Best Website Builders for Ecommerce: Price & Features 2023

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 the most important aspect of 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 it features great reporting tools that 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 for so many large or ready-to-scale online stores is there’s no other provider that is better at facilitating the addition and management of large amounts of products. If you’re more interested in selling than having a site that looks exactly how you want it, Shopify is the ecommerce website builder for you.

Through its Shopify Payments system, you’re able to track everything from sales on Instagram, 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.

As of July 2023, Shopify added a feature allowing any merchant with more than two locations to set up rules that automatically prioritize where an order gets fulfilled based on what saves the most time and money.

Shipping is another feature that Shopify has locked down, with tons of ordering options. For example, Shopify’s carbon-neutral shipping option is great for businesses watching their environmental footprint. 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 ecommerce 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 (followed by three months at just $1 per month) 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.

Read our Wix vs Squarespace guide to see how the providers compare in depth.

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. Shopify scores 4.8/5 overall because its features are excellent for inventory and sales, but it’s design tools could be improved upon – preventing the builder from achieving full marks.

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 ecommerce website.
• The Shopify Advanced: $399 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 Plus, an enterprise-level plan, for $2,000 per month. We recommend sticking to those middle three plans if you’re interested in ecommerce. If you use the “$1-a-month-for-three-months” deal, you’ll have a long runway to see if the features really work for your needs.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning the Shopify POS, which is software that can be used for in-person sales and also integrates with Shopify’s ecommerce and payments services. Check out our Shopify POS review for more information about the solution, and our Shopify POS pricing guide for details on its costs.

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

Wix: summary

Wix is terrific for smaller online stores but, thanks to a massive overhaul of its sales features over the past year and regular discounts, it can now truly hold its own with the top providers.

Based on our most recent round of research and testing, Wix now boasts an impressive score of 4.4/5 for sales features. This is because while Wix’s sale features are strong, its ordering, delivery, and cross-channel sale tracking tools aren’t as strong as our frontrunner Shopify. However, due to Wix’s ever-evolving toolkit, and great deployment of AI technology, its overall score has from to 4.8/5 (compared to 4.6/5 in previous research).

What’s more, with the platform boasting stellar design features and a flawless user experience, it’s no surprise the ecommerce website builder 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. 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 can easily build a great-looking online store in minutes.

A new Wix website can be created and modified with a drag-and-drop editor. 

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. There are also plenty of royalty-free images available. 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 control and automate a range of business functions from a central point. This mean you can promote your business with marketing emails to give 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. Not only do Wix’s refined SEO settings give users granular, page-level control over their SEO data, but its partnership with Semrush also gives you access to extensive keyword data, making it easier to identify keywords and user queries to target.

The platform is adding new payment channels, with a March 2023 update adding Tap to Pay on iPhone, allowing users to accept contactless payments. What’s more, you can also easily create multilingual sites with Wix, which is ideal for users in countries with one or more major languages. There’s even an AI text generator, giving you a head start when it comes to writing blog posts.

What Wix should improve

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Wix is the inability to change anything once 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 in our design flexibility tests.

Wix somewhat compensates for this by giving you significantly more creative freedom in the design phase than its competitors (like Shopify) because it includes hundreds of templates to choose from. This does mean it’s less likely that you’ll 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 singing up with Wix is that it has quite a slow response time when compared with the other ecommerce website builders on this list — but it still wasn’t the slowest we tested. Wix is a good pick if you have a tiny operation and want to take advantage of the increasing economic power of the ecommerce industry – the latest stats show a US ecommerce growth rate of over 11% year-over-year.

How much does Wix ecommerce cost?

Wix offers three pricing plans with ecommerce functionality: Core, Business , and Business Elite.

• Core: $27 per month when paid annually, and gives you all the essentials to start an online store, including 50GB of storage and the ability to sell products online.
• Business: $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.
• Business Elite: $159 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 ecommerce 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, our in-house testing and research saw it receive a better overall score than some of the dedicated ecommerce store builders, such as BigCommerce.

What we like about Squarespace

The built-in scalability of the software allows for growing businesses to develop alongside the platform. It’s also one of the most improved ecommerce website builders we tested – its user experience score jumped from 3.4 out of 5 in our last round of testing to 4.2 out of 5, which means people who are using the platform are more satisfied with its offering.

Squarespace’s compatibility with Square, one of the biggest POS providers, also lets you process cash and card payments that integrate with your online store. 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 that are designed specifically for ecommerce websites as well, so getting started should 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 a built-in search engine optimization (SEO) features, helping 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 website builders don’t offer these perks, Squarespace might be the best ecommerce website builder for your team if you’re looking to maximize the reach of your business.

What Squarespace should improve

While Squarespace has expanded its third-party payment options to inlcude Stripe, Paypal, Apple Pay, and Afterpay, you will be limited in your ability to internationalize as there are tricky language settings and shipping choices.

In a related manner, although Squarespace offers inventory management, you’ll find better systems offered by other providers, such as Shopify’s large capacity for inventory or BigCommerce’s complex inventory tools. Overall, it’s not the best choice for managing large quantities of stock, but it is a better option for businesses selling digital items (like event tickets) rather than physical items (like handbags).

Figuring out how to use all of Squarespace’s features can be a learning curve, so give yourself several sessions to figure it out. As noted during our testing, make sure to hit the “save” button manually whenever you can because the software won’t save your work automatically.

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’ll 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. You also aren’t required to pay any transaction fees on any sales.
• 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 member-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 your goods 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 any 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 awarded Square Online a value for money rating of 4.8/5. That’s head and shoulders above any other ecommerce builder on this list making it one of the more favorable options for smaller, budget-conscious retailers.

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 Online’s biggest upsides is that it has seamless integration with Square’s POS software. This makes it 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. Its seamless POS integrations, a user-friendly interface, and excellent value for money are just some of the reasons Square Online scores 4.6/5 overall — just behind Wix and Shopify — despite improvement 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 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 2.9% + $0.30 transaction fee on all sales. Those transaction fee rates were considered fairly expensive just a few years ago, but rising industry costs now mean they’re no longer far away from competitors like Shopify. Square Online’s free plan helps it earn a high 4.8/5 pricing score from our researchers.

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 do get access to all the accounting and inventory features offered on the pricier 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% + $0.30 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.

Read our Shopify vs BigCommerce guide to see how the ecommerce builders in features and price.

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 advanced ecommerce features like expanded payments options and sales integration with brick-and-mortar stores.

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 numerous 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

One of the main drawbacks for BigCommerce is that it has slightly limited customization options.

In addition to this, BigCommerce commits the cardinal user experience sin of having an interface that is difficult to navigate, and it doesn’t provide any helpful tips to help you get the hang of it either. This is especially noticeable when considering sites like Wix, which has so many tutorial elements – especially during setup.

Unfortunately, BigCommerce’s clunky UX and steep learning curve make it less than ideal for users with less tech experience and those using an ecommerce builder for the first time.

How much does BigCommerce cost?

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

• $29 per month Standard plan.
• $79 per month Plus plan.
• $299 per month Pro plan.

Pricing came into effect on February 23, 2023 based on evolved product offering.

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 $180,000 per year. It also allows you to create custom groups for targeted marketing, and your customers are able to store their 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 may be a great ecommerce platform, but it’s difficult to use, especially when compared with 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 the provider back.

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, that additional support won’t hurt.

On top of this, it provides one of the strongest site speeds on this list, meaning that ecommerce 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, it has a restricted backend and complex user design, seeing it receive an ease of use score of 3.2/5. This is the reason 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, because 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. This makes Volusion an enticing solution for ecommerce retailers with high turnovers and those looking to expand their reach.

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 may leave your head spinning.

Some menus are simply confusing, with pages you’d expect to be in one place located in a seemingly unrelated menu. Due to its complicated design and clunky usability, Volusion received a rating of 3.2/5 for ease of use. This places it in last place in this category 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 locating 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 – $35 per month, which is meant for small businesses. You only have access to online support and you’ll 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 who want 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 without distracting customers 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 with the sale of more than $2.5 billion worth of art, and its small team aims to support artists however they can.

To accommodate 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’ll get access to when you pay, including Google Analytics, theme code editing, and inventory tracking.

Inventory tracking is available on the provider’s paid plans and, 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, which is always beneficial for a growing business.

Where Big Cartel could improve

With the above considered, any other kind of business will likely want to steer clear of Big Cartel. It’s incredibly limited, and even its pricier plans don’t include advanced ecommerce features like gift cards or abandoned cart recovery. It’s also quite restricted when it comes to branding 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 pick a 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, this is the perfect option.