16 Best Online Store Builders to Launch Your Ecommerce Website
Want to launch an eCommerce website and increase your online sales, but you don’t know which online store builder to choose?
When you go through the comparisons and detailed reviews for each tool in this article, you will get a clear picture of the 16 best online store builders in 2023, and I will help you choose the perfect fit for you.
Shopify
BigCommerce
Squarespace Commerce
WooCommerce
Do you have no technical knowledge and the resources to hire a professional web designer, but you want to unlock all the eCommerce capabilities that will help you maximize your online sales?
You can do so with the website builders designed for eCommerce businesses.
The good news is that there is no shortage of powerful eCommerce website builder platforms. How do you find the right eCommerce platform while attaining price and quality?
I have selected the 16 most reliable and worthy eCommerce website builders and given my top 5 recommendations in the list below.
Best Online Store Builders to Launch Your Ecommerce Website
Check out my picks for the best eCommerce website builders in 2023:
- Shopify
- BigCommerce
- Squarespace Commerce
- WooCommerce for WordPress
- Wix Ecommerce
- Shift4Shop
- Zyro
- Selz
- Square Online
- PrestaShop
- Adobe Commerce
- Volusion
- Weebly Ecommerce
- X-Cart
- Ecwid
- Big Cartel
1. Shopify
All-in-One eCommerce Website Builder
With its logical structure, clean interface, and extensive documentation and video guides, all you need with Shopify is the product to sell. Shopify is the perfect choice for beginners and more experienced store owners with fully customizable themes, apps for everything, SEO u0026 marketing tools, and a payment gateway.
Shopify is packed with email marketing, store management, merchandising, shipping, and other add-ons to help you when selling online through any platform.
Shopify store example:
Key Features
Customizable templates
With 170 modern-looking themes, Shopify provides a variety of sleek designs across all devices regardless of your coding knowledge. Shopify's drag and drop editor lets you personalize the templates easily.
E-commerce features
Shopify provides various discount codes, shipping rates, tax settings, and dropshipping capability with direct import from AliExpress.You can acquire new customers through Sendinblue subscription forms and get the perfect POS setup.
Sales channels
You get to sell online through your Facebook page, Instagram account, Pinterest business account, Amazon, and eBay, embed the “Buy” button on a website or a blog, or even sell in person with your brick and mortar shop or a pop-up shop.
Payment processing
Shopify lets your customers pay through all the major payment processors. You can access Shopify Payments for your clients to pay directly on your online store. Shopify Payments is PCI compliant and supports 3D Secure checkouts.
Add-ons
Shopify's app store offers over 3,200 apps for inventory management, delivery management, store design, sourcing & selling, marketing, referrals & rewards, and all the features you need to increase your online sales.
Pricing
- 100+ Templates
- Unlimited Products
- International Commerce
- 24/7 Support
- Shopify POS
- Ecommerce Automations
- up to 88% Shipping Discounts
- Standard Analytics Reports
- 5 Staff Accounts
- 1% Fees for 3rd Party Payments
- 0.5% Fees for 3rd Party Payments
- Lower Credit Card Fees
- 15 Staff Accounts
- Advanced Analytics Reports
- Duties and Import Taxes
Read more Shopify pricing or successful Shopify stores
Shopify offers the Basic plan at $29, the Shopify plan at $79, and the Advanced plan at $299 per month.
The tool charges 2.9% + 0.30 USD transaction fees for online purchases and 2.7% for in-person sales for each transaction.
Also, every plan features a 14-day free trial for all its plans.
2. BigCommerce
Best Online Store Builder for Large Online Stores
BigCommerce is a Shopify alternative that comes with more built-in sales tools and a much higher level of hands-on control over the content elements of your own website. At first, BigCommerce is slightly more challenging to grasp, but the extensive features are worth the learning curve. It is an excellent choice for large stores selling online.
BigCommerce delivers real-time shipping quotations, gift cards & discount codes, product reviews & ratings, POS, multi-currency selling, professional reporting, and AMP functionalities in its entry-level plan.
BigCommerce is remarkably user-friendly, and it allows you to launch a web store within a few hours, integrate with WordPress, and sell your products on eBay, Facebook, Amazon, Google Shopping, and other channels seamlessly.
BigCommerce store example:
Key Features
Templates & product options
BigCommerce offers 12 free templates and over 180 reasonably-priced themes. You can even find multiple style variations on particular themes. All the themes display automatically on any device and are AMP-enabled.
eCommerce features
You can import products, set up inventory tracking, manage stock levels, analyze purchase trends, process orders, print invoices, and access the multi-currency functionality in all plans without extra cost.
Shipping
BigCommerce lets you activate real-time shipping quotes, provide discounts for the commonly-used shipping services through the ShipStation app, and offer your customers in-store pick-up, next-day delivery, and shipping tracking.
Tax management
If you don’t want to set up tax calculation rules, you can connect with a third-party tax service to calculate your taxes automatically. Moreover, you can display a label on your online store stating whether the product price includes tax or not.
Customizable checkout
BigCommerce provides access to its checkout SDK. You can choose from a library of JavaScript checkout elements and customize everything from the background details to the steps the customer needs to move through in the process.
Marketing features
The builder lets you utilize its coupon codes & discounts, and newsletters through tools like MailChimp, HubSpot, and iContact to maximize your conversions and take advantage of the abandoned cart recovery, Google AdWords, and buy buttons.
Payment gateways
The tool provides three options to accept credit card payments, including PayPal powered by Braintree, third-party payment processors, and Square POS. There are no additional transaction fees, and you can access all the major mobile wallets.
Pricing
- 200+ Store Templates
- 24/7 Chat & Phone Support
- No Additional Transactions Fees
- Unlimited Bandwidth & Storage
- Annual Sales Limit - $50k
- Clients' Credit Cards Storage
- Abandoned Cart Saver
- 5 Storefronts & Inventory Locations
- Customer Segmentation
- Annual Sales Limit - $180k
- Google Customer Reviews
- Price Lists for B2B & B2C
- 8 Storefronts & Inventory Locations
- Filtering with Custom Product Filters
- Annual Sales Limit - $400k
The BigCommerce Standard plan is $29.95 per month, going up to $79.95 with the Plus and $299.95 with the Pro plan.
The transaction fees in BigCommerce decrease as you scale up the plans. In the Standard plan, BigCommerce charges 2.59% + $0.49 per transaction.
If purchased annually, you will receive a 10% discount on the Plus and Pro plans, and all the plans come with a 15-day free trial.
3. Squarespace Commerce
#1 eCommerce Platform with Beautiful Templates
Squarespace is known for its rich selection of beautiful templates, AI-powered website builder that generates a website based on your preferences, secure uptime, and tons of features for selling online. It is the best website builder for store owners looking to design perfect-looking online stores.
Squarespace is an excellent eCommerce solution for small business owners looking to create an elegant-looking eCommerce website while maintaining simplicity.
The website builder will elevate the SEO and attract more sales, especially if your eCommerce business is content-heavy and reliant on visual design.
The live editor is intuitive enough for beginners to handle.
Squarespace is known for creating the most visually-appealing websites out of all the website builder platforms, and it supports an unlimited number of products and transactions.
The eCommerce site builder is improving each day with a free custom domain, SSL security, real-time carrier shipping, blogging module, email marketing, scheduling, abandoned cart recovery, and more.
Squarespace Commerce store example:
Key Features
Stunning templates
You can choose from 16 online stores and over 80 standard themes. All the themes are responsive, mobile-friendly, and exceptionally beautiful. The design module allows you to customize most of the template elements.
Inventory
In Squarespace Commerce, you can access multi-dimensional product variants. The amount of products and SKUs is unlimited. You can send shipping notifications, update the stock, print shipping labels, and issue refunds from the dashboard.
Marketing & SEO tools
After signing up, you will receive a Mailchimp integration for your new eCommerce site as a standard. You can connect your online business with your social media profiles and cross-post your content across your site and social media.
Blogging module
Squarespace Commerce allows you to add a blog to your website, write posts, enable comments, and elevate customer engagement by pushing the posts on social media.
Payment gateways
While Stripe integrates with Squarespace as the default payment option, the website builder accepts all major credit cards. Apple Pay is also a payment option, and there are no monthly fees with Stripe or PayPal.
eCommerce functionality
You will have everything from unlimited product support to a built-in shopping cart with Squarespace Commerce. The flexible POS system allows you to synchronize your pop-up shop and retail outlet inventory with your online store.
Pricing
- Mobile-Friendly Websites
- 100+ Templates
- Free Custom Domain
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- 2 Contributors
- Ecommerce Functionality
- Unlimited Products
- 3% Transaction Fees
- Custom Code (CSS & JS)
- Unlimited Contributors
- 0% Transaction Fees
- Point of Sale
- On-site Checkout
- Product Reviews
- Facebook and Instagram Selling
- Abandoned Cart Recovery
- Advanced Shipping
- Advanced Discounts
- Subscription Selling
- Commerce APIs
Read more Squarespace pricing or Squarespace ecommerce examples
The Business plan is $23, and the pricing ranges up to $49 per month for the Advanced Commerce plan when paid annually.
While the Business subscription includes a 3% fee per transaction, Squarespace removes this in the Basic Commerce plan, so you don’t have to pay additional transaction fees.
You will find a 14-day free trial in all Squarespace plans.
4. WooCommerce for WordPress
Best Open-Source eCommerce Website Builder
WooCommerce is an open-source, fully-customizable WordPress plugin designed for eCommerce catered toward small online stores and mid-sized businesses working on a tight budget.
WooCommerce allows you to integrate any WordPress website with eCommerce elements and turn it into an eCommerce site to sell digital and physical products, subscriptions & appointments in an unlimited amount.
The eCommerce store data is futureproofed in WooCommerce. You can migrate to a different platform and export your content whenever.
WooCommerce store example:
Key Features
Open-source & future-proof
The open-source model ensures that you retain full ownership of your online store's content. The platform is infinitely customizable, with more than 400 extensions and the capability to integrate with other WordPress plugins.
Design & themes
There are 49 themes in WooCommerce that you can choose, three of which are free. Storefront is the official theme recommended for new users. To extend your Storefront theme to a specific eCommerce store type like sports and bookstores, you can do so for $0 to $39 per month.
Order management
With over 25 order and inventory extensions, you can easily handle custom, split, and bulk orders. The free inventory management tool ATUM lets you edit inventory, suppliers, SKUs, locations, weight, and prices.
Shipping & dropshipping
WooCommerce shipping is a built-in free tool through which you can provide different shipping options, access discounted shipping rates, and print USPS & DHL labels. You can even start an AliExpress dropshipping business through WooCommerce dropshipping.
Shopping cart & WooCommerce Blocks
WooCommerce provides a basic shopping cart functionality that comes out of the box. You can enhance the shopping cart capabilities at no cost through checkout and shopping cart blocks in the form of WooCommerce Blocks.
Payment processing
The best option here is the WooCommerce payments tool, through which you can manage the payments directly from the dashboard.
Pricing
Since you need a hosting solution to launch the online store that you create in WooCommerce, it is the best practice that you consider these WooCommerce hosting providers.
We recommend selecting a service that provides WooCommerce-specific hosting over the generic hosting providers because of the easy & automated setup, daily backups for futureproof data, increased security of your and your customer's data, and support teams with WooCommerce experts.
Check out the best WooCommerce hosting solutions and their prices:
- Bluehost – $12.95 – $24.95 per month
- SiteGround – $6.99 -$14.99 per month
- WP Engine – $50 per month
5. Wix Ecommerce
Best Online Store Builder for Small Businesses with Maximum Customization
Wix eCommerce is a well-rounded eCommerce website builder that combines simple editing tools and comprehensive eCommerce functionality. The preview function lets you see how all the changes look to your customers, and the AI-powered automated design system enables you to create your site quickly.
Wix eCommerce lets you place the elements and widgets however you wish on the entire website through its unstructured drag and drop editor.
If you don't want so much freedom with the editor, you can use the Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence).
ADI uses the answers to a few short questions and automatically creates a website that aligns with your needs.
Wix eCommerce store example:
Key Features
Product presentation
You can sell all kinds of physical and digital goods in Wix or accept payments for bookings if your business involves customers taking classes through the Wix Bookings app. With a built-in product zoom, the customers can check your product in full detail.
Inventory & shipping
Wix eCommerce allows you to sell unlimited products. In the Wix Stores app, you can manage your inventory and deploy product tracking. With the ShipStation app, you can connect your store to a dropshipping company.
Shipping labels & taxes
Through Wix eCommerce, you can print personalized shipping labels, track orders from the dashboard and set shipping & tax rules.
Multichannel selling
After downloading Ecwid to use alongside your online store, you can sell on Facebook and Pinterest. Through Ecwid, Wix lets you sell across Instagram, Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest, and more.
Wix Ascend
Ascend is an advanced feature that helps you promote your brand, unlock advanced SEO, and automate your workflow in one place. You will receive guidance to get started with SEO, and the tool will help you find the best keywords and internal linking strategies.
Wix Stores App
This is Wix's built-in mobile store app that allows you to create product galleries, generate discount codes, set up a mobile-optimized online store and sell unlimited products, start a dropshipping business, accept credit card and offline payments, create newsletters, and more.
Wix Multilingual
Create different versions of your existing website in various languages. You can translate text, links, images, and SEO settings.
Pricing
- 500+ Ecommerce Templates
- Unlimited Products
- Abandoned Cart Recovery
- Sell on Instagram, Facebook, etc.
- 20GB Storage Space
- Multiple Currencies
- Sell on Amazon & eBay
- Modalyst Dropshipping - 250 Items
- Sell Subscriptions
- 35GB Storage Space
- Priority Customer Support
- Unlimited Modalyst Dropshipping
- 50GB Storage Space
- Upload Unlimited Videos
- 500 Auto Sales Tax Calculations
Read more Wix pricing or beautiful examples of Wix
Going from the Business Basic for $17 per month, you can scale up to the Business VIP plan for $35.
For credit card transactions for E.U. countries, Wix charges transaction fees of 1.9% of the transaction amount + 0.30 EUR and 2.9% of the transaction + 0.30 USD in the USA.
All plans include a 14-day free trial.
6. Shift4Shop
Best eCommerce Site Builder with Free Migration and a Robust Free Tier
Shift4Shop is a cloud-based eCommerce website builder best suited for merchants on a tighter budget looking to add a shopping cart and product inventory to their eCommerce website.
The tool delivers unlimited products and monthly data transfers with zero transaction fees in almost all tiers.
Shift4Shop delivers single-page checkout, built-in blog, product & customer reviews, and digital download functionalities as a standard, which is not customary with other eCommerce builders.
The tool offers a free End-to-end eCommerce website builder without monthly subscriptions, PCI compliance, or setup fees.
You can migrate your setup of an existing website from a different eCommerce platform for free.
Key Features
Editor and customization
Shift4Shop’s editor allows you to add products, categories, pages, and blog posts, and you can customize more than a hundred templates through CSS and HTML.
Add-on tools
The ad-on tools Shift4Shop offers cover everything from store design, visitor engagement, email marketing services, the affiliate marketing tools to chat apps, fulfillment systems, accounting software, and tax calculators.
Inventory management
The tool displays the transactions in a logical format for easy tracking, and the shopping cart tool notifies you of the current state of the stock, daily sales total, new orders coming in, due orders, and monthly sales stats.
Payment processing
By default, the platform offers PayPal and Stripe, but you can integrate with 100 other payment gateways like Authorize.net, Amazon Pay, Visa Checkout, and Google Pay.
SEO & marketing
You can access the sitemap builder, gift cards & affiliate referrals, email campaigns, and even connect to Google Analytics to view the online store statistics from your dashboard.
PCI-compliant web hosting
Shift4Shop equips you with integrated web hosting, free domain registration, renewal, and transfer under PCI compliance.
Pricing
The prices range from $0 in the End-to-end Ecommerce plan to $229 per month for the Pro Store subscription.
You will only need to pay the processing fees of 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction through Shift4 Payments.
7. Zyro
Best Affordable eCommerce Store Builder with Fast Load Times
Zyro has created an affordable eCommerce platform with exceptional loading speeds and helpful AI-powered eCommerce tools.
You can select a template yourself or automatically generate one after answering a couple of questions.
After this, you can edit with its intuitive and minimalistic editor and manage the dashboard with ease.
When you build an online store in Zyro, the tool equips you with free web hosting and domain name registration.
The Business plan comes with the eCommerce essentials, through which you can sell up to 100 products and access a free domain for one year.
The Advanced Store subscription brings Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, eBay sales channels, abandoned cart recovery, and more features for up to 2.500 products.
Key Features
AI website and content generator
AI website generator will help you design a site automatically. Zyro’s AI-powered content writer will generate authentic, SEO-optimized site content.
AI branding tools
The AI branding tools will generate a unique logo, slogans, and business name, and the AI heatmap will predict the site parts that will have the most engagement.
Inventory & order tracking
With Zyro, you will be able to track your customers’ orders until delivery, categorize your products, and always have an up-to-date insight into the stock. You can generate your shipping rates with carriers like UPS or FedEx or set the automatic ones.
Multichannel selling and marketing tools
Zyro lets you sync your web store and sell on Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon. Zyro expands your marketing further with tools such as the Messenger Live Chat, Google Analytics, Snapchat Pixel, Twitter, Facebook Pixel, and Pinterest Tag.
Built-in SEO tools
You can add a blog to your website, categorize posts, integrate Google Analytics into all plans to track site performance, and add Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp live chat.
Native integration with Unsplash
Zyro ensures access to millions of high-quality images with its integration with Unsplash.
Pricing
The Business plan goes from $2.90 to $15.90 per month with the Advanced Store plan.
When accepting payments through gateways such as Square, you will pay 2.9% + $0.30 in transaction fees.
8. Selz
Best eCommerce Website Builder for Selling Digital Goods on Social Media
Selz allows you to create a new online store through its web server and customize your new eCommerce site through a clean and intuitive interface using expertly-crafted themes.
You can edit anything in Selz easily with its comprehensive drag and drop functionality.
You can expand your online business by linking your Selz account to an online store you already set up on another eCommerce platform with buttons and widgets.
Alternatively, you can sell directly through your social media pages and manage the sales through the social media platform from your Selz dashboard.
Selz provides eCommerce capabilities specifically designed for selling digital products while offering unlimited hosting and bandwidth and more advanced features like automatic delivery & updates, unlimited downloads, PDF stamping, and license keys.
Key Features
Multichannel selling
Selz gives your store the access to add products to an existing website, social platform, or a blog and embed the buy now buttons on your store. You can install a WordPress plugin, sell on Facebook and Instagram, and integrate with Google Smart Shopping.
Checkout
Through the shopping cart feature, your customers can finish the checkout directly through your site. Allow customers to set their prices with the pay what you want functionality.
Shipping
The tool will handle your SKUs, order notifications, numerous shipping integrations, and refunds. Selz lets you utilize integrations with the shipping services and provide real-time shipping rates and options at the checkout.
Inventory and SEO
You will easily track stock levels and automatically pause all sales for sold-out items. Gain access to product and category-specific meta tags, URLs, and titles. Publish informative articles through the blogging feature and elevate the SEO.
Customer management
Engage with and incentivize your customers with loyalty programs, discounts, and free shipping, and integrate with comment and rating apps. Initiate direct communication with customers through in-app messaging.
Digital product features
Sell e-books, videos, apps, and online courses through the Digital ninja features, and take advantage of Selz’s unlimited hosting and automatic delivery options.
Integrations
Selz will let you connect to the third-party web analytics tools like Google or Bing Analytics, and the app store will offer access to integrations such as Campaign Monitor, AWeber, Mailchimp, Salesforce, Xero, Disqus, and more.
Pricing
You can purchase Selz for $26 per month in the Basic version and go up to $179 with the Advanced subscription.
Selz sets 2.9% + $0.30 transaction fees, and there is an additional 2% fee for payments you process outside of Selz Pay.
You can try Selz for free for 14 days.
9. Square Online
Best eCommerce Site Builder for Low-Volume Sellers with Limited Technical Knowledge
Square Online is one of the best eCommerce website builders for low-volume selling and store owners looking for a quick setup.
This software allows someone with zero prior technical knowledge to create impressive-looking sites.
The software offers quite a generous free subscription with unlimited products, free website & SEO tools, shipping, delivery, Facebook & Instagram selling, and the Square POS integration.
For just $12 per month in the Business plan, you get unlimited storage, custom domains, ad blocks, and password-protected pages.
Square Online offers plenty of great themes to choose from, with designs that follow the best practices and do not distract from the product, yet they give you enough space to establish an authentic branding style.
Key Features
Square POS
Square Online allows you to access the Square POS functionality for free if you already use it in your brick-and-mortar shop. Manage your inventory from a single dashboard, and synchronize your physical and online store for stock received, inventory recount, restock return, damage, etc.
Shipping
Select how you want the software to calculate the shipping rates for the areas you are shipping to, print shipping labels in the Performance or Premium account, and keep track of the pending orders.
Pop-ups
In Square Online, you can use pop-ups to offer coupons, collect emails, make announcements, and verify age. The pop-ups here are designed not to be too intrusive, easy to exit, yet visually appealing.
Email marketing
To unlock past the automatic order confirmation emails and access and activate the abandoned cart and item reviews, you will need to upgrade to the Performance or Premium plans.
Integrations
Integrate your online store with Instagram. Connect with eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce or BigCommerce to generate your store and domain name through another provider and process payments through Square.
Tax calculation
Like with Shopify, you will need to manually calculate the tax rates when shipping to areas outside the U.S. and Canada. However, this free tool will automatically account for taxes within all states in the U.S. and apply Canada’s 5% tax rate.
Pricing
Apart from its Free plan, you can unlock more advanced features for $12 per month in the Business plan.
Square Online includes a 2.9% + $0.30 processing fee per transaction in all its plans.
10. PrestaShop
Best User-Friendly, Feature-Rich Open-Source eCommerce Platform
PrestaShop is one of the best free eCommerce platforms that use the self-hosted or open-source option.
PrestaShop’s customization tools will help you organize your products and enable the customers to navigate your online store easily.
The tool offers a couple of free themes, and you can access the 2,200 templates and a collection of customizable themes in the PrestaShop Marketplace.
The eCommerce builder does take the non-tech users into account to ensure that setting up a store is easy for anyone.
If you don’t have the technical knowledge to edit the underlying code, you can use the software’s editor to add a logo, change the page layouts, and update page content.
If you have a very customizable product and are competent in CSS, PHP, or HTML, you will find PrestaShop fitting, with its expansive features and a rich collection of modules.
Key Features
Inventory
In PrestaShop, you can update stock with suppliers, restock inventory, synchronize with sales channels and accounting, sync with third-party systems, and analyze sales & stock levels.
Built-in SEO
The software lets you control how the products appear in Google Search, leverage the Google Rich snippets from the marketplace, and set up page redirects. SEO Audit is a best-seller module that allows you to write search engine and user-friendly content and detect any SEO problems on every page of your website.
Marketing
PrestaShop Ads is a marketing tool that allows you to advertise on Facebook, Amazon Ads, Google Ads, or Instagram. PrestaShop assists you with your marketing strategy with other features such as special offers, discounts & coupons, free shipping, gift wrapping, affiliate programs, and more.
Competitor analysis and product health check
Activate the product health check functionality to improve data feed quality and resolve data feed-related issues. Identify your store’s top competitors across online marketing platforms and set marketing strategies for the competitive products.
PrestaShop modules
The tool offers over 4,000 free and paid modules that can help you customize your online store, boost conversion rates, and satisfy your customers. Expert developers designed these modules, with the cheapest ranging between $30 and $50.
Pricing
PrestaShop is 100% free.
If you want to invest money into advanced eCommerce features, you can access the PrestaShop addons marketplace.
11. Adobe Commerce
Best Cloud-Based eCommerce Website Builder for Expanding Businesses
Adobe has created a stable, secure, and adaptable eCommerce builder that increases your store revenue while providing multi-channel commerce for B2B and B2C.
Adobe Commerce eliminated the need for developer support with a tool that lets you create compelling content quickly through a simplistic interface, personalized customer content, and fast page updates.
Whether you are managing a B2B or a B2C company, Adobe Commerce allows you to manage multiple sales channels and brands and expand internationally.
Key Features
Page builder
The intuitive page builder supports all content types, and you can schedule, preview, and publish content changes in the future while placing the page builder on autopilot. Reposition content elements and speed up page updates with in-content editing.
Industry-leading AI
The Adobe Sensei AI provides actionable data analysis and automates site content creation, catalog updates, product recommendations, fulfillment, customer targeting, and segmentation. Leverage the AI-generated product recommendations across key touchpoints to boost the conversion rates.
Inventory & shipping
Offer home shipments, in-store pick-ups, and online purchases to your customers, and allow store associates to fulfill orders from PC, PoS, or tablets. With flexible fulfillment options and sourcing algorithms, you can identify the closest location to fulfill orders and meet the customers’ requirements.
Live Search
Deliver blazing-fast search results and personalized results on every shopper query through a free extension you can download from the marketplace. Activate the search-as-you-type functionality, ensure your customers narrow their search quickly through multiple filters, enable browsing by category, and more.
ShopRunner integration
Integrate with ShopRunner and provide a subsidiary for FedEx for your store. Through this tool, you will handle increases in package volume through two-day shipping and provide seamless checkouts and returns.
Pricing
The pricing is private and negotiable. After contacting the team, you will receive a quote according to your requirements.
12. Volusion
Powerful eCommerce Website Builder with Robust Inventory & Analytics Tools
Volusion’s inventory and eCommerce features are highly-efficient and ensure that your eCommerce website accurately displays content information to your customers while providing a seamless purchasing process.
This tool is superb at organizing your online store and leveraging excellent analytics tools to help you manage and scale your business.
Volusion has other highlight features like its product videos that bring the products to life, the suggested product functionality, and a variety of payment gateways.
Key Features
Apps & integrations
With support for 4000+ apps through the Zapier integration, you can automate your work in all areas, from accounting to customer management. You can update prices, track inventory, or snap product pics straight from your phone through the mobile app.
Themes
Volusion’s themes are visually-appealing and responsive, and you can make each page unique with drag and drop content blocks for social media, images, videos, testimonials, and create slideshows.
Advanced search and slideshows
Allow your customers to locate the products in your online store. Highlight the discounts & products on your homepage with a free, attention-grabbing slideshow feature.
Product display customization and product variants
Inform your customers about your product and its performance with reviews, social sharing, and availability notifications. Volusion lets you set different prices for different product variants for more expensive supplies.
Shipping & returns
In Volusion, you can specify shipping types, request signatures, offer special discounts and flat-rate options, and set overall shipping rates. The simple and intuitive returns system will manage all returns while taking the workload off your hands and leaving the customers happy.
Pricing
The Personal plan is $35 per month, and the pricing goes up to $299 in the Business subscription.
Volusion charges 1.25% per transaction in the Personal plan.
13. Weebly eCommerce
Best Online Store Builder for Sharing Products on Social Media
Weebly is one of the best small-business eCommerce solutions on the market that allows you to sell digital & physical goods and courses while ensuring that store and product management is easy for anyone.
The store builder lets you add products to your site by uploading CSV Excels and transferring articles directly from Shopify and Etsy.
Weebly is one of the most capable eCommerce website builders for creating a landing page or a marketing campaign with a built-in blogging feature.
While Weebly's free version is an excellent choice for a smaller web store, you will need to scale up to a higher-priced tier to access more advanced features like real-time shipping, coupons, and item reviews.
Key Features
Shipping settings
Weebly provides worldwide and regional shipping options, including total order price, flat-rate, weight, and item quantity in real-time carriers such as UPS, USPS, FedEx, and DHL. You can activate the onsite pick-up with opening times and instructions.
Checkout & mobile shopping cart
The software enables your customers to access your store over their phones and tablets through a built-in mobile shopping cart. The Android/iPhone mobile apps let you monitor and update your online store on the go. You can add new products, photos, descriptions, and product variations and receive instant notifications when a product is purchased.
Coupon builder
Manage a couponing system directly from the Weebly dashboard, and create coupons by code, date, and quantity. Set coupons for specific product categories and products over a certain amount, and set up coupons to grant free shipping for your customers.
Square gift cards
With Square gift cards, you can allow your customers to send digital gift cards to the recipients of their choice. After a completed purchase, Weebly automatically sends out an email with a gift card and a redemption code. The recipient can use the card multiple times with a healthy balance.
Filtering and product search
The software allows your customer to find the most relevant products. Through Weebly, you can activate search filtering options by different categories like price, color, or other product variations.
Pricing
- 60+ Mobile-Friendly Templates
- Sell Unlimited Products
- SEO Tools
- Chat & Email Support
- No Weebly Ads
- Free Domain
- Unlimited Storage
- Phone Support
- PayPal Payments
- Request Reviews via Email
- Abandoned Cart Recovery Emails
- Priority Support
Read more Weebly pricing
Apart from its Free plan, Weebly offers a Connect subscription for $5 per month.
Volusion charges 1.25% per transaction in the Personal plan.
14. X-Cart
Best eCommerce Website Builder for Personalized Shopping Experience
X-Cart offers eCommerce solutions for the marketplace, B2B, retail, and international selling.
If you wish to boost your online sales through an X-Cart store, you need a basic understanding of PHP, CSS, and JavaScript.
This tool is one of the best eCommerce platforms because it provides powerful tools to help both the smaller and larger stores and a free version that will increase the sales rates for merchants on a tight budget.
When you access the free demo of the software, you will get a clearer picture of how to run an online store on X-Cart.
Through the onboarding wizard, you will receive a walkthrough in the demo store where you can delete the demo products and create your storefront.
Key Features
X-Cart app store
You will find hundreds of add-ons and integrations in the X-Cart marketplace. You can even integrate with Zapier and connect your store with over 4,000 third-party apps. You will find user ratings and reviews for each app in the marketplace.
Marketing functionality
X-Cart allows you to leverage the loyalty programs, advanced banner system, exit offers, and more to turn one-time shoppers into loyal customers. Along with cross-selling, up-selling, and featured products, the tool provides tracking analytics like Google Analytics and Mixpanel to turn customer insights into actionable steps.
Inventory & shipping
The tool lets you track products and variants, group your products by type, add multiple images, and set up notifications for best-sellers and low-stock items. After you activate real-time shipping calculations, your customers will receive an estimate of their shipping costs before placing an order.
SEO tools
The software automatically generates clean URLs and meta tags whenever you list a product. If you don’t prefer the automatic ones, you can configure your SEO terms. X-Cart ensures you leverage the configurable page titles and sitewide SiteMap to increase your CTR and rank higher in the organic search.
Recurring payments
The tool enables you to access more than 50 payment processors through a PCI Level 1 -certified payment application called X-Payments. X-Cart allows recurring payments and subscriptions, plus PCI-compliant storage of credit card details.
Pricing
The software offers a free version and a couple of paid subscription options. However, you will need to request a quote from the X-Cart team to receive the pricing information. There is a 30-day free trial.
15. Ecwid
Best eCommerce Site Builder with Comprehensive Multilingual Selling Features
Ecwid is one of the most cost-effective, powerful, and cheapest eCommerce platforms that allow you to add eCommerce features to an already running website.
As long as you are on the Business or Unlimited plan, you can translate your store into 53 different languages.
The software detects the visitors’ language through their IP address and displays the correct language version of the store.
The main site elements, such as the add to bag buttons and social media labels, get translated automatically, but you will need to do the translation for the product descriptions.
Ecwid allows you to construct an ad-free, standalone store without a monthly subscription commitment.
Key Features
SEO features
You can use the automatically-generated page titles and meta descriptions or edit your versions. The URLs that Ecwid generates automatically will be included in the title you give to your products. The software continuously works on improving the Google SEO Core Web Vitals targets for speed, responsiveness, and visual stability.
Dropshipping
Through Ecwid’s marketplace, you can access Wholesale2B, Syncee, Spocket, NextsChain, Sup, Printy6, and Printful and activate the dropshipping functionality. The Printful app gives you the chance to create products with your images or logos.
Flexible tax calculations
Ecwid lets you set up that your visitors’ locations get automatically identified and that the tax rates get applied automatically. For digital products, Ecwid caters to EU’s VAT MOSS requirements.
WordPress plugin
With a dedicated plugin for WordPress, you can add an Ecwid store to your WordPress site in a few clicks.
Wide range of shipping options
Ecwid lets you charge flat-rate, weight-based, or offer free shipping to your customers. The tool lets you leverage the built-in integration with different carrier companies. Through Ecwid, you can automatically display their shipping rates for customers’ orders.
Digital product commerce
Ecwid is more generous than Shopify and BigCommerce in capping digital file sizes, allowing you to sell files up to 25GB in size for all its paid plans.
Pricing
Apart from its Free plan, you can purchase the Venture subscription for $12.50 per month.
16. Big Cartel
Best Online Store Platform for Creative & Artistic Sellers
Big Cartel is one of the best, hosted eCommerce platforms created for small businesses on a tight budget and creatives looking to build beautiful artist websites.
You can even use the tool to sell a smaller amount of products for free.
The basic eCommerce functionality and a painless onboarding process make Big Cartel a risk-free choice for an online store owner looking to set up an online store and sell for free.
The tool is best suited for artists selling individual pieces and artworks rather than bulk-selling due to its simplistic selling features.
However, Big Cartel is not just one-dimensional, with the userbase expanding to all kinds of business types.
Key Features
Themes & design
Big Cartel offers 18 different themes to choose from, and they are all free. All themes are entirely free, fully responsive, and aesthetically pleasing.
Simplistic editor
You can leverage the basic drag and drop functionality, a decent number of Google fonts & branding elements flexibility, and the straightforward layout Big Cartel provides. If you have the technical skills, you can edit the CSS and HTML code of the themes and control their appearance.
Payment processing
Integrate with external payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal, Square, and Venmo with no transaction fees when accepting payments, regardless of the gateway.
Subscriptions
With a paid plan and Stripe payment gateway, you will be able to activate the subscription functionality. Through subscriptions, you will be able to accept monthly payments and ship items to your subscribers regularly. You can also accept monthly donations, which is especially useful for artists who want to increase their merchandise sales and recurring revenue.
SEO
The tool provides a fully-responsive design, valid HTML markup, automatically-generated SiteMap, clean URLs, alt text editing feature, and canonical URL capabilities.
Pricing
Big Cartel offers the Gold plan for five products for free, and you can scale up to the Platinum subscription for $9.99 per month to unlock the eCommerce space for more products and sales features.
Big Cartel doesn't charge any commissions, but you will need to pay 2.9% + $0.30 for each transaction through Stripe and 3.49% + $0.49 through PayPal.
Online Store Builder FAQ
Online store builders are website builders through which you can design and create an online store where you can sell digital, physical, or subscription-based products. These are the most popular eCommerce platforms specifically for eCommerce sales.
You can pay for the full ownership of the content or the monthly hosting space and sell shipped goods, digital products, or lessons.
There are a couple of ways you can attain a free eCommerce site.
You can create a store in WooCommerce for free, but you need to pay for the hosting services and domain fees.
You can create an online store through a free tier in tools such as Shift4Shop, Square Online, Weebly, X-Cart, or Ecwid, and you will only need to pay the per-transaction processing fees.
Other tools like PrestaShop are 100% free without monthly fees or sales commissions.
The eCommerce website builders have developed to the point that most of them enable people with limited coding knowledge to create professional-looking web stores.
First, make sure you know your niche. After choosing a domain name, you need to pick your eCommerce website builder. When aligned with your needs, the right platform will help you add products, design the look, set up shipping, market, and launch your store.
Statistics show that eCommerce sales are on the rise right now, which makes now a good time to start your web store.
According to a rough estimate, an average online store in the U.S. makes around $150.000 in monthly revenues after three months of operating.
By the end of year one in business, an average web store will earn an estimated $330.000 in monthly revenue.
Our pick for the best free web store builder is PrestaShop. PrestaShop is a free, open-source eCommerce tool that will provide you with various themes and modules for your perfect website design, store management, SEO, and inventory functionalities that are easy to use at $0 per month and no sales commissions.
Our vote for the cheapest eCommerce website builder is Square Online because it provides the best value for money and offers a free plan for small businesses on a tight budget.
At just $12 for its Professional subscription, you get more than enough to design a perfect web store, and their free eCommerce solution is one of the most generous.
Ecommerce Website Builders: Which is Best for You?
Thanks to the development of modern eCommerce platforms, you can design a professional-looking web store without coding expertise. But, which one do you choose?
It is easy to recommend Shopify and BigCommerce due to their overwhelming popularity, or Squarespace for their excellent marketing and reputation for creating stunning websites.
Wix provides excellent localized commerce tools, and Shift4Shop and Ecwid present budget-friendly all-in-one solutions.
Our top five picks bring these great qualities, plus the ability to anticipate and support the future growth of your eCommerce business.
Once more, here are our top five picks for the best eCommerce website builders:
Shopify
BigCommerce
Squarespace Commerce
WooCommerce
Wix eCommerce
To help you decide which eCommerce tool is best for you, check out our reviews below for detailed comparisons between different eCommerce website builders.
- Shopify vs. Wix
- WooCommerce vs. Shopify
- BigCommerce vs. Shopify
- Shopify vs. Squarespace
- Wix vs. Weebly
- Wix vs. Squarespace
- Best WooCommerce Alternatives
- Best Squarespace Alternatives
- Best Shopify Alternatives