offer management and bulk operations — is included in every plan, not sold as a paid add-on. Several competitors bill those separately on top of a subscription. Full details on the pricing page.

Sources and verification

Every figure on this page was checked on 27 August 2026. Both companies geo-serve their pricing pages, so country-specific figures are labelled. Neither Square’s support centre nor Shopify’s help centre publishes last-updated dates on articles; where a real publication date exists — changelogs, press releases, blog posts — it is given.

• Square pricing and plans: Unified pricing press release, 6 October 2025; switching to the new plans; UK pricing; UK online-store plans; US fees.
• Square catalogue and payouts: Catalog API overview; CatalogItem; CatalogItemVariation; deposit schedule; bulk item import; multiple currencies.
• Shopify pricing and product model: pricing; POS pricing; variant-limit changelog, 15 October 2025; productOptionsCreate; inventory states; CSV import and export.
• Migration: Store Migration app; migrating from Square; Shopify blog, updated 9 January 2026.
• International and currency: Shopify Markets; Markets fees.
• Sentiment: Square on Trustpilot; Shopify on Trustpilot. Read as themes, not as scores.
• Audited scale: Block Q2 2026 shareholder letter; Block FY2025 Form 10-K; Shopify Q2 2026 results.
• Comparable review data: Square Point of Sale on Capterra; Shopify on Capterra.
• Retail context: US Census Bureau quarterly e-commerce report, released 18 August 2026.
• BigCommerce vs Shopify compared

Where the two companies’ own pages disagree with each other — Square’s UK Premium price is the live example — we have said so rather than picking one silently.