Someone posted a question on r/smallbusiness this week: new business, membership fees plus merch sales, what platform should she build on. Two comments came in. Neither one addressed the actual problem — they just named a platform each commenter happened to like.
That's the standard internet answer to this question, and it's why so many small businesses end up migrating platforms a year in. The real answer isn't "Shopify" or "Squarespace." It's a question you have to answer about your own business first.
The platform question isn't "which one is better." It's "which one is your real business."
Figure out which revenue is primary
A gym that sells branded hoodies and a merch brand that offers a $10/month fan club both check the "membership plus merch" box. They are not the same build. The gym's membership fee is the product; the hoodie is a nice-to-have that shows up at checkout maybe twice a year. The merch brand's t-shirts are the product; the fan club is a retention play that keeps people opening emails between drops.
Build for whichever one actually pays your bills. Treat the other one as a feature bolted onto that foundation, not a second storefront competing for the same navigation bar.
If merch is the business, start with Shopify
Shopify's Basic plan runs $39/month. Grow — Shopify renamed its old "Shopify" plan to Grow this year — is $105/month, and Advanced is $399/month for businesses that need deeper reporting and automation. Checkout, shipping rates, and inventory are the strongest in the category at this price point. That's the whole reason to pick Shopify over a general site builder in the first place.
What Shopify doesn't do natively is membership. You'll need an app — Simplee Memberships and Conjured Memberships both show up as solid options in the app store — to sell recurring access and gate member pricing. Budget another $20-$50/month on top of the plan cost, and plan to spend an afternoon checking how the app's discount logic interacts with Shopify's own promo codes. They don't always cooperate.
If membership is the business, start with Memberful or Squarespace
Memberful runs three tiers: free with a 10% transaction fee, Pro at $25/month with a 4.9% fee, and Premium at $100/month, still 4.9%. Stripe's standard processing fee — 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction — stacks on top of whichever tier you pick. On a $10/month membership, that's close to $0.80 gone to fees before anything else touches your revenue.
Squarespace's Member Areas add-on works the same way but sits on top of your existing site plan instead of running standalone: Starter is $9/month with a 7% fee, Core is $18/month at 4%, Pro is $35/month at 1%. The base website plans Member Areas requires run $25-$139/month depending on tier, so this option only makes sense if you're already committed to Squarespace for the site itself.
Either way, keep merch simple on this side. A basic product block or a connected print-on-demand tool covers most cases. You're not trying to out-Shopify Shopify — you're trying to not leave money on the table while people are already on your site renewing.
The part that breaks cheap setups
This is the actual sticking point buried under the surface-level "which platform" question in that thread. If members get a discount on merch — 15% off store-wide, or a specific price on one item — that logic has to live somewhere, and not every platform handles it the same way.
WooCommerce handles it natively. The WooCommerce Memberships extension ($279/year, plus $239/year for the Subscriptions plugin if you want recurring billing) lets you set per-product or per-category discounts tied to a membership plan, and it can exclude sale items from stacking with member pricing. No third-party app, no webhook stitching two systems together.
Shopify can't do this out of the box. You're back to a membership app, and you need to confirm specifically whether it supports tiered, product-level discounts before you commit. Some apps only handle a flat store-wide percentage, which falls apart the moment certain items shouldn't qualify.
What we'd actually build
If a client brought us this exact question, we'd ask one thing first: does more than half the projected revenue come from membership fees, or from merch? That answer picks the platform.
Merch-primary with a light membership perk: Shopify plus a membership app, roughly $60-$90/month all-in before Stripe fees. Membership-primary with light merch: Memberful or Squarespace Member Areas plus a simple product page, $35-$135/month depending on tier. Genuinely balanced, with member-only merch pricing as a real feature: WordPress with WooCommerce and the Memberships extension. Higher setup cost, but it's the only stack here where the discount logic doesn't fight you.
We've written before about the honest math on Webflow vs Next.js vs WordPress for small businesses, and a lot of the same "what's your actual constraint" logic applies here. If you're staring at this fork and want a second opinion before you build, tell us what you're actually selling and we'll tell you which platform fits — even if it's not one we build on.
— Cole
Sources
- r/smallbusiness: "Best website for merch sales and membership?" — the thread that prompted this post
- Shopify 2026 pricing breakdown — demandsage.com
- Squarespace Member Areas pricing and features — sparkplugin.com
- WooCommerce Memberships pricing — amanurrahman.com
- Memberful pricing and fees — checkthat.ai
- WooCommerce member discount configuration — pluginrepublic.com