Ready to start selling online? You’ll need an e-commerce platform. An e-commerce platform is software that enables you to create and manage an online store. You’ll be able to use this software to manage your products, edit your site, analyze operations, and everything else associated with online sales. However, finding the best ecommerce platforms isn’t always as easy as you think.
The market has become flooded with many different e-commerce solutions of all types and sizes. Fortunately for you these wide range of options means that the best solution for your business situation is out there. You just need to find it. Whether you’re starting a new website from scratch or looking to change providers, this guide will point you in the right direction.
– Square Online
– Bluehost
– Shopify
– BigCommerce
– Wix
– Squarespace
– 3DCart
– WooCommerce
– OpenCart
– Ecwid
Below, I’ve highlighted the best features, benefits, prices, and potential drawbacks for each one. I will also explain which one of these platforms is the best for different types of online stores.
Zyro is another easy-to-use website builder that allows you to create an incredible website in minutes.
Whether you’re looking to make an e-commerce site, a portfolio to showcase your work, or a simple blog, Zyro offers a variety of beautiful templates for you to choose from to help.
Their e-commerce functionality is world class too. Their drag-and-drop website builder allows you to make the perfect online store and customize it to fit your brand. It’s also highly responsive so you’ll be able to see your changes take effect in real time.
One of their unique features they offer is their AI tool. For example, their AI Writer generates text for your website in just seconds. which means not having to stress about creating compelling copy yourself.
When it comes to pricing, Zyro is extremely hard to beat. Currently, at the time of publishing this blog post you can get 80% off full price if you sign up for certain annual contracts.
Most people know Square for their POS systems and software. However, they also offer a superb e-commerce platform.
It’s no surprise that their e-commerce platform integrates well with their POS software. So, if you happen to use Square, you’ll be able to have an accurate count of your inventory as you are selling to your customers.
With Square’s e-commerce platform, you’ll have the ability to do things like book appointments, accept donations, arrange pickups or deliveries, and even sell your products directly on Instagram to boost your ROI.
Square also gives you excellent online tools to boost your SEO and reach even more customers through the web.
The platform is free to use and includes integration with Square POS, automatic inventory sync, and unlimited products for pick and delivery giving you an instant boost in your online sales. However, there is one catch: It costs around 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction using Square.
For full pricing details on each plan, you can visit the Square Online plans page.
WooCommerce is one of the most trusted ways to convert a WordPress site into an appealing and functional online store. But what if you don’t know the first thing about how to maximize the two platforms working together, or just don’t want to handle optimizing both on your own?
Bluehost is one of the largest names in web hosting and has you covered with just about everything. However, in your case it has just the option you need—its outstanding dedicated WooCommerce hosting package.
It’s not just web hosting it’s more than that, it’s a turnkey solution for creating a WooCommerce store on your WordPress site that runs without any problems right out of the gate.
Once you start using Bluehost you will get a guided store creator that includes all the features, extensions, and plugins you might need. Many of the crucial plugins for WooCommerce, like shipping options through USPS or FedEx, will cost you an additional annual fee to use. A few of them run upwards of $200/year.
With Bluehost online stores which is powered by WooCommerce, you will get all the essentials you need at no extra cost to you whatsoever.
Furthermore, you get Bluehost’s exemplary 24/7 customer support for some extra guidance and a boatload of different store features, including:
– Email marketing
– Customer reviews
– Unlimited products
– Easy-install payment processing options
– Manual order creation
– Discount/promo codes
– Site traffic metrics
All of these are included in both the standard and Premium plans for Bluehost’s WooCommerce hosting.
Pricing scales a bit, based on your upfront commitment:
Standard
$12.95/month for a three-year term, then renewing at $24.95/month
$15.95/month for a one-year term, then renewing at $24.95/month
$29.95/month when paying month-to-month
Premium
$24.95/month for a three-year term, then auto-renewing at $39.95/month
$32.95/month for a one-year term, then renewing at $39.95/month
$49.95/month when paying month-to-month
Bluehost E-commerce, powered by WooCommerce, is a great option for both novices to WordPress and/or WooCommerce, as well as those that simply want a simple, trusted, turnkey solution for setting up a WooCommerce web store.
Get started on creating your online store by heading over to Bluehost.
Shopify is arguably one of the most well-known and best e-commerce platforms in the world. Shopify powers over a million e-commerce websites across many various industries and product types.
That’s because it’s both easy to use and setup while offering simple pricing and being incredibly powerful. It’s an excellent option for beginners or orgs without a great deal of in-house tech solutions.
Shopify is also very versatile. It’s used by many small businesses and larger-scale operations. Kylie Jenner used Shopify to create her billion-dollar empire selling lip kits from Kylie Cosmetics. But you can always use it for a smaller startup as well.
Another stand out feature from Shopify is its award-winning 24/7 customer support, which you’ll have access to even before you sign up or purchase a Shopify plan.
Shopify makes it really easy for you to sell products from your online store from the start, as well as through social media platforms, other online marketplaces, and in-person settings with Shopify POS software.
The Shopify drag-and-drop builder is a very convenient and easy way to build a new e-commerce website from scratch. All themes are optimized for mobile devices, which is important to maximize your conversions.
They even offer an excellent payment processor. It also integrates with more than 3,200 apps within the Shopify App Store.
There are three kinds of base plans offered by Shopify:
Basic Shopify — $29 per month
Shopify — $79 per month
Advanced Shopify — $299 per month
But please keep in mind, these are just the base rates. Adding different apps, processing payments, and other types of features will cost you extra.
High volume stores that are seeking more of an enterprise-grade solution, you can get a custom Shopify Plus quote to suit your business’s needs.
The entry-level plan they offer will be enough to get you started, but I’d recommend the mid-tier Shopify subscription if you can. It comes with better features like gift cards, different kinds of professional reports, and overall better discounts for shipping and payment processing for just a little more upfront investment.
Shopify does however offer a 14-day free trial for all of their plans.
BigCommerce is a robust all-in-one e-commerce platform providing everything you need to sell online. In fact, BigCommerce actually offers more native features than Shopify built-in straight from the get-go.
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by its features — except for people who plan on taking advantage of these extra features, it’s nice to know that you simply won’t have to pay extra for functionalities.
BigCommerce makes it easy for you to manage sales across multiple channels as well. You’ll be ready to sell to customers across platforms like Amazon, eBay, Instagram, and Facebook. BigCommerce also partners with payment solutions like PayPal and Square to allow your customers even more options to buy your products.
The platform has an excellent reputation in terms of uptime, loading speed, security, and other performance metrics. they provide unique solutions for B2B stores, wholesale shops, and WordPress users.
BigCommerce has specific options for e-commerce stores in numerous industries as well.
Depending on whether or not you’re starting a new online store from scratch or scaling your brick-and-mortar small business into the e-commerce world, BigCommerce is one of the best solutions for you to seriously consider.
Here’s a quick overview of the BigCommerce plans:
Standard — $29.95 per month
Plus — $79.95 per month
Pro — $249.95 per month
As expected, each tier does come with different added features and benefits. But what’s unique about BigCommerce’s pricing is that once a store reaches certain sales milestones it will be automatically upgraded to a new plan.
The 12-month sales limits are as follows:
Standard — Up to $50,000
Plus — Up to $150,000
Pro — Up to $400,000
So, for instance, if you sign up for the Standard plan, you’ll automatically be switched to the Plus plan if you eclipse $50,000 within the last 12 months.
While that shouldn’t discourage you from using them, it’s important to understand this ahead of time so you aren’t surprised if your monthly rate increases.
Save 10% off Plus and Pro plans with an annual contract. you can try any BigCommerce plan free for 15 days.
Wix is a very flexible, drag-and-drop website builder. It can adjust to a variety of your website creation needs.
The best part about using Wix for your e-commerce platform is its simplicity to manage. Your e-commerce site will be able to have the same drag-and-drop benefits as a standard Wix website. You simply just need to choose one of the e-commerce plans that accepts payments online.
For those of you who are already using Wix for your website, you can always upgrade your plan later on to activate the e-commerce functionality.
Your Wix store manager makes it very easy to manage your inventory, track all of your orders, and communicate with your customers. With its integration with tools such as bookkeeping software like Quickbooks, Wix really beats the competition as one of the best e-commerce website builders.
Wix has more than 500+ different e-commerce templates for you to choose from. You’ll be able to customize your storefront with collections, galleries, related products, and a customer wishlist.
You’ll even have the ability to set up global shipping rules from multiple carriers with ease. As of right now, Wix doesn’t support drop shipping. But their website does say that a drop shipping platform is coming in the future, so I would expect that within the next year they will support drop shipping.
Unlike many other e-commerce platforms, Wix doesn’t take any transaction commissions off your orders. So, the only fees that will appear would be from the payment processor.
Wix offers four different e-commerce plans, which all accept online payments:
Business Basic — $23 per month
Business Unlimited — $27 per month
Business VIP — $49 per month
Enterprise — $500 per month
All plans come with unlimited bandwidth. You’ll get extra storage at each pricing tier.
Wix is new to the e-commerce space. Therefore, the platform isn’t perfect. But they’ve definitely made improvements as of late. You’re able to do different things like target abandoned shopping carts, which wasn’t always on option before. So, I expect more of these types of improvements from Wix in the years to come.
One such improvement is Corvid by Wix. this is a web development platform that enables you to develop apps using the Wix editor. This might result in better integrations with different types of CRMs in the future.
SquareSpace is another popular website builder. But SquareSpace features a fully integrated e-commerce platform built-in to each plan except for the entry-level option.
With SquareSpace, building a stunning website is simple. The templates are modern and fully customizable. You even have the ability to install multiple templates to one specific website and switch between them at any time you want.
I’d recommend SquareSpace to any new e-commerce shops that are unsure of what the future holds in terms of growth. That’s because this platform makes it very easy for you to scale or pivot the direction of your sales strategy within a few clicks.
SquareSpace has dozens and dozens of e-commerce benefits. Here are a number of the top highlights to give you an idea of what you’re getting:
– Unlimited products
– Flexible product variants
– Sell physical and digital products
– Manage subscriptions
– Multiple payment methods
– Mobile-optimized checkouts
– Gift cards
– Abandoned cart recovery
The list goes on and on. the downside of using SquareSpace is that there isn’t an app store to add any other integrations or extensions. What you see is what you get. You’ll find that the most popular and useful apps are already built-in, but just make certain you check the full feature list if you need or want something specific.
These are the SquareSpace plans and prices:
– Personal — $12 per month
– Business — $18 per month
– Basic Commerce — $26 per month
– Advanced Commerce — $40 per month
As I discussed earlier, the personal plan doesn’t have e-commerce capabilities. You can sell online using the Business plan, but you’ll pay an extra 3% transaction fee to SquareSpace and won’t get all of the useful e-commerce features.
At a minimum, I’d recommend the basic Commerce plan. There aren’t any transaction fees, and you’ll benefit from customer accounts, checkouts on your own domain, e-commerce analytics, social media selling, POS, and other features that you’d expect for an e-commerce shop.
For gift cards, abandoned cart recovery, subscriptions, and a number of other higher-level features, you’ll need to sign up for the Advanced Commerce plan.
3DCart isn’t nearly as popular as other industry giants like Shopify or BigCommerce for a few reasons. However, 3DCart is a great option to consider if you are more of an advanced e-commerce user.
I’d especially recommend 3DCart to those of you who have already built an online store in the past. If you’ve got prior experience in the e-commerce industry, 3DCart has the capabilities that you can take full advantage of.
They don’t offer any kind of drag-and-drop builder, so you’ll need to have a basic understanding of how to code to customize your themes and templates the way you want them. But this makes 3DCart a good choice for any company who has the resources for tech or dev departments.
3DCart does however stand out as one of the best e-commerce platforms with built-in SEO tools. Here’s a summary of the pricing for its plans:
Similar to BigCommerce, each plan has different restrictions for online sales before you’re automatically upgraded to the next tier. Those limits are between $50k, $100k, $500k, and $1 million for each plan.
Other top features and benefits of 3DCart include:
– No transaction fees
– 24/7 customer support
– 200+ payment gateways
– Integrations with third-party online marketplaces
– Unlimited bandwidth
– Web hosting
– Free domain for one year
However, one of the drawbacks of 3DCart is that the admin dashboard for managing and editing your site isn’t that user-friendly. There are numerous themes and designs that are outdated as well.
All 3DCart plans come with a 15-day free trial and are backed by a 30-day satisfaction guarantee.
WooCommerce is a bit different than the other platforms we’ve seen thus far. It’s more of an e-commerce plugin made for WordPress, as opposed to an all-in-one e-commerce platform such as Shopify.
But with nearly 80 million downloads, WooCommerce is the world’s most well-known e-commerce solution. Nearly 30% of all online stores across the world are powered by WooCommerce.
With WooCommerce, any website running on WordPress can be changed into an e-commerce store.
WooCommerce is completely free to download and is easy to install to your WordPress site. But it requires you to have your domain, hosting, and WordPress account already created. Then it’s pretty much just as simple as installing any other type of WordPress plugin.
You can customize your store however you like simply by adding any of the 300+ different extensions from the WooCommerce Extensions Store.
This is the best place to integrate payment processors, different types of subscription tools, and other store management features. Many of these extensions are free, but others are priced up to $300 per extension.
Since WooCommerce is run via WordPress, the different customization and capabilities for your online store are virtually limitless. You’ll only need to add features that you simply plan to use, so you won’t need to worry about anything else cluttering your dashboard.
With all of this in mind, I would only recommend WooCommerce to individuals or businesses with content-based websites. Meaning that the primary function of your website is not just e-commerce capabilities.
For example, if you’ve got a WordPress blog and want to sell 10 or 20 products as a supplemental income strategy, you can install WooCommerce for its e-commerce functions.
But if you would like to create a new e-commerce website from scratch and sell hundreds of different items, I’d search for another solution on our list.
The OpenCart e-commerce platform will provide you with everything you need to start creating and managing your online store. Over 342,000 e-commerce sites across the world are powered by OpenCart.
OpenCart isn’t a website builder. It’s a powerful open-source software that you can install in order to add different e-commerce functionalities to your existing website.
One of the reasons why I prefer OpenCart is because the admin dashboard makes it easy for you to manage everything using a singular and easy interface.
Another major advantage of OpenCart is its marketplace. It has over 13,000 modules, themes, and extensions. So, if you would like to integrate something new with your e-commerce store, there’s a pretty good chance that it’s available on the OpenCart marketplace.
The best part about OpenCart? It’s completely free to download and install to your website. There is never any type of monthly or annual fee for using this software.
However, you’ll need to pay to use certain extensions. But if you’re running a simple e-commerce website and you don’t really need any of the premium extensions, OpenCart is definitely a good way to keep your costs down.
If you need any help or assistance along the way, there are more than 110,000 registered members active daily on the OpenCart community forum. You’ll be able to browse through the 550,000+ posts to check if someone already answered your question.
For dedicated 24/7 technical support directly from OpenCart, you’ll need to pay extra. The current rate starts at $99 for a one-time fix or $99 per month for advanced ongoing support throughout the life of your online store.
If you’re a WordPress user and need an alternate solution to WooCommerce, Ecwid would be my next recommendation.
It’s not nearly as popular as WooCommerce, but it still offers many great benefits and specializes specifically in e-commerce sales from a variety of marketplaces.
Unlike WooCommerce, Ecwid is completely compatible with many other platforms. In addition to WordPress, Ecwid may be added to:
– Wix
– Weebly
– Squarespace
– Joomla
– Tumblr
– Blogger
– Adobe Muse
Basically, you can turn nearly any website into an e-commerce platform with Ecwid. They also offer a simple all-purpose solution for selling on Amazon too in addition to its integrations with CRMs like Salesforce.
Another great advantage of Ecwid is that they have a free forever plan, although it’s limited to only 10 products. You won’t be able to integrate your online store with other marketplaces without paying either.
To get the most out of Ecwid, you’ll need to sign up for their premium plan.
– Venture — $15 per month
– Business — $35 per month
– Unlimited — $99 per month
The Venture and Business plans both are limited from a range of 100 to 2,500 products. As the name implies, there aren’t any type of restrictions on the Unlimited plan.
As you’d expect, the features and benefits get better as you upgrade to each tier. So, you can begin with the entry-level plan and upgrade at any time that you see fit if you outgrow your plan.
With numerous options to consider, you’ll need to narrow down your choices. Below is the methodology that we used for making the picks and creating our list above.
You can also use these different criteria as well to make your decision a bit easier. I’ll explain which features matter the most, which of them don’t, and break down the details of every element below.
Getting started should be the first thing to think about. If it’s difficult to get set up out of the box, it’s usually an indication that you’ll have trouble down the road as well.
You need to make sure that the platform you choose makes it easy enough for you to start your store, manage your products, make edits to your website, and start collecting payments online. Ideally, all of this should be managed within a single admin dashboard or some type of interface with minimal third-party requirements.
All e-commerce platforms or not created equally. the type of platform you select will depend upon your current situation.
There are e-commerce website builders, plugins, and extensions. If you have already got a website, you need to make sure that your solution is compatible with whatever CMS you’re using.
For example, WooCommerce is a plugin that is specifically made for WordPress sites. J2Store is a shopping cart extension for Joomla. Ecwid is an extension that is compatible with both WordPress and Joomla as well as other platforms.
If you already have an existing website and you simply want to convert it to an online store, a plugin or an extension would be better than a website builder.
The type of e-commerce website you have will also determine what your e-commerce platform needs to be.
How many products are you selling? Are you offering any type of physical products, services, or digital goods? Do you need any kind of drop shipping capabilities or are you strictly managing shipments on your own?
An existing blog website that wants to add digital downloads won’t need a similar solution as a full-blown e-commerce shop that needs to be built from scratch.
All e-commerce stores will allow you to process online payments. But you need to look beyond that to see what features they provide and what features you really need.
Is everything already built-in to the platform? Or is there some sort of marketplace with different kinds of themes, integrations, and extensions?
Some advanced plans go together with things like abandoned cart recovery, customer profiles, detailed analytics, and product recommendations. But if you only have a basic site selling a couple of products, these features might not be important to you.
The cost of your e-commerce solution will likely be based on the features offered within the plan you select. Some e-commerce platforms are free to use, but you’ll be charged extra as you start to add certain extensions.
Your rate might even change based on your sales. So, make sure you understand how the pricing works before you make your final decision.
I always search for e-commerce platforms offering a free trial and some sort of money-back guarantee. This gives you an opportunity to try everything out to see if you’re getting the best value.
There’s something for everyone on this list. Whether you’re a beginner in need of a good e-commerce website builder, or an experienced developer in need of some advanced software for B2B sales, you’ll be able to use this guide to find the best platform for your business.
Here’s a quick overview of the best e-commerce platforms that I’ve reviewed throughout this guide.
– Zyro — Best new e-commerce and website builder.
– Square Online — Best free e-commerce platform plan.
– Bluehost — Best for easily setting up a WooCommerce store.
– Shopify — Best for startups, beginners, and boutique e-commerce shops.
– BigCommerce — Best e-commerce platform for small businesses.
– Wix — Best drag-and-drop e-commerce site builder with easy setup.
– SquareSpace — Best website builder with built-in e-commerce capabilities
– 3DCart — Best for advanced e-commerce store owners with development experience.
– WooCommerce — Best WordPress plugin for e-commerce functionality.
– OpenCart — Best free and open-source e-commerce platform.
– Ecwid — Free e-commerce extension compatible with multiple CMS platforms.
Choosing an e-commerce platform can be challenging because there are so many different options at your disposal. Fortunately, you’ll be able to narrow your list down based on the standards that I’ve identified above.
