E-Commerce Websites

An ecommerce website builder is a website builder that lets you sell online. These builders offer ecommerce-friendly plans, equipped with powerful sales features to help you grow and manage your online store.

It is important to look out for scalability, ease of use in the editor and the back-end dashboard, costs involved and quality of features and tools.

This is not a comprehensive list, there are many other we have not included. Please do your own research before choosing the one best suited for your business or organisation.

Shopify

Advantages

• Best for Startups, medium, large, multi-channel sales and print on demand
• Many regard this as the best overall ecommerce website builder
• Easy to get started and multiple themes to choose from
• 3 pricing plans to choose from
• Fully customisable store design
• Unlimited number of products, no bandwidth limitation, easy to scale and grow with your business
• Wide range of features
• User-friendly
• Mobile phone compatible
• Compatible with multiple payment processor platforms
• Lots of indicator info available

Disadvantages

• Shopify isn’t the cheapest of options, but you get what you pay for
• It can work out expensive – monthly fee, customisation fees, transaction fees, 3rd party app fees
• Limited customisation available without hiring a designer
• No email storage, you will need to find another provider
• Transaction fee based on payment option
• No access to marketing automation

Wix

Advantages

• Best Value for money ecommerce website builder
• Best for smaller stores - tools and features are impressive, but they aren’t quite good enough to deal with a large or complex inventory.
• Great-looking online store, they have 100+ ecommerce templates
• Feature rich-plans offer best value for money and it offers top-level help and support to users
• 3 pricing plans to choose from
• Supports 180 languages
• Excellent sales features

Disadvantages

• Can’t switch templates once the site is live
• Less sales features than Shopify
• You have to pay more for better features
• The number of options can be overwhelming

BigCommerce

Advantages

• Designed for both small and big online stores
• Best choice if you’re looking to really grow your online store into a large and successful business retailer
• Able to list unlimited products with any plan but each has a yearly sales threshold limit, if you go over it, you’ll be moved to a superior (and more expensive) plan
• BigCommerce doesn’t charge any additional transaction fees nor limits your online traffic
• Has great SEO features
• 3 pricing plans to choose from

Disadvantages

• Not very user-friendly or easiest to use - easy to add products and categories but not other types of content like blog posts
• Can be expensive - its prices reflect the large number of tools and features you get
• Third party apps needed
• Don’t use it if you are a beginner, either in business or in tech

WooCommerce

Advantages

• Best For Content Driven Brands, SEO
• Best for medium and large stores and is the number one ecommerce plugin for WordPress. Is a toolkit that transforms your WordPress website into an online eCommerce store

Disadvantages

• Is not very beginner friendly
• And even if WooCommerce is free of charge, don’t forget the hidden costs of a domain, hosting, the theme, additional plugins, or extensions

Zoho Commerce

Advantages

• Zoho Commerce features beautiful website templates and easy-to-use customisation tools
• Email marketing and SEO tools are built into the platform
• The platform is highly secure and SSL certified
• All plans include free website hosting
• Users can generate sales and customer reports with all plans

Disadvantages

• Zoho Commerce has no free plan and is less affordable than competitors, such as Shopify
• The platform lacks support for digital products
• Zoho commerce lacks dedicated 24/7 technical support

Etsy

Buy and sell handmade or vintage items, art and supplies on Etsy, the world’s most vibrant handmade marketplace.

Squarespace

Stunning templates and incredibly easy-to-use editor.

Square Online

Best of the best free plans.

GoDaddy

Fastest way to open an online store.