Just stepping into the eCommerce industry and finding a website builder that works best for you? These user-friendly platforms can help you create online stores without extensive coding knowledge. You get pre-designed templates, drag-and-drop interfaces, and integrated features tailored to sell products or services online.
Some of the top eCommerce platforms include Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace, etc. They can significantly reduce the time, cost, and technical expertise required to build a professional-looking and functional online store.
If you’re venturing into online selling, this blog will be helpful. You’ll learn about the top platforms used by the best eCommerce experts, so you can start your project with ease.
What Does an eCommerce Website Builder Do for You?
There are numerous eCommerce site builders. To find the one that best fits your business norms – first, you’ll need to understand its capabilities and how these ecommerce tools are better or scruffy than each other. Moving further in understanding how builders help to sell online.
Helps in Launching & Maintaining an Online Store
eCommerce website builders like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Wix offer free templates, multiple payment gateway options, and multilingual possibilities. With such features, the entire process starting from launching to maintaining it gets pretty straightforward – even if you are a newbie or a small business rolling to start an online store.
Offers Extendable Built-In Customization Options
When you create an online presence, the most concerning point is having a front-end design that makes and feels the audience connected to the services they are looking for.
For these, business needs the most advanced customization flexibility – and that’s exactly what eCommerce website builders offer, too. All you’ll need to do is either add the plugins or directly integrate add-ons to your online store through the app store.
Contributes to Higher SEO & Scaling Capabilities
Compared to versatile CMS platforms, you don’t need third-party integrations to scale your online business higher with an eCommerce website builder.
You can edit the title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs from the dashboard itself – it also includes social sharing features, making it easier for sellers to market their online stores.
Cost-Effective Solutions for Everyone
Most of all, eCommerce website builders offer a free trial to use it and conclude whether one works best for your business. This feature ultimately makes users worriless about money draining or any loss by the end of the day.
Provides Generous Support Team
With whom you can connect anytime via live support, you can also create a ticket, make a call, or even connect via e-mail. Thus, if you are stuck somewhere or unintentionally create any chaos at the backend – an experienced eCommerce support team is there to help out and configure things as needed.
7 Best of All eCommerce Website Builders
eCommerce builder
Price per month
G2 star rating
Shopify
$39
4.4
WooCommerce
Free
4.4
BigCommerce
$39
4.2
Squarespace
$25
4.4
Square Online
Free
4.3
Wix
Free
4.2
Magento
Contact Support
4.0
Covering the standard criteria, let’s move on to the additional features, best best-fitting business size, and compare the pros and cons offered by each top WordPress alternative.
Shopify
As the recent statistics state, there are currently 4.36 million Shopify stores live online. With its user-friendly intuitive, Shopify eCommerce website builder ticks all the boxes that an eCommerce seller needs, including SEO, scalability, and real-time analytics.
If you are a complete neophyte to this, you better first learn How to Start DropShipping Business with Shopify in 2024. By reading this, you will get a comprehensive roadmap and pro tips to turn your eCommerce store startup into a massive online sales generating platform.
Features
Easy to Use: Shopify has a simple drag-and-drop tool that lets you create and manage your online store without needing technical skills. It’s designed to be user-friendly.
Customizable Designs: Shopify offers over 150 pre-made themes that you can customize to match your brand. This helps you create a unique and professional-looking store.
Multiple Payment Options: Shopify supports many payment methods like PayPal, Stripe, and credit/debit cards, making it easy for customers to pay and for you to manage transactions.
Secure and Fast Hosting: Shopify includes hosting and SSL encryption, ensuring your store is secure and runs smoothly. This protects customer data and builds trust.
SEO Tools: Shopify has built-in tools to help your store rank higher in search engines. You can easily customize things like titles, descriptions, and image tags to improve your store’s visibility online.
WooCommerce is not a website builder in itself but a powerful and widely used eCommerce plugin for WordPress, standing for one of the most popular and free tools to build an online store running across the globe. It empowers businesses, entrepreneurs, and individuals to create and manage online stores easily.
Features
Easy to Set Up: WooCommerce works perfectly with WordPress themes, making it easy to turn your website into an online store without needing a lot of technical know-how.
Highly Customizable: You can change the design and features of your online store to fit your brand and needs. This means you can make your store look and work exactly how you want.
Multiple Payment Options: WooCommerce supports many ways for customers to pay, like PayPal, Stripe, credit cards, and debit cards. This makes it easy for customers to complete their purchases.
Inventory Management: WooCommerce helps you keep track of your stock and sends you email alerts when products are running low. This way, you can always make sure you have enough products available.
Lots of Add-Ons: WooCommerce offers many extensions and plugins to add extra features to your store, like subscriptions and memberships. This allows you to expand and customize your store as needed.
Pricing: While WooCommerce itself is free, it requires a WordPress website. Additional costs include hosting, extension fees, and development expenses.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce is an e-commerce platform offering various features catering to all business sizes. It is primarily used by B2B marketers or wholesales – selling and managing massive inventories.
The main plus of BigCommerce is its offering of 600 SKUs for each individual product. Moreover, at first, if you are unable to conclude whether the BigCommece is fit for your business size or not – you can sign up for a 15 day free trial and clear your check marks quickly.
Features
SEO & Analytics Optimization: BigCommerce offers built-in SEO tools and analytics to help your store rank well in search engines and track performance for data-driven decisions.
Inventory & Payment Management: The platform provides robust tools for managing your inventory and supports various payment gateways, making it easy to handle products and orders efficiently.
Cross-Channel Commerce: You can sell your products across multiple channels, including social media and marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, expanding your reach beyond just your online store.
Scalable Catalog: BigCommerce supports a large number of products and orders, making it a good choice for businesses with extensive product catalogs.
Reporting & Analytics: Detailed reports and analytics help you understand your store’s performance, customer behavior, and sales trends, allowing you to make informed decisions.
As we saw above when you consider using an ecommerce website builder, there are multiple factors that need to be checked first such as web hosting, domain, and other built-in capabilities.
But with Squarespace, these terms get easier as it is all in one. You can choose a domain; compare it with others, check out the hosting plans that can benefit, and start to create your online store right away.
It is one of the most popular eCommerce builders that offers personalized solutions for individuals, businesses, and organizations to sell online without having any extensive technical expertise.
Features
Design Tools: Squarespace offers over 60+ beautifully designed templates that are easy to customize. This feature is crucial for creating a visually appealing website without needing coding skills.
Multiple Contributors & Access Levels: The ability to collaborate with multiple contributors and assign different access levels helps manage and streamline teamwork on your website.
Passwords & Page Locks: Squarespace allows you to protect specific pages or your entire website with passwords, making it easy to restrict access to certain content.
Custom Redirects: The ability to create custom 301 URL redirects helps ensure visitors are directed to the right pages, which is important for maintaining SEO and a good user experience when changes are made to your site.
Email Campaign Integration: Integration with popular email marketing platforms like MailChimp simplifies collecting email addresses and managing email campaigns directly from your website.
Square Online is another ecommerce website builder – launched in 2019 by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey. With nearly 100+ new features Square Online lets sellers style every element of the online store with curated site styles, and flexible design controls.
It is best considered for early-stage businesses and eCommerce newbies. Square Online has built-in inventory management with a robust ability for inventory management, an easy payment gateway, and an exceptional user interface.
Moreover, it also offers a free plan including all the elements to get started with eCommerce business.
Features
Website Builder: Square Online’s drag-and-drop website builder with customizable templates makes it easy for users to create and personalize their online stores without needing technical skills.
Payment Processing: Seamless integration with multiple payment processing systems ensures secure and efficient management of transactions for both the store owner and customers.
Mobile Responsiveness: Mobile-responsive templates ensure that your online store looks and functions well on various devices, which is crucial for reaching customers on smartphones and tablets.
Order Management: Tools for tracking orders, managing fulfillment, and sending notifications help streamline order processing and improve customer service.
Analytics and Reporting: Built-in analytics tools allow you to track website traffic, sales, and customer behavior, helping you make informed decisions to optimize your store’s performance.
Pricing: Free version is available and paid version starts from $29 per month.
Wix
Wix is a popular cloud-based website builder founded by Avishai Abrahami in the year of 2006. It ranks as the fifth best e-commerce website builder in 2024 allowing individuals and businesses to create and manage websites.
Leading brands including Sap, Deloitte, and CBS to the complete newbie Wix have automation options, scalability, and pricing plans fitting to each of them with functionalities that meet every unique requirement.
Features
Drag-and-Drop Website Builder: Wix’s intuitive editor allows users to easily drag and drop elements like text, images, and videos onto their website canvas. This makes it simple to create custom layouts without any coding knowledge.
Templates: Wix offers over 800 professionally designed templates for various industries and purposes. Users can choose a template that fits their needs and customize it to match their brand, ensuring a professional look for their website.
Mobile Optimization: Wix templates are optimized to work well on all devices, including smartphones and tablets. The Page Layout Optimizing tool helps ensure the best layout for mobile by automatically reordering elements on the page.
SEO Tools: Wix provides essential SEO features such as meta tags, alt text, and sitemaps, helping users improve their website’s visibility on search engines. This is crucial for attracting organic traffic and improving search engine rankings.
eCommerce: Wix’s e-commerce capabilities allow users to create online shops with multilingual support (90+ languages), product listings, multichannel sales, and payment processing. This makes it a strong choice for businesses looking to sell products online.
Pricing: Free version is available paid version starts from $17 per month.
Magento
Magento is a leading open-source eCommerce platform founded by Roy Rubin and Yoav Kutner in 2008. It ranks as one of the top eCommerce platforms, enabling individuals and businesses to create and manage robust online stores.
Leading brands including Nike, Ford, and Coca-Cola utilize Magento for its powerful automation options, scalability, and flexible pricing plans, which are tailored to meet diverse and unique business requirements. With its extensive features and customizability, Magento caters to the needs of both large enterprises and small businesses alike.
Features
Easy Website Management: Magento’s simple system lets you easily customize your store’s design and layout.
Great SEO Tools: Magento helps improve your search engine rankings with customizable URLs, meta tags, and sitemaps.
Effective Marketing: Use Magento’s tools for promotions, discounts, and email marketing to boost sales.
Handles Growth: Magento manages large product catalogs and high traffic smoothly, ensuring fast performance.
Comprehensive eCommerce: Magento offers features like various payment options, multi-language support, and inventory management to run your store efficiently.
Pricing: Contact magento support for pricing
Best eCommerce Website Builder Comparison
Criteria
Shopify
WooCommerce
BigCommerce
Squarespace
Square Online
Wix
Magento
Ease of Use
Highly Intuitive
User-Friendly
User-Friendly
User-Friendly
User-Friendly
User-Friendly
Not user-friendly
Customization
Extensive customization options
Highly customizable
Highly customizable
Limited customization
Limited customization
Extensible customizable
Highly customizable
Scalability
Excellent scalability, suitable for small to large businesses
Scalable, but may require more plugins for advanced features
Highly scalable, designed for growing businesses
Limited scalability for large catalogs
Limited scalability for complex businesses
Scalable, but may require third-party apps
Highly scalable platform
Payment Gateway Support
Supports over 100 payment gateways
Supports various payment gateways with the help of plugins
Supports multiple payment gateways
Limited payment gateways
Limited payment gateways
Supports various payment gateways via apps
Supports various payment gateways out of the box
Privacy & Security
Strong security features and regular updates
Secure, but depend on hosting, and plugins you consider in use.
Strong security features and compliance
Standard security
Minimal security, but limited control
Good security, but limited control
Secure platform that offers a number of features
FAQs About Best eCommerce Website Builders
Q1. Which is the best ecommerce website builder for beginners?
Shopify, WooCommerce, and Square Online are the top three best ecommerce website builders for beginners. But if you are looking for some advanced features you better pick from Shopify or WooCommerce.
Q2. How to choose the most suitable eCommerce website builder for your business?
Determine Your Budget Segment.
Evaluate Your Future Business Priorities and Planning.
Explore Key Features.
Checkout Design Flexibility.
Evaluate Customer Support Availability.
Q3. What is the estimated cost of launching an online store?
It depends on multiple criteria you choose, such as:
Ecommerce Software
Domain Name
Web Host
SSL Certificate
Store Theme & Designs
If you are looking for an estimation of specific business size you can read out our Ecommerce Website Development Cost comprehensive guide.
Conclusion
Covering a long way, we’ve concluded that choosing the best eCommerce website builder for your business is crucial as its scalability, revenue, future graphics, and several other factors depend entirely on it.
Here you go with a quick recap of this blog content so that you can list your requirements and pick the fitting to your business needs
1. Shopify is widely regarded as the best eCommerce website building platform, offering a user-friendly interface, scalability, and a wealth of features for eCommerce stores of all sizes.
2. WooCommerce, a powerful WordPress plugin, is the best free eCommerce website building platform, providing high customization options and the ability to extend functionality through plugins.
3. BigCommerce is the best eCommerce website building platform for multi-sellers, catering to businesses with extensive inventories and high online sales volumes.
4. Squarespace is an all-in-one solution with easy-to-use design tools and a focus on mobile optimization, making it a suitable eCommerce website building platform for individual sellers or small-scale online stores.
5. Square Online, the best eCommerce website building platform for individual sellers, offers a free plan and seamless integration with Square’s payment processing system.
6. Wix, a user-friendly website builder with many templates, can be an excellent eCommerce platform for creating business websites with visually appealing designs.
Remember, when choosing the best eCommerce website builder for your business, consider budget, scalability needs, customization requirements, and the level of support you require.
These factors will help you to align your choice with long-term business goals. If you’ve got something you want us to know, feel free to drop it in the comment section – and if you have any query regarding eCommerce development, you may request a consultation with our experts. We’ll get in touch with you shortly.
John Niles, a dedicated Technical Consultant at BrainSpate since 2023, specializes in eCommerce. With a global perspective, he crafts insightful content on cutting-edge web development technologies, enriching the digital commerce landscape.