Squarespace gives you a beautiful template. You still write every product description, set up the email campaigns, design the cart, choose every image. LOAM generates the brand, the catalogue copy, the storefront pages, and the customer agent from five answers — Squarespace's polish without Squarespace's homework.
Squarespace's Commerce Basic ($36/mo) charges a 3% transaction fee in addition to Stripe's processing. LOAM charges no platform transaction fee — Stripe Connect Express runs in your name and we never take a cut.
Squarespace gates subscriptions, abandoned-cart email, advanced shipping, and customer accounts to higher Commerce tiers. LOAM ships them all natively at every tier from day one.
Squarespace stores your data in a multi-tenant CMS. LOAM provisions each store its own Postgres database — exportable in standard SQL, no cross-tenant query risk.
Every LOAM store ships with MCP, llms.txt, and OpenAPI surfaces so ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity can shop your store. Squarespace stores are invisible to AI commerce.
We'd rather you pick the right tool than churn out of LOAM in three months.
Squarespace's templates remain the best out-of-box visual polish for editorial brands, restaurants, and creators. If your store is also a portfolio, booking system, or content hub, Squarespace's all-in-one approach can still be the right call.
Acuity Scheduling, Member Areas, online courses — Squarespace bundles these natively. If your business is half retail / half service-with-booking, weigh the convenience.
| Feature | LOAM | Squarespace |
|---|---|---|
AI brand + catalogue + agent generation | ✓ | — |
Native MCP / llms.txt / agent surfaces | ✓ | — |
Built-in customer agent Squarespace has chat add-on, not native agent. | ✓ | Partial |
Lifecycle email programme | ✓ | Partial |
Subscription products Squarespace gates to Commerce Advanced ($52/mo). | ✓ | Partial |
Real-time inventory + reserve-on-order | ✓ | Partial |
Returns + exchanges + RMAs | ✓ | Partial |
Per-tenant database isolation | ✓ | — |
Stripe Connect in merchant's name | ✓ | Partial |
Beautiful out-of-box templates Squarespace's design lineage is best-in-class. | Partial | ✓ |
Native booking / scheduling | — | ✓ |
Member areas / online courses | — | ✓ |
Transaction fee (platform) Squarespace charges 3% on Business, 0% on Commerce tiers. | 0% | 0–3% |
Platform pricing (commerce entry) | Free in beta | $36/mo Commerce Basic |
If you're on Squarespace Personal or Business (i.e. you have a small shop section), yes — those tiers don't include real ecommerce features, and you'd be running into 3% transaction fees and shipping limitations. LOAM's free beta covers all of that natively. If you're already on Squarespace Commerce Basic+ and have a content-led brand where the booking / member-area features matter, the trade-off is more nuanced.
Yes. Squarespace's CSV exports cover products, customers, and orders cleanly. LOAM's import maps them to the Medusa v2 schema and generates brand + storefront copy from your data. Plan a half-day for testing before swapping DNS.
Not directly — Squarespace's design lineage is editorial-magazine polish, and LOAM's curated themes are different aesthetically. What LOAM trades for that is brand generation: instead of picking a template and filling it in, you describe your brand and LOAM designs around it. Different model; both work depending on what you value.
Not today. Those are Squarespace's strongest non-commerce features, and we're not chasing them. LOAM's focus is generated commerce: brand + catalogue + storefront + customer agent. If your business is half-commerce, half-scheduling, Squarespace may still be the right tool.
Squarespace Commerce Basic is $36/mo + 0% transaction fee (Commerce tier), or Business at $23/mo + 3% transaction fee. Most stores on Business that take ecommerce seriously end up upgrading. LOAM is free during beta; planned paid tiers will be one all-inclusive subscription rather than 'website + commerce + addons' stacked.
Free during beta. No credit card. Bring a domain when you're ready.