Squarespace in Switzerland: TWINT, VAT, CHF and .ch Domains
We're a Squarespace agency based in Ilanz, Graubünden. Most of our clients are in the US, but a good share are Swiss SMEs, and they all ask the same six questions before signing. Here are the answers, current as of September 2026.
Does Squarespace work for a Swiss business?
Yes, with a short list of things to know. Squarespace is a US platform with a strong European presence: the interface is available in German and French, Swiss francs are a supported store currency, and Stripe and PayPal both work with Swiss accounts.
What it doesn't have is anything Swiss-specific. There's no TWINT in the checkout, no QR-bill generation, no Swiss data centre. Whether that matters depends on what your site needs to do. For a service business, a practice, a restaurant, a consultancy or a portfolio, it almost never does. For a shop selling to Swiss consumers, TWINT is the one you need to think about.
Payments and TWINT
What works: Stripe and PayPal. Connect a Swiss Stripe account and you can take Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Apple Pay and Google Pay in CHF. Payouts land in your Swiss bank account. Squarespace's own processor, Squarespace Payments, is not available to Swiss businesses at the time of writing; Stripe is the standard choice.
What doesn't: TWINT. Even though Stripe supports TWINT for Swiss merchants, Squarespace's checkout only exposes a fixed set of Stripe payment methods, and TWINT isn't one of them. This has been the case for years and there's no sign of it changing.
How much that matters: TWINT is used by most Swiss adults and is the default for small in-person payments. Online, cards still dominate for anything over a few dozen francs, and Apple Pay covers a lot of the mobile convenience TWINT offers. In our experience, a Swiss shop without TWINT loses a few percent of checkouts, mostly on low-value items. That's real but rarely decisive.
Workarounds we've used:
For services and invoices: send a Swiss QR-bill from your accounting tool (Bexio, Abacus, Banana). Customers pay by TWINT or e-banking by scanning it. Squarespace sends the order confirmation; the payment happens outside the site. Works well for B2B and for anything over a few hundred francs.
For bookings: Acuity Scheduling (Squarespace's booking product) uses Stripe directly and can take deposits by card. Still no TWINT, but a smoother card experience.
For a small product range: a Payrexx or Stripe Payment Link behind a custom "Pay with TWINT" button, alongside the standard Squarespace checkout. It's two checkouts, which we don't love, but it's honest and it works.
For a serious shop where TWINT is essential: Shopify, where TWINT is available through several Swiss payment providers. We build on both and will tell you in the first call if that's where you belong.
VAT (MWST)
Swiss VAT rates since January 2024 are 8.1 percent standard, 2.6 percent reduced (food, books, medication) and 3.8 percent for accommodation. Registration is mandatory once your worldwide turnover passes CHF 100,000 a year.
In Squarespace Commerce, taxes are set under Commerce, then Taxes. You add Switzerland as a country, enter the rate, and choose whether product prices are displayed including tax (which Swiss consumers expect) or with tax added at checkout (which is the US default). Set it to include tax. Check that the reduced rate is applied per product where it applies; Squarespace lets you mark products as tax-exempt but does not support multiple rates per country natively, so a shop mixing standard-rate and reduced-rate items needs a workaround, usually a second "country" entry or manual invoicing.
Squarespace doesn't produce Swiss-compliant invoices with your VAT number on them. For a shop that needs proper invoices, connect orders to Bexio or your accounting tool through Zapier or Make, and let that system issue the invoice.
Squarespace itself charges Swiss VAT on your subscription. Your invoice will show it, and it's reclaimable if you're registered.
Domains and .ch
Squarespace sells domains, but we register .ch domains at a Swiss registrar (Infomaniak, Hostpoint or nic.ch directly) and connect them to Squarespace by DNS. Two reasons: control, because if you ever leave Squarespace your domain isn't tied to the subscription, and price, because .ch renewals are cheaper direct.
Connecting takes ten minutes. You point an A record and a CNAME at Squarespace, wait for propagation, and Squarespace issues the SSL certificate automatically. We do this for every client and it's included in every build.
If your brand also uses a .com or .swiss, register those too and forward them to the primary domain. .swiss requires proof of a connection to Switzerland; a registered company or a Swiss address is enough.
Data protection (nDSG)
Squarespace hosts your site and your visitors' form submissions and orders on servers in the US. The revised Swiss Data Protection Act (nDSG, in force since September 2023) allows transfers to countries with adequate protection, and since September 2024 the Federal Council recognises the Swiss-US Data Privacy Framework, which Squarespace has certified under.
What this means in practice: you can use Squarespace lawfully as a Swiss business. Your privacy notice must say that data is processed by Squarespace in the US under the Data Privacy Framework, and you should have Squarespace's data processing agreement on file (it's in your account settings). If you handle special category data, for example a medical practice taking appointment requests with health details through a form, talk to a lawyer about whether the form should live elsewhere.
Cookie banners: Swiss law does not require consent for cookies the way the EU's ePrivacy rules do, but if you have EU visitors and use analytics or marketing pixels, you need a consent banner anyway. Squarespace's built-in cookie banner is adequate for basic cases; for anything with Google Ads or Meta pixels we use a proper consent tool.
Languages
Swiss sites often need two or more of German, French, Italian and English. Squarespace has no native multilingual feature. The two options are Weglot (a subscription that translates and serves each language on its own subdirectory, from around USD 17 per month for one language) or a manual set-up where you build each language as a separate section of the site with a switcher.
For a five-page site in German and English, manual is cheaper and cleaner. For a 40-page site in three languages, Weglot pays for itself in the first month. We've written a separate guide on the trade-offs.
One Swiss-specific note: use ss, not ß, and use Swiss number formatting (CHF 1'250.00). Squarespace's German interface is German-German; your content should be Swiss.
Hosting, speed and support
Squarespace is served from a global CDN, so a Swiss visitor gets the site from a European edge. Load times in Zurich are the same as in Berlin. Uptime is not something you'll think about.
Support is by email and live chat, in English, with German available at some hours. Response times are usually under a day. For anything beyond "how do I change this", clients tend to come to us, which is why we offer support plans in CHF.
Pricing in CHF
Squarespace bills in CHF for Swiss accounts. After the July 2026 increase, annual plans are roughly CHF 17 for Basic, CHF 26 for Core, CHF 44 for Plus and CHF 90 for Advanced per month, plus VAT; check the current exchange in your account. Nearly all our Swiss clients are on Core, because Basic doesn't allow custom code and charges a 2 percent transaction fee on sales.
Our rate for Swiss clients is CHF 125 per hour, and a typical SME site lands between CHF 4,000 and CHF 12,000. We've put the full cost breakdown in a separate article.
When Squarespace is the wrong choice for a Swiss business
Three cases. A shop where TWINT is essential and the QR-bill workaround won't do: Shopify. A site that must be hosted in Switzerland by policy, for example some public-sector or healthcare organisations: a Swiss host with WordPress or a Swiss-made CMS. A site with hundreds of structured content records that need relations and filtering: Webflow or a custom build.
For everyone else, Squarespace is a good decision, and it's a decision you can reverse. Everything exports.
Questions we get
Can I run the site in Swiss German? You write the content; the platform's German interface strings (form validation, "read more", cookie text) are German-German and can be overridden with CSS or JavaScript. We do this on every Swiss site.
Do I need an Impressum? Swiss law (UWG Art. 3 lit. s) requires clear identification of the provider for online sales, and it's expected practice for every business site. Put company name, address, email and, where applicable, UID and VAT number in the footer or on an Impressum page.
Can Squarespace send invoices in CHF? Squarespace Invoicing works and bills in your account currency. It does not produce QR-bills. For Swiss B2B clients we invoice from Bexio or similar and use Squarespace for the order or booking record.
Is Squarespace hosting in Switzerland ever going to happen? There's been no announcement. If Swiss hosting is a hard requirement, Squarespace is out, and we'll recommend a Swiss host and CMS instead.
What about the .swiss domain? Available to businesses with a Swiss connection. It's a fine secondary domain; we'd still use .ch or .com as the primary, because that's what customers type.
Can I take TWINT for appointment deposits? Not through Acuity. For deposits we either take card via Acuity or send a QR-bill and confirm the booking on payment.
