Best Ecommerce Website Builders

Shopify Summary

Shopify is one of the most popular ecommerce website builders around. It excelled across the board in our testing, scoring highest on sales features (4.6 out of 5), which is obviously most important for ecommerce website builders. It's ideal for larger businesses, owing to the fact it allows for the easy management of inventories that can only be handled by the most powerful software.

Shopify combines top-class sales channel integration with a simple and intuitive UI, and features great reporting tools to help optimize your sales. What's more, the provider is virtually unmatched when it comes to integrating disparate sales channels into a single online platform. For all these reasons, we've dubbed Shopify the best option when it comes to ecommerce website builders.

What we like about Shopify

The reason Shopify is the preferred choice of so many large or ready-to-scale online stores is there's no one better at facilitating the addition of large amounts of products fast, as well as subsequently managing them. If you're less bothered about your site looking exactly how you want it and more interested in selling, selling, and more selling, Shopify is the best ecommerce website builder for you.

Through its Shopify Payments system, you’re able to track everything from sales on Instagram through to Google Shopping, and even real-world point of sale transactions. That’s right – if you run a brick-and-mortar store, you can manage all your sales, inventory, and accounting through one platform. Shopify also permits 100 other payment gateways if you're not using Shopify payments – but there will be transaction fees.

Shipping is another feature that Shopify has locked down, with tons of ordering options — Wix isn't too far behind, but you'll still need some apps to help you with taking payments from across the world.

Screenshot of Shopify's inventory management tools, Source: Shopify

Although not nearly as good as Wix for design, Shopify is still better than a lot of other ecommerce platforms in this regard. It offers loads of different website templates, all of which are optimized for mobile, and can be edited and changed to your liking with remarkable depth. To see for yourself, simply take advantage of Shopify's free trial and check out the video below:

What Shopify should improve

Although you won't be disappointed with Shopify's design function and features, user experience varies across the site. For instance, users might find Shopify's Checkout and Page Types & Design a little clunky to navigate, especially if they're new to website builders. While this isn't likely to be a deal breaker, the interface isn't exactly intuitive when you compare it to Wix or Squarespace.

One person that took part in our user testing described it as the “inverse of Wix”, with a heavy emphasis on the management of inventory and sales channels integrations rather than the actual design of the site. The reason Shopify's scored 4.8 out of 5 is down to excelling in fulfilling the first two functions rather than the design templates on offer.

Another downside is that Shopify is more expensive than most other providers on this list. While its cheapest ecommerce plan weighs in at a modest $29 per month, its app library, which allows users to take advantage of basically any ecommerce feature they can think of, doesn't come cheap either. This, combined with the lack of built-in apps available right out of the gate, means you could end up spending a lot on Shopify. The transaction fees the provider charges — in a marketplace where competitors like Big Commerce don't enforce any — could also mean you lose a bit of profit on purchases.

How much does Shopify cost?

Shopify offers three main pricing plans: Shopify Basic, Shopify, and Shopify Advanced:

• Basic plan: $29 per month when paid annually. It will give you all the tools you need to run an online store. No extra apps are required – everything is ready to go.
• Shopify plan: $79 per month. This gives you some cheaper credit card processing rates and some nice, extra features such as gift card issuing. It also gives you support for hardware peripherals, such as receipt printers, which are essential if you're running a brick-and-mortar store and your website.
• The Shopify Advanced: $299 per month when paid annually. You get access to report building tools, as well as third-party calculated shipping rates, which means customers will be able to see how much it'll cost them to get a product delivered through different companies.

To be transparent, Shopify does offer a Starter plan for $5 per month, and an enterprise-level plan, called Plus, for $2,000 per month. We recommend sticking to those middle three plans if you're interested in ecommerce.

Want to know more? See our Shopify pricing guide

Note on the table below: all Shopify plans include abandoned cart recovery, point-of-sale support, a free SSL certificate and 24/7 customer support. Hosting and shipping labels are included in all pricing packages, except Starter.

Wix: summary

Wix is brilliant for smaller online stores, but thanks to a massive overhaul of its sales features over the past year, plus regular discounts, it can now truly hold its own with the very best competitors.

Based on our most recent round of research and testing, Wix now boasts an impressive score of 4.4 out of 5 for sales features, and an almost unbeatable 4.8 out of 5 overall as an ecommerce platform (compared to 4.6 in previous research). What's more, with the platform boasting stellar design features and a flawless user experience, it's no surprise the ecommerce tool is firmly in the top two.

What we like about Wix

When you sign up for a Wix ecommerce site, you get access to a rapidly improving ecommerce platform, with unmatched help and support. In our user testing, Wix scored well for ease of use – particularly for having an easy-to-understand interface. If you're not familiar with its backend, it does have a bit of a steep learning curve. But once you're past the initial growing pains, Wix is a breeze to navigate.

Wix's ecommerce platform uses exactly the same design tools as the regular Wix website builder. This means that you'll easily be able to build a brilliant-looking online store in minutes.

Screenshot of Wix's drag and drop feature. Source: Wix

Wix offers a great range of templates for online stores that you'll be able to customize with new text and images for all your products, plus contact forms and extra pages. Wix's drag-and-drop editor (pictured above) also makes everything super easy. Take a look at this tutorial video from Wix's YouTube channel:

Additionally, if you're using Ascend by Wix — the Marketing & Customer Management Suite provided by the website builder — you'll be able to centrally control and automate a range of business functions, from promoting your business with marketing emails to giving customers help and support with chatbots. Over $870 billion was spent online with US merchants last year, so it's these kinds of tools that will help you get in on the action.

If you're serious about your online store generating traffic, Wix's SEO capabilities will definitely cut the mustard too. Not only do Wix's newly refined SEO settings give users granular, page-level control over their SEO data, but its recent partnership with Semrush also gives them access to extensive keyword data, making it easier to identify keywords and user queries to target.

What's more, you can also easily create multilingual sites with Wix — ideal for users in countries with one or more major languages.

What Wix should improve

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Wix is the inability to change anything after you've published your site. Unlike Shopify and Squarespace, you can't change the theme post-publishing, which can make for a stressful pre-launch experience if you aren't sure about your design. This saw Wix score a disappointing 0 out of 5 on our design flexibility tests.

Wix somewhat compensates for this by giving you significantly more creative freedom in the design phase than competitors like Shopify because it includes hundreds of templates to choose from. This does mean it's less likely that you'll ultimately want to change your site, but being able to make modifications after publishing is still a feature that newbies to the website building game would benefit from.

Another thing you need to know before buying is that Wix has quite a slow response time relative to other website builders on this list — but it still wasn't the slowest we tested.

How much does Wix ecommerce cost?

Wix offers three dedicated ecommerce pricing plans: Business Basic, Business Unlimited, and Business VIP.

• Business Basic: $27 per month when paid annually, and gives you all the essentials to start an online store, including 20GB of storage and the ability to sell products online.
• Business Unlimited: $32 per month when paid annually. It has some small advantages over the Basic plan, such as access to Wix's logo creator tool, but nothing completely essential to running a bigger online store.
• The Business VIP: $59 per month when paid annually, but gives you access to VIP help and customer support. This might not seem like a massive upgrade, but it might save you a small fortune in the event that something goes wrong with your website.

See our Wix pricing guide for more detail on its ecommerce plans, or check out the table below for a sneak peak:

3. Squarespace – Best for Marketing Features

Squarespace summary

You might be forgiven for thinking we’ve put Squarespace in by mistake. It is, first and foremost, a website builder that is designed to give you a sleek website, and not as an ecommerce platform. However, we found Squarespace to be a very competent online store builder

Even if it doesn't quite win in our Wix vs Squarespace comparison, it ended up with a better overall score than some dedicated ecommerce store builders, such as BigCommerce, according to our in-house testing and research.

What we like about Squarespace

The built-in scalability of the software allows for growing businesses to develop along with the platform. It's also one of the most improved ecommerce website builders we tested too – its user experience score jumped from 3.4 out of 5 in our last round of testing to 4.2 out of 5 this time, which means people who are using the platform are becoming more and more satisfied with what it can do.

Squarespace also offers compatibility with Square — one of the biggest POS providers out there — and this can be a huge benefit to any business, particularly physical stores.

As we mentioned above, Squarespace's real advantage is that it has some of the best website builder templates on the market. Squarespace's templates are all designed in-house and are completely optimized for cell phones, tablets, laptops, and PCs. There are plenty designed specifically for ecommerce websites as well, so getting started will be a piece of cake.

With a user-friendly site builder, Squarespace's back-end design is heaps more intuitive than Wix's. Thanks to Squarespace's Fluid Engine upgrade, which combines its classic drag-and-drop technology with an improved, flexible design grid, it's now easier than ever to create a slick, professional-grade site on Squarespace.

Finally, Squarespace is also ahead of the major providers when it comes to marketing and promotional tools. The platform offers built-in search engine optimization (SEO) features to help improve your store's web ranking; social media integrations, so that can drive more traffic to your page; and a free integration with Mailchimp, a leading email marketing tool. Since most other ecommerce builders don't offer these perks, Squarespace might be the best ecommerce builder for your team if you're looking to maximize the reach of your business.

What Squarespace should improve

While Squarespace previously only allowed for two third-party payment options, the company has since expanded, allowing payments through Stripe, Paypal, Apple Pay, and Afterpay. Unfortunately, you will be limited in your ability to internationalize due to tricky language settings and shipping choices.

In a related manner, although Squarespace offers inventory management, you'll find better systems offered by other providers. Overall, it's not the best choice for managing large quantities of stock, but it is a better option for businesses selling non-physical items (like event tickets) rather than physical ones (like handbags).

How much does Squarespace cost?

Squarespace offers two pricing plans for online stores: Basic Commerce and Advanced Commerce.

• Basic plan: $27 per month. For this price you get a mobile-optimized checkout, which is a great feature for businesses relying on mobile commerce. The plan also offers improved commercial metrics to identify any pain points your users are finding with your site and you aren't required to pay any transaction fees on any sales, either.
• Advanced plan: $49 per month. On this plan you get abandoned cart recoveries, and shipping rate calculations for USPS, FedEx, and UPS. You get access to Squarespace's Orders API, which allows you to build custom integration with third-party services for order fulfillment and production logistics. Plus, you can sell gift cards and recurring digital services, such as magazines or members-only podcasts.

Want to know more? Read our full Squarespace for ecommerce review or check out the pricing table below:

4. Square Online – Best for Businesses On a Budget

Square Online is one of the easiest ecommerce platforms to get started with. Signing up and building a store with the platform is remarkably straightforward.

All the tools you need to create an online store are offered up straightaway with minimal fuss and confusion — it's simple, effective and, importantly, excellent value for money. Businesses on a budget, take note.

What we like about Square Online

Unlike most of its rivals, you can start selling stuff online without signing up for one of Square Online's paid plans. Yes, that's right, this platform is completely free — you won't find many better options out there that don't demand any sort of payment.

Based on the provider feature offering in relation to its price point, our research team actually awarded square a value for money rating of 4.8 out of 5. That's head and shoulders above any other ecommerce builder on this list.

However, it must be noted that Square Online enforces transaction fees, whereas BigCommerce and other providers featured in this article do not.

Perhaps one of Square's biggest upsides is that it has seamless integration with Square's POS software.

This makes Square Online a great choice if you're already using Square's POS tools for a bricks-and-mortar store — all your sales, accounting, and inventory information will be stored together, making everything easy to access and easy to manage. Its seamless POS integrations, alongside its user-friendly interface and excellent value for money, are just some of the reasons Square Online scored 4.6 out of 5 — just behind Wix and Shopify — despite improvement being needed in several areas (more on this below).

Find out more in our full Square Online review

What Square Online should improve

In terms of improvements, Square Online doesn't offer you a whole lot in the way of design or customization options. In fact, during our user testing, we found Square Online's designs to be a bit basic.

Disappointingly, while design-focused sites like Wix offer hundreds of templates, Square Online doesn't give users a range of site templates to choose from. Instead, you get a basic layout that can be changed a bit, but you'll still be left with something that looks slightly generic.

How much does Square Online cost?

As we mentioned above, Square Online is the only worthwhile ecommerce platform that allows you to start selling stuff using a free plan — with a pretty expensive 2.9% + $0.30 transaction fee on all sales.

However, there are some drawbacks to the free plan. For example, you won't get a custom domain name — meaning you'll be left with something that looks sloppy and a bit unprofessional. Your site will also feature Square Online branding, with banner adverts that, again, make your site look amateurish. However, you get access to all the accounting and inventory features offered on the more expensive plans, which are:

• Plus plan – $29 per month. Removes Square Online branding and gives you unlimited storage and some extra marketing and shipping features.
• Premium plan – $79 per month. Lowers the transaction fee to 2.6% and offers improved shipping discounts. Your customers will also be able to use the real-time shipping calculator, letting them see exactly how much they'll pay at checkout.

While it can’t quite match Shopify or Wix, BigCommerce is still an excellent ecommerce platform that's ideal for businesses managing large or complex inventories. If you're looking to set up a clothing store, for instance, BigCommerce or Shopify is the way to go.

When it comes to its core function as a sales platform, BigCommerce can match Shopify stride-for-stride. In fact, the impressive inventory management features mean you could make the case, depending on your needs, that BigCommerce is a better fit for your business, particularly if you're a smaller business that still requires these advanced ecommerce features.

What we like about BigCommerce

BigCommerce doesn’t place transaction fees on the sales you make — something that you might have to put up with if you opt for Shopify but don't want to use Shopify payments. However, BigCommerce will place a cap on the total value of sales you can make, which increases depending on the pricing plan you choose.

BigCommerce Analytics Dashboard. Source: BigCommerce

The provider also offers excellent reporting and sales analysis tools (see above), granular product inventory detail, and a wide range of sales channels it can integrate, including real-world point of sale transactions. It's also the only platform that allows you to send transactional emails to confirm purchases.

BigCommerce allows you to manage loads of different sales channels through its platform. In addition to selling on your own website, you'll also be able to sell products on Instagram, eBay, and Amazon, while controlling everything through your BigCommerce account. Here's a quick guide to advertising on Meta's platforms with BigCommerce:

What BigCommerce should improve

The main drawbacks to BigCommerce are its slightly limited customization options.

As well as this, BigCommerce commits the cardinal user experience sin of having an interface that is difficult to navigate and does not provide many helpful tips to get the hang of it. This is especially noticeable when considering sites like Wix, which has so many tutorial elements, especially during setup.

How much does BigCommerce cost?

BigCommerce has three main pricing plans, and they're very similar to Shopify's:

• $29.95 per month Standard plan.
• $79.95 per month Plus plan.
• $299.95 per month Pro plan.

The Standard plan allows you to list an unlimited number of products with any payment processor you want. However, it doesn't give you access to some of the customer-centric features that are now commonplace, and your annual sales are capped to $50,000.

The Plus plan ups the sales cap to $150,000 per year. It also allows you to create custom customer groups for more targeted marketing, while customers are able to store credit cards.

The Pro plan gives you access to Google customer reviews, allows you to import a custom SSL certificate, and lifts the sales cap to $400,000 per annum.

Want to know more? See our BigCommerce pricing guide, or check out the table below:

We're not going to sugar coat it; Volusion is a great ecommerce platform, but it's difficult to use, especially when compared to the increasingly user-friendly Squarespace.

Simply put, it just isn’t quite as intuitive and straightforward to use as many of the options on this list, which really holds it back in this context.

What we like about Volusion

Volusion has great, mobile-responsive website templates, which will help make your site stand out from the crowd and, with 5.31 billion unique mobile users across the world, you'll need all the help you can get.

On top of that, it provides one of the strongest site speeds on this list, meaning that websites set up by Volusion typically benefit from faster loading times. Since Google awards well-performing sites with higher rankings, this can be a great asset for businesses looking to boost their traffic organically.

Volusion's industry-leading site speed actually makes it one of the best platforms on the market — especially for experienced users. However, with an ease of use score of 3.2 out of 5 — due to its restricted backend and complex user design — the ecommerce website builder is unable to appear any higher on our list.

Like the other ecommerce building platforms, Volusion has a good range of strong sales features – especially its highly detailed inventory management. This will pay dividends as your business grows, as managing your stock and analyzing your sales performance will be easy.

It also has no transaction fees, and a great range of reporting tools that can help you stay on top of your dealings.

What Volusion could improve

But, as we mentioned above, Volution's software can be a bit confusing to navigate. Some features relating to your site’s design, for example, can be accessed from two separate menus, creating a doubled-up feeling that leaves your head spinning.

Some menus are simply confusing, with pages you’d expect to be in one place being located in a seemingly unrelated menu. Due to its complicated design and clunky usability, Volusion received a rating of 3.2 out of 5 for ease of use — placing it last out of all the providers on this list. It would be useful if Volusion had a good knowledge center to compensate for this poor score but, according to our in-house research team, the software also performed the worst when it came to (not) finding the information we needed.

How much does Volusion cost?

Volusion offers three fixed pricing plans, as well as a POA plan for the largest businesses, with pricing based on your gross merchandise volume:

• The Personal plan – $29 per month, which is meant for small businesses. You only have access to online support and will be limited to 100 products and up to $50,000 sales per year.
• The Professional plan – $79 per month, will let you list 5,000 products on your site. The sales cap is doubled to $100,000 per year, and you get access to features such as product reviews, newsletters, and abandoned cart recoveries.
• The Business plan – $299 per month, which gives you a lot of extra features. For example, you get access to Volusion’s API, advanced report builder tools, and the platform's “Dedicated Success Team”, who can advise you on business decisions rather than simply offering support.

Big Cartel is unique on this list because it is primarily aimed at artists and other creators to sell pieces on a simple and affordable platform. Between the stripped-back feature set, the low prices, and the basic templates, you'll be able to set up an online shop quickly and easily and it won't distract from your creative vision.

What we liked about Big Cartel

Unlike most of the website builders on this list, Big Cartel has a pretty notable niche: artists. According to Big Cartel's website, they've helped in the sale of more than $2.5 billion worth of art, and the small team aims to support artists however they can.

To accommodate for cash-strapped creatives, Big Cartel offers a free plan, and it can be very attractive if you're planning on selling less than five products. However, there are a few features missing from the free plan that you get when you pay, including Google Analytics, theme code editing, and inventory tracking.

Inventory tracking is, however, available on the provider's paid plans. With this feature, you'll be able to sell your products and ensure you're keeping track of everything effectively. Plus, you'll be perfectly set up to scale down the road, which is always beneficial for a growing business.

Where Big Cartel could improve

With the above considered, any other kind of business likely wants to steer clear of Big Cartel. It's incredibly limited, and even the more expensive plans miss advanced ecommerce features like gift cards and abandoned cart recovery. It's also quite restricted in a branding sense because marketing features are virtually non-existent. This makes Big Cartel an unfavorable option for businesses intent on broadening their reach.

What's more, if your business is budget-conscious, you could get a much more effective website builder that is a bit more robust when it comes to ecommerce features, like BigCommerce, or better design functionalities, like Squarespace. Still, if you're looking to launch a small, artistic side gig, you've found the perfect option.