TL;DR
Just stepping into the eCommerce industry and finding a website builder that works best for you? Our curated list can help! For many years, the eCommerce industry has been evolving and throwing a game-changing dice each time.
By 2026 only, this e-commerce sector is expected to become a treasuring business model with over $8.1 trillion market value. But on what grounds will each eCommerce platform scale and generate these massive revenues?
You got that just right! It depends on the website builder you choose, as it discloses the ecommerce features you can plan, manage, and strategize your online stores’ future graphics on. Let’s understand how this overall ecommerce plan works and how the right website builder can help you achieve this milestone.
Even the best strategy sounds like a daydream until you don’t have the right e-commerce development team and tools.
You might also be experienced with traditional offline selling, but as online shopping is the new common, diving into the pool of online markets has become a necessity.
Thus, having an ecommerce store is an ultimate goal here, and online store builders are the ones helping you to execute it. The best e-commerce website builder is a criterion passed by a builder with specific components that ensure ease for sellers and shoppers.
So, which are they, and what factors does the best website builder conduct for you? Let’s discover.
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.
E-commerce 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 2023. 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.
1. User-Friendly Interface: Shopify offers a reflexive drag-and-drop builder that makes it easy for users with little technical knowledge to create and manage online stores.
2. Customizable Templates: Shopify offers professionally designed 150+ themes that can be customized to match your brand’s look and feel.
3. Inventory Management: You can handle the Shopify store without any hassle as adding and managing products is way easier in it. You can also include variations, inventory tracking, and SKU management.
4. Payment Processing: Various payment gateways are supported by Shopify, such as PayPal, Stripe, debit, and credit cards.
5. Secure Hosting: Shopify includes hosting and SSL encryption for your website, ensuring your store is fast, reliable, and secure from online threats.
6. Mobile Responsiveness: Every Shopify theme is mobile-responsive, making the eCommerce store accessible on different devices and reducing the customer bounce rate.
7. App Store: Shopify has 8,000+ apps that allow you to add extra functionality to your store, such as SEO tools, marketing apps, and inventory management.
8. SEO-Friendly: Shopify’s built-in SEO features thoroughly help optimize the online marketplace for search engines, including customizable title tags, meta descriptions, and alt text for images.
9. Easy Inventory Management: eCommerce website builder can help track inventory levels, set up low-stock alerts and product variants efficiently.
10. Customer Support: Shopify offers 24/7 customer support via call, live chat, and email to assist with any issues anytime.
1. Easy to Use: Shopify’s user-friendly interface makes it accessible to users with no to little technical expertise.
2. Scalability: Accommodating businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises.
3. Reliability: Shopify’s hosted solution ensures your store remains online and secure without worrying about server management.
4. App Ecosystem: The extensive app store allows you to enhance your store’s functionality as your business grows.
5. Mobile Optimization: With mobile-responsive themes, you can tap into the growing mobile eCommerce market.
6. Payment Options: It supports a wide range of payment gateways, giving customers flexible payment options.
1. Basic Shopify: This plan costs $39 monthly and includes unlimited bandwidth, 24/7 support, free SSL, and abandoned cart recovery.
2. Standard Shopify: The standard Shopify plan costs $79 monthly and includes additional features like professional reports and abandoned cart recovery.
3. Advanced Shopify: This plan starts at $299 per month and is designed for high-volume businesses. It includes advanced report building and third-party calculated shipping rates.
4. Shopify Plus: Shopify Plus is a customizable enterprise-level solution with pricing tailored to individual business needs. It offers advanced features and support.
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.
1. Easy Integration: WooCommerce seamlessly integrates with WordPress themes, turning your website into a fully functional e-commerce store without the need for extensive technical knowledge.
2. Customizability: It offers a high degree of customization, allowing you to tailor your online store’s design and functionality to match your brand and specific needs.
3. Product Management: WooCommerce offers effortless online store management, including adding, editing, and organizing your product catalog.
4. Payment Options: A wide range of payment gateways is offered by WooCommerce, making it convenient for customers to purchase. Common options include PayPal, Stripe, credit card, and debit card payments.
5. Shipping Management: Configure shipping methods, rates, and zones to handle the logistics of delivering products to your customers, including options for real-time shipping rates.
6. Inventory Management: Keep track of your stock levels and receive email notifications when products run low, ensuring you never run out of stock and maintain standard business online.
7. Reporting and Analytics: WordPress delivers detailed sales reports and analytics to gain insights into your store’s performance and make data-driven decisions.
8. Extensions and Plugins: WooCommerce offers an extensive library of extensions and plugins to enhance functionality. These can be used to add features like subscriptions, memberships, and more.
1. Cost–Effective: WooCommerce is a free ecommerce website building tool, making it an attractive option for businesses seeking to minimize initial costs.
2. Flexibility: The platform’s open-source nature and wide range of available extensions. It allows you to adapt your store to the changing online shopping experience requirements.
3. SEO–Friendly: WooCommerce is built with search engine optimization (SEO) standards. Products ranking with this eCommerce website building tool is completely effortless among all search engine results.
4. Community Support: There’s a vibrant community of users and developers, so you can find many tutorials, themes, and plugins to help you along the way.
5. Scalability: WooCommerce is fit for individuals, small businesses, and even established eCommerce owners.
WooCommerce itself is a free plugin that integrates with WordPress, simplifying the overall process of creating an online store. But to host it, there are several factors you’ll need that are billable.
1. Hosting: It is a crucial factor, as it handles everything, starting from the domain, server management, and bandwidth allocations. Depending on your particular requirements and plan, you can function with any hosting provider starting from $20 – $600/month.
2. Domain: The unique brand name the visitors get navigated to, starting from $2-$30/year. Its price is not only based on the business name you choose but also the gTLD extension; for example, if you choose ‘.online’, it can cost you $34.99/year; on the other hand, ‘.com’ stands for $15.99/year.
3. SSL: When you build an ecommerce store, the primary factor to win an audience is to ensure their data security. This SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) gets integrated for that only; your Google rankings can also get badly affected if you don’t consider SSL in your online store. Its price ranges from $0 – $350/year.
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.
1. SEO & Analytics Optimization: BigCommerce provides built-in SEO tools and features to ensure your ecommerce solution works for all search engines and track website analytics to make data-driven decisions.
2. Inventory & Payment Management: The platform offers multiple inventory management tools and supports various payment gateways that efficiently streamline your products and order management.
3. Application Integrations: With BigCommerce, you don’t have to worry about extending the store’s functionalities by choosing from 100s of apps from its marketplace; you can go beyond the typical functionalities and won’t feel bordered with any functionalities.
4. Cross-Channel Commerce: You can sell your products not only through your online store but also across multiple sales channels, including social media and marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and more.
5. Scalable Catalog: BigCommerce can handle a large number of products and online orders, making it suitable for businesses with extensive product catalogs.
6. Reporting & Analytics: Access detailed reports and analytics to gain insights into your store’s performance, customer behavior, and sales trends, helping you make informed business decisions.
7. Backup & Restore: BigCommerce offers data backup and restore capabilities to protect your store’s data and ensure business continuity in case of unexpected issues.
1. Scalability: BigCommerce can help both startups and established businesses to improve their online visibility – all it majorly depends is on the technical efforts you put into creating an ecommerce website using it.
2. Customization: The platform offers broad design flexibility and supports customization so that you can create a unique and branded online store.
3. Security: BigCommerce includes certified tier 1 security including SSL certifications, ISO, and SOC which gets regularly updated to safeguard your customers’ data and your business.
4. Mobile Responsiveness: Your online store will be mobile responsive ensuring a seamless shopping experience for customers on various devices
5. Multi-Channel Selling: Sell your products on multiple channels. Expanding your reach and potential customer base
1. Standard BigCommerce Plan: It starts from $39/mo. You can save some amount on yearly plans too but as it keeps modifying you’ll need to keep a check on BigCommerce pricing plans on its official site.
2. Plus BigCommerce Plan: With this plan, you can create up to 5 multi-storefronts and also get unlimited bandwidth. As it covers almost all features compared to the pro BigCommerce plan , any business size can consider using this ecommerce website builder at only $105/mo.
3. Pro BigCommerce Plan: As this plan is quite pricey – that is $399/mo it is recommended when your ecommerce sales need up to 8 multi-storefront and have started making up to $400k sales per year.
4. Enterprise BigCommerce Plan: As each enterprise has its unique requirements, it is recommended by the establishment itself to contact BigCommerce sales team.
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.
1. Design Tools: Squarespace is known for its user-friendly and easy-customizable web themes. They currently offer 60+ elegantly designed templates that allow you to create visually appealing websites without any coding knowledge.
2. Multiple Contributors & Access Levels: Squarespace allows you to collaborate with multiple contributors. Just like WordPress, you can assign different access levels to control what each team member can edit or access.
3. Passwords & Page Locks: Most builders charge for this feature, but Squarespace includes it in their package only. You can protect specific pages or your entire website with passwords. This feature is useful if you want to restrict access to certain content or sections of your site.
4. Custom Redirects: You can create custom 301 URL redirects to ensure that visitors are directed to the right pages, even if you’ve changed your site structure or moved content. It mainly occurs when you’ve newly set up your store and are making some SEO optimizations.
5. Scheduled Posts: It provides a scheduling feature for blog posts and other content, allowing you to plan your content calendar and publish posts at specific times.
6. Email Campaign Integration: Squarespace offers integration with popular email marketing platforms such as MailChimp, making it easier to collect email addresses from your website visitors and manage email campaigns.
7. Excerpt and Source URLs: You can create excerpts for blog posts and articles, and you can also specify source URLs for your content, which is helpful for SEO and attribution purposes.
1. User-Friendly Interface: Even if you’ve never built a website before, you can get started with Squarespace without any worries. Squarespace website doesn’t require any coding skills both beginners and experienced eCommerce store managers can consider it in use.
2. Mobile Friendly: All Squarespace templates are mobile-responsive, ensuring that your website looks and functions well on various devices, including smartphones and tablets.
3. Security: Squarespace takes security seriously, providing SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption for all websites. This helps protect sensitive information and build trust with visitors.
4. Robust E-Commerce Capabilities: Squarespace offers robust e-commerce features, making it suitable for online stores. Users can easily set up product listings, manage inventory, and accept payments.
5. Analytics and Insights: Squarespace offers website analytics, allowing users to track visitor statistics, page views, and other essential metrics to understand their website’s performance.
1. Squarespace Staff Plan: As of current Squarespace pricing plans, this plan starts for $23/month and gets your hands on well-customized templates that can be majorly used for personal portfolios, blogging, or static service pages.
2. Squarespace Company Plan: At just $33/month that too with advanced web analytics. But one thing to note here – with this plan, you’ll definitely get a fully integrated eCommerce but will also need to pay 3% additional transaction fees.
3. Squarespace Commerce Essential Plan: Starting from web optimization for mobile devices, to getting payment in your domain area – this plan is the best fit for small to intermediate size businesses. All you’ll need to pay is $36/month and zero transaction fees.
4. Squarespace Commerce Advanced Plan: The one fitting to most advanced sellers and big check generators – if you are getting started we suggest not to directly hop on this one thinking that best of all use it.
Better, switch step-by-step and strategize accordingly. It also offers a trial plan which is completely free for 14 days. We suggest you give it a short first. The price of the commerce advanced plan is $65/month with advanced selling options and subscription sales.
One factor to consider with Squarespace is that if you plan yearly planning then only you’ll get a free custom domain. In none of the monthly plans, Squarespace makes this functionality available.
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.
1. Website Builder: Square Online provides a website builder with easy-to-use drag and drop tools with templates that allow users to create and customize their online stores and websites.
2. Online Store Management: You can easily list and manage inventory, set pricing, create categories, and track inventory levels.
3. Payment Processing: Square Online integrates seamlessly with multiple payment processing systems, allowing you to manage your online store seamlessly and securely.
4. Mobile Responsiveness: Templates are designed to be mobile-responsive, ensuring that your online store looks and functions well on various devices.
5. Order Management: Square Online includes tools for managing orders, including order tracking, fulfillment, and the ability to send order notifications to customers.
6. Inventory Management: Users can track and manage inventory levels, receive low-stock alerts, and update product availability in real time.
7. Custom Domain: You can use a custom domain name for your ecommerce site to establish a professional and branded online presence.
8. Shipping and Fulfillment: You can build an ecommerce site that not only offers typical shipping options but also improves user experience with shipping labels, and offers different shipping rates to the customer.
9. Social Media Integration: When you start your online store the primary motto includes driving a massive audience and keeping them connected with your business. With this social media integration feature, you can easily conduct this and also gain a steady business appearance.
10. Analytics and Reporting: It provides analytics tools to track website traffic, sales, and customer behavior, allowing you to make data-driven decisions.
1. Ease of Use: As it is beginner-friendly, its user interface is pretty straightforward, making it accessible to businesses with varying levels of technical expertise.
2. Seamless Integration: Since Square Online is part of the Square ecosystem, it integrates seamlessly with payment processing and other tools including Stripe, Paypal, Apple Pay, and Afterpay.
3. Mobile Commerce: With mobile-responsive design, you can reach customers on smartphones and tablets, offering a convenient shopping experience.
4. Security: This ecommerce builder prioritizes security, ensuring that customer data and payments are protected.
5. Customer Support: Square offers customer support to assist with any issues or questions.
1. Square Free Plan: It starts and ends at $0.00, until and unless your online marketplace starts making sales – as it charges 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction (billed annually).
Though, it is the best free ecommerce website builder to consider as you don’t have to give away your funds before you start making
2. Square Plus Plan: Considering this plan can be the best for you, as it is available at $29/mo (billed annually) – it sounds quite more pocket-friendly with additional benefits or personalized orders and advanced item settings. Getting a free domain for 1 year is the most considerable plus you can get in this plan.
3. Square Premium Plan: The maximum and most recommended plan for ecommerce pro players. Undoubtedly, this plan includes an advanced version of each segment you can get with the free and plus plans but would also need some experience to tackle it.
It costs $79/mo with only 2.6% + 30¢ fees per transaction which is less than other plans. If you want a detailed comparison between the packages you can check on their official Square Up pricing page.
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 2023 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.
1. Drag-and-Drop Website Builder: Wix’s intuitive editor allows users to easily drag and drop elements/widgets (like text, images, videos, and more) onto their website canvas, making it easy to create custom layouts.
2. Templates: Wix offers a large collection of 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.
3. App Market: With its wide range of add-ons and integrations, the Wix app market offers a wide range of extendable functionalities including e-commerce, marketing, booking systems, and more.
4. Mobile Optimization: Wix templates themselves are well-optimized to function well on each device including smartphones, tablets, and mobile devices.
Even if you are about to build an e-commerce website from scratch its tool named Page Layout Optimizing tool helps to revise the mobile layout. It automatically re-orders elements on your page to get the best layout for mobile.
5. Hosting and Domain: With its free version of Wix you can get hosting services from Wix, named as ‘accountname.wixsite.com/siteaddress’. Besides that, you can connect your custom domain directly through the platform with the pro version.
6. SEO Tools: Wix offers basic SEO features, such as meta tags, alt text, and sitemaps, to help users improve their website’s visibility on search engines. You can ensure a standard scaling capacity with Wix.
7. E-commerce: Wix has exceptional e-commerce capabilities, allowing users to create online shops with 90+ languages multilingual capabilities, product listings, multichannel sales, and payment processing.
8. Blogging: Users can create and manage blogs on their Wix websites, including features like categories, tags, and social sharing.
9. Analytics: Wix provides website analytics tools to track visitor data and gain insights into website performance.
1. Beginner Friendly: Choose a template, check out the other widgets you want to add, drag it, and simply drop it on the website. Making a website with Wix is as simple as that with little to no web design experience.
2. No Coding Required: Creating an online store with this website builder doesn’t ask do any coding skills, making it accessible to a broader audience.
3. Affordable: It offers a free plan with limited features and various premium plans at different price points, making it suitable for various budgets.
1. Wix Free Plan: This plan allows you to create a basic website with a Wix-branded domain costing $0/month. However, it comes with limited storage and bandwidth, and Wix ads will be displayed on your site.
2. Combo Wix Plan: Starting at around $16 per month, this plan includes a custom domain, removes ads, and offers more storage and bandwidth. It’s suitable for individuals looking to build a hobby or portfolio site.
3. Wix Unlimited Plan: Freelancers and small business owners aiming to expand their online appearance can pick this plan. It will simply only cut off $22 per month with unlimited bandwidth, additional storage, and a few more features, making it suitable for small businesses.
4. Pro Wix Plan: If you are aiming to scale your small business higher in the means of testing marketing tactics, running Ads, and other marketing functionalities then you must consider this pro plan to get your ecommerce website to scale these all at just $27/month.
5. Wix VIP Plan: This plan starts at $45 per month, offers priority support, and is suitable for businesses that require high-level support and resources.
6. Wix Business Basic Plan: Most of us consider the use of this web builder as the best free ecommerce website builder believing that it offers both free and paid plans to create an ecommerce store.
But it is not like you can’t start selling online with Wix before switching to the pro plan. This basic one is part of that, only ranging from $27 to $32 for the unlimited; if your online marketplace starts scaling heavy sales you can also consider switching to Wix Business VIP at $59/month.
| Criteria | Shopify | WooCommerce | BigCommerce | Squarespace | Square Online | Wix |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ease of Use | Highly Intuitive | User-Friendly | User-Friendly | User-Friendly | User-Friendly | User-Friendly |
| Customization | Extensive customization options | Highly customizable | Highly customizable | Limited customization | Limited customization | Extensible 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
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.
It depends on multiple criteria you choose, such as:
If you are looking for an estimation of specific business size you can read out our Ecommerce Website Development Cost comprehensive guide.
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 – an excellent choice for beginners and businesses of all sizes. It offers a user-friendly interface, scalability, and many features.
2. WooCommerce – a powerful plugin for WordPress that provides high customization options as it is extendable with other plugins.
3. BigCommerce – suitable for businesses with extensive inventories and online sales.
4. Squarespace – an all-in-one solution with easy-to-use design tools and a focus on mobile optimization. It’s beginner-friendly but has limitations for complex businesses.
5. Square Online – beginner-friendly and also offers an option with a free plan that seamlessly integrates with payment processing.
6. Wix – a user-friendly website builder with many templates.
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.
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