Best Ecommerce Website Builders 2020

We’ve tested every major ecommerce platform out there, so we can help you pick the right one for your needs. Based on our thorough tests and assessments, we've found that Wix is the best ecommerce website builder around.

Wix is perfect if this is your first time creating an online store, even if you have no coding or web design experience. It has fantastic online sales features and modern templates – plus, regular Wix discounts make the platform particularly appealing for smaller businesses, too.

Shopify is our joint-highest scoring website builder for ecommerce. In fact, if you're looking to create a large-scale online store then it may prove a better choice than Wix, thanks to its vast array of sales and fulfilment features and ability to tie in seamlessly with a physical store sales funnel.

Unusually, there is even a great free option to consider, thanks to Square Online – you can build an online store through Square (a retail and POS giant) at zero cost, and you'll only need to pay a percentage of your transaction fees to Square.

* Save 10% on Squarespace with code ‘TECHCO10'

Remember – the internet may be the biggest marketplace in the world, but unless your business has the right website, no one will be able to find your products, let alone buy them. So follow our recommendations and make the right choice before you start building an online store.

Based on our thorough tests, these are our favorite ecommerce website builders:

• 1. Wix – Fantastic templates and a modern suite of ecommerce functions make this our top choice for all but the largest online stores.
  2. Shopify – The best way to build a large-scale online store and manage your sales with sophisticated payment and shipment features.
  3. Square Online – A simple but surprisingly powerful tool from a retail giant, with a great free plan.
  4. BigCommerce – Runs Shopify and Wix very close for the top spot, this is a fantastic ecommerce website builder.
  5. Squarespace – Designed as a website builder, Squarespace is also a great ecommerce platform.
  6. Volusion – Great for sales and reporting, but a little hard to use.
  7. Weebly – Gives you a good website, but lacks some sales features.

  In this guide, we'll also cover some more general points about ecommerce website builders, including:

  • Top Seven Ecommerce Website Builders – Take a look at our independently-assessed top seven
  • How We Test Ecommerce Website Builders – Peek beneath the hood of our unique user testing
  • Ecommerce Website Builder FAQs – We answer all your burning questions about ecommerce website builders
  • Next Steps – Get started with the best ecommerce website builder for you

Top 7 Ecommerce Website Builders

We put each ecommerce website builder through a rigorous testing and analysis program to cut the wheat from the chaff.

Wix is the best ecommerce website builder for smaller businesses, including first-time online stores and ecommerce platforms that don't have a bricks and mortar store as well. With a huge range of templates and bang-up-to-date ecommerce features, Wix is a brilliant platform for creating a slick online store. With its ADI system, you simply need to answer a few quick questions from Wix and the platform will build you a draft site in moments.

Shopify is our joint best-rated ecommerce website builder. Though it scores the same as Wix in our tests, we'd argue Shopify is better for larger stores. It is truly made for streamlined online sales, but it also pairs brilliantly with existing sales funnels from a physical store or chain of shops. If you want a large, complex online store, then Shopify is perfect – it can scale to match the needs of even the most ambitious business.

Try before you buy to see just how much Shopify can do for you – Get a 14-day free trial

However, if you want to create a smaller or more boutique online store, our top recommendation is Wix. This website builder makes it breathtakingly easy to design a professional-looking site from scratch, and Wix now has some very sophisticated ecommerce functions and apps to help your business grow.

Want to know more about our favorite ecommerce builders and what makes them so great? Below, we've rounded up our test scores for each of the main ecommerce website builders on the market.

* Save 10% on Squarespace with code ‘TECHCO10'

For more detail on how each brand did in our tests, keep reading for our review summaries below:

Is Wix good for ecommerce?

Wix is great for ecommerce if you're running a smaller online store, and if you're keen to design your own site. When you sign up for a Wix ecommerce site, you get access to a rapidly improving ecommerce platform, with unmatched help and support. What’s more, in our user testing, Wix scored well for ease of use – particularly for having an easy to understand interface.

Ascend allows you 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. You can also easily create multilingual sites with Wix – ideal for users in countries with one or more major languages.

See our full Wix Ecommerce review for more

Designing an ecommerce site with Wix

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.

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 makes everything super easy, as well.

How much does Wix ecommerce cost?

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

Business Basic costs $20 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 costs $25 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 costs $35 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 you website.

See our Wix pricing guide for more detail on its ecommerce plans

How Did We Choose the Best Website Builders for Ecommerce?

Our recommendations aren't based on random guesswork.

We put every website builder on this page through extensive, independent testing.

As well as assessing the features and value for money of each price plan, we put each website past a panel of testers of completely mixed abilities, from experienced web developers to novices. That way, we can ascertain real world ease-of-use for each online store platform.

How we test and rate ecommerce website builders

The scoring above is based on in-depth, independent assessments of each of these ecommerce website builders. So you can know which system is right for you, we put each brand through a series of tests and user feedback assessments.

For an ambitious online store, you'll need excellent features and access to a range of apps – all of which goes into our features assessment. But it's no use having these options if they're too complex to use. That's why we also do real-life user testing, getting users with a range of skill levels to try out the website builders and provide feedback on how approachable they found them.

We rate the variety and quality of templates you can use to create an online store, plus we rate the Help & Support on offer when you need assistance.

Finally, we give an all-important value for money rating, based on the variety of plans available and what you get in return for your investment.

If you're looking to make a smaller, more boutique store, then we'd recommend choosing Wix – it has some fantastic ecommerce functions, and competitive price plans that will be more appealing than the Shopify top tiers for larger stores.

Shopify came out joint-top in our tests. It's a market leader when it comes to creating a large online store, and for good reason. It has fantastic features and, crucially, it's a great brand to choose if you're building a large-scale ecommerce site.

Building an Ecommerce Website FAQs

Now you know which ecommerce website is the best, and how we came to that conclusion, it only seems right that we answer some important questions and dispel some myths about ecommerce website builders.

In this section, we'll be covering:

• Ecommerce website builder costs
• Whether or not you can create an ecommerce site for free
• Whether Wix is a good choice for an ecommerce site
• Which ecommerce website builder is the easiest to use
• The best ecommerce website builder for small businesses
• What makes a good ecommerce website design
• Whether ecommerce builders give you ready-made site templates or not

How much does it cost to build an ecommerce website?

Not all ecommerce website builders cost the same amount. In fact, platforms such as Shopify or BigCommerce cost significantly more than platforms such as Wix or Weebly.

This is largely due to the complexity of each platform. While Wix and Weebly will let you create a really small, basic site with only a few products, Shopify and BigCommerce are designed for much larger operations.

Broadly speaking, Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly's cheapest ecommerce plans will cost you between $20-30 per month.

Wix's ecommerce plans, for example, range from $23 per month for the Business Basic plan to $500 per month for the Enterprise plan.

Meanwhile, Shopify's cheapest plan is $29 per month, and gives you access to a serious ecommerce experience. However, its other plans cost $79 per month and $299 per month. These are designed for established ecommerce stores, so there's no need to worry about the high prices if you're just starting out.

How do I create a free ecommerce website?

You'll have to pay actual money to sell online with any of these ecommerce platforms. But, there is a way of creating your online store for free, and that's by choosing Square Online as your website builder. Of all the ecommerce brands we've listed, this is the only one that offers a way to create your entire store for free – the catch? You'll need to pay transaction fees to Square on all of yours sales. That isn't unusual for an ecommerce site builder, but we recommend you check our pricing table, above, to be sure you're comfortable with the costs.

All in all, we'd recommend Square Online to smaller ecommerce brands, or anyone building a personal online store or boutique store. For much bigger sites, the transaction fee will work out as poorer value.

All the other website builders we've listed do offer some level of free functionality – Squarespace, Shopify, and BigCommerce, for example, have limited-time free trials. However, you'll need to pay to extend these trials into full sites.

Don't let that put you off setting up an ecommerce site, though. As you start making money, you'll quickly recoup the cost of the ecommerce platform you choose.

Is Wix good for online stores?

If you want to make a small store – perhaps as a side-hustle, a boutique website, or a site to sell merch associated with another project you're working on (a podcast or band, for example) – then yes.

In fact, Wix is a great choice for an ecommerce site if you're looking to make an online store as part of a larger website.

However, if you're looking to create a large online store for a company that sells lots of products, we'd probably advise going with Shopify or BigCommerce.

Which is the easiest ecommerce website builder to use?

Shopify and Wix are the two easiest ecommerce website builders we've tested, and both should prove simple and approachable when you're creating your own online store. Arguably, Wix just has the edge for first timers, thanks to its best-in-class Help & Support options. Both sites have excellent setup processes, where you're guided through creating a site with some simple questions and easy-to-follow templates to get you started – this can help any beginner feel confident with their first steps.

To determine how easy each website builder is to use, we put each website builder we tested past a panel of users of mixed experience with creating websites. This included complete first-timers who had never made a website before, let alone an online store.

In our table below, we've included ratings for Ease of Use, Help & Support, plus a Customer Score rating, based on the feedback from our real-world user panel.

Which ecommerce platform is best for small businesses?

If you're a small business owner, and want to create an ecommerce site, we'd recommend going with either Wix or Squarespace.

Wix makes creating a website incredibly easy, and you'll have loads of design tools at hand to make it fit your existing branding. Squarespace, on the other hand, has a laser focus on design, and has loads of built-in ecommerce tools.

Wix, however, does offer a more scalable platform that Squarespace for ecommerce sites. So, while both are good for starting out, Wix will likely be a better fit in the long run.

What makes a good ecommerce website design?

The best ecommerce sites are super easy to use and look high-quality. Of course, building a site that can tick both of these boxes is easier said than done.

However, there are some good ground rules to follow:

• Make sure navigation is easy – No one likes clicking back-and-forth between different menus, trying to work out how to get home
• Use high quality images and videos – Customers want to buy things that look nice, and if the stuff you're trying to sell doesn't look nice, no one will buy it
• Mobile optimization – More than 40% of online purchases happen on mobiles, so its worth making sure your site looks good on a phone
• User-generated reviews – These are a great way to build trust in an online store, so make sure your site can use them

This isn't just a matter of pretty visuals and smooth navigation for customers, either. A well designed ecommerce website can improve your revenue – indeed, research by Shopify has found a correlation between quality online store design and increased customer loyalty.

In fact, Shopify is so confident in its research, it has produced a 39-point checklist for all online stores to use when deciding on a design.

Are there ecommerce website templates?

Absolutely. All of the ecommerce platforms we've recommended here offer online store templates. These make it super-easy to start creating an online store by giving you the bare bones of a site, right off the bat.

You might not like the idea of using a template, and would prefer a more free experience. However, all of Squarespace's templates, for example, are professionally-designed, which might give you the edge on your competition. We've added some of our favorite in the gallery.

A template will also ensure your site stays consistent, so it always looks clean and elegant.

Next Steps in Creating an Ecommerce Site

So those are the best platforms for creating an ecommerce site, but how do you actually go about creating one? We’re going to run through all the things you should consider before, during, and after the creation of your site.

• Pick the right software – This is crucial, because if you don’t get this right, your business might never reach its potential. We’d recommend Shopify if you’re looking for a platform to give you an online store, as well as help you manage bricks-and-mortar stores or other online sales channels. Wix would be a better choice if you’re after a fully-featured website with the ability to sell products.
• Use the trial – Once you’ve picked your software, you should always try it out before committing to it. Shopify (and most other ecommerce builders) will give you a free trial period, normally lasting a couple of weeks. Some website builders, including Wix, have free packages with no time limit. This means that you can make sure the software is right for you, and you know how to properly use it.
• Prepare – The more you put into ecommerce platforms, the more you get out. If you’re already running a business, it’s worth checking whether the software you’re going to use can work with the existing payment systems and accounting software you use. Some platforms, such as Shopify, encourage you to use their own payment systems, for example.
• Get people to try it – Ask friends, family, or even random people to use your store and gather their feedback. After all, when Joe Public is going to be buying your products, you should at least make sure they can use your website.
• Optimize – Don’t sit still; make sure you use the reporting tools offered by your ecommerce builder to improve different aspects of your site. This will help get customers down the sales funnel as quickly and easily as possible.

Still not sure which ecommerce builder is right for you? Read our full reviews of:

• Wix review
• Shopify review
• Wix vs Shopify
• BigCommerce review
• Shopify vs BigCommerce
• Squarespace for Ecommerce
• Wix vs Squarespace
• Volusion review