OptinMonster’s research reveals that a vast majority of global internet users (93.5%) have made online purchases, underlining the importance of having an e-commerce website for businesses.
However, creating a feature-rich online store requires a reliable ecommerce website builder. This type of builder simplifies setting up your store, managing payments, fulfilling orders, and driving traffic to your site.
We have compiled a list of top online options to help you find the best ecommerce website builder for your business. Our guide also includes a breakdown of each builder’s most useful features so that you can make an informed decision. So, let’s delve into the realm of the cheapest E-commerce builder for your business operations.
Ecommerce Website Builders: When Do You Need Them?
For most people, using an ecommerce website builder is the simplest and quickest way to begin selling products online. These builders usually feature drag-and-drop page editors that allow you to create a complete website without requiring any coding skills.
They come equipped with all the necessary tools to manage orders, shipping, and other related tasks.
However, there are exceptions. If you already have a website or are an experienced developer, you could use plugins like WooCommerce on WordPress or Shopify Lite to add ecommerce functionality to your existing site.
Nonetheless, for most businesses, ecommerce website builders are the best option. They provide an easy way to supplement brick-and-mortar sales and reach new customers. This is especially beneficial for retailers, restaurants, suppliers, and other businesses looking to make ordering more convenient for customers.
If you’re not a developer or don’t already have a website, ecommerce website builders are the most efficient, affordable, and convenient way to launch your online store.
1. Shopify
Shopify is a reliable and user-friendly ecommerce platform that can help you take your business online without the need for coding skills or a large budget. With over one million businesses powered by Shopify, this platform is known for its affordability, beautiful website designs, and helpful marketing tools.
When creating your Shopify store, you can choose from a wide range of professional templates that offer built-in features, including SSL certifications, domain hosting, custom domains, abandoned cart recovery, and more. You can sell unlimited products and expand your reach by integrating with multiple marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, and Etsy through Shopify’s partner integrations.
Shopify Payments also makes it easy to accept payments online, with over 100 payment gateway integrations available. In addition, more than 4,000 free Shopify apps help you customize and enhance your store’s functionality to sell more online.
Some of the features that make Shopify an excellent ecommerce platform include the following:
- A vast selection of over 100 professional themes created by renowned designers such as Pixel Union and Happy Cog.
- A built-in mobile commerce shopping cart that allows shoppers to make purchases on any mobile device or tablet.
- Full access to your store’s HTML and CSS for complete customization of your ecommerce website.
- Search engine optimization tools to help potential customers find your online store.
- Streamlined inventory management to keep track of stock counts and stop selling products when inventory runs low.
- No limitations on the number of products you can sell in your store and unlimited bandwidth so that you’re not charged based on the number of visitors to your site.
- Simplified reporting and analytics tools to help you monitor your store’s performance.
- Integration with Shopify POS system to connect your in-person and online storefronts.
- Access to a wide range of marketing, sales, and customer support tools through the Shopify app store, which features over 4,000 apps.
- A mobile app to manage your business on the go.
- 24/7 customer support through email, live chat, and phone.
- Flexible pricing plans, including a free trial without needing a credit card, and paid plans starting as low as $39 per month.
2. 3dcart
3dcart is an ecommerce platform designed to provide a simple shopping cart solution for retailers who want to sell their products online. Although it doesn’t offer the extensive features of other site builders like Shopify or Wix, it’s an attractive option for store owners looking to establish an online presence quickly, thanks to its affordable pricing, good sales reporting, and mobile-responsive themes.
However, users may not have much control over the creative aspect of their store as the available templates are limited, and the builder can be challenging to use. Despite these limitations, 3dcart still provides some excellent ecommerce features to help users start their online store.
Here are some of the features offered by this platform:
- Integration of 160+ payment options directly into your online store without requiring any coding skills
- A selection of over 90 free templates to quickly establish your website
- Built-in search engine optimization functions to boost your site’s search visibility
- Abandoned cart notifications to help recover lost sales and boost your revenue
- Excellent Zapier integrations to extend your store’s capabilities and provide more functionality
- A 15-day free trial, followed by paid plans starting at $19 monthly.
3. Weebly
Weebly is a user-friendly online storefront builder powered by Square, making it an ideal choice for small to medium-sized businesses that want to set up a simple online store without investing too much time or effort into maintenance.
If you’re a beginner user who wants to avoid getting bogged down by technical elements, Weebly is an excellent option. While anyone can build a website on Weebly for free, using your domain name or removing ads requires a paid plan.
The free version does offer some useful features, such as real-time shipping and coupon options, but if you need more advanced functionality, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Business owners who use Square for payments may also be interested in checking out Square online, which offers similar features to Weebly, allowing you to set up a professional ecommerce website quickly and easily.
Here are some of the features offered by this platform:
- An intuitive website builder and management platform for easily managing inventory and orders.
- Bulk inventory functions that allow you to edit large batches of products and import/export data.
- Mobile-optimized website design to ensure your site is easily accessible on all devices.
- A straightforward coupon builder (available with paid plans) to create promotional offers in your store.
- A user-friendly drag-and-drop builder and a media library that guides you through the website creation process.
- A free platform version is available, while paid plans start at just $6 monthly.
4. Squarespace
Squarespace is an ecommerce site builder with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder, making it accessible even for users with minimal technical knowledge. Like Wix, it started as a traditional website builder, so there may be a slight learning curve when setting up an online store.
Squarespace provides a range of well-designed templates, allowing you to customize colours, text, and images to match your brand. However, you cannot start selling online until you upgrade to a paid plan.
When using Squarespace as your ecommerce solution, you can only accept payments through a few payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Afterpay. However, you can sell subscriptions and gift cards using the Commerce Advanced plan.
If you don’t want to deal with setting up Squarespace’s ecommerce functions, you can add the Shopify Buy Button to your basic website for just $5 per month. This small embedded piece of code provides access to over 100 payment options, sales and growth tracking, simple shipping integrations, currency support, and other features.
Some of the features offered by this platform are:
- A drag-and-drop builder with customizable templates and starter layouts enables you to easily create your online store.
- Automatically responsive web designs and image scaling ensure your site looks great on any device.
- Custom WYSIWYG editing, which supports various content types and complex layouts.
- The ability to sell an unlimited number of products through your online store.
- Automatic post-purchase email sequences to help engage customers and boost sales.
- Access to finance, marketing, shipping, and sales extensions provides additional functionality for your store.
- A 3-day free trial is available, with the basic Commerce plan starting at $26 per month.
5. BigCommerce
BigCommerce is an ecommerce platform designed for enterprise-level companies. It provides web hosting and extensive customization options, making it an ideal choice for tech-savvy business owners looking to scale. However, users cannot register their domain name through BigCommerce and must purchase a domain elsewhere and connect it to their store.
BigCommerce offers advanced features such as international selling capabilities, SEO apps and optimized stores, and the ability to sell on multiple channels, including social media and other online selling sites. However, these features can be more complex to use. Retailers like Grace & Lace have reported experiencing drawbacks with
BigCommerce, such as a lack of flexibility and ease of use. Grace & Lace switched to Shopify Plus, Shopify’s enterprise solution, after struggling with BigCommerce. The move to Shopify Plus provided the company with powerful business tools and add-ons, resulting in a 20% year-over-year growth since migrating.
Here are some of the features offered by this platform:
- A visual editor that allows you to edit website pages using a drag-and-drop tool, making it easy to customize your site.
- Customizable themes are built using HTML, CSS, and Javascript, providing extensive flexibility to create a unique look for your online store.
- Checkout customization with server-to-server checkout API and SDK, enabling you to tailor your checkout process to meet your specific needs.
- Digital wallet payment options, including popular wallets like Amazon Pay and Apple Pay, offer your customers more ways to pay.
- Cross-channel commerce with marketplaces like Amazon and Google Shopping allows you to expand your reach and sell on multiple platforms.
- Multi-currency and multi-language support for international sales make reaching customers worldwide easier.
- The platform offers a 15-day free trial, and monthly paid plans start at $29.95.
6. Wix
With its easy-to-use platform, Wix, a popular website builder, has jumped on the ecommerce bandwagon. You can use Wix’s drag-and-drop builder to create an online store catering to your needs. Wix offers customizable templates, domain name registration, and web hosting to help you get started with minimal hassle.
However, there is one significant drawback: while you can create an ecommerce website for free, you can’t sell anything until you upgrade to a paid plan.
Wix provides useful tools to manage your ecommerce business, such as order tracking, online payment acceptance, multichannel selling, and abandoned cart campaigns.
However, Wix’s basic plan falls short regarding inventory management features such as low-stock alerts, tax calculators, and dropshipping capabilities. If you have a large inventory, you may want to consider ecommerce software with more comprehensive inventory-tracking tools.
Here are some of the features offered by this ecommerce platform:
- A user-friendly editing interface that makes it easy to build your online store, even if you don’t have technical expertise.
- Customizable templates allow you to tailor your site from the storefront to the checkout page, creating a unique and professional look for your business.
- Integrations with popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Google Shopping, and eBay to help you reach more potential customers.
- A free SSL certificate that helps protect your customers’ personal information and payment details.
- SEO-optimized product pages that can help your online store rank higher in search engine results, driving more traffic to your site.
- The ability to import CSV files of your inventory into your store saves you time and effort in uploading products.
- The platform’s Business Basic plan starts at $23 per month.
7. GoDaddy
Although GoDaddy is primarily known as a website builder, it also offers an ecommerce solution. GoDaddy’s ecommerce builder is designed to be beginner-friendly and uses artificial design intelligence to create a customized online store quickly and easily.
However, there are some downsides to using GoDaddy as your ecommerce platform. While it offers built-in tools for search engine optimization and email marketing campaigns, its feature set is somewhat limited.
Additionally, GoDaddy’s ecommerce builder only allows you to sell up to 1,500 products, which may not be sufficient for businesses looking to scale and expand their product offerings.
Features of this ecommerce site builder include:
- A selection of over 100 mobile-friendly templates for building your online store
- Integration with social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook for easy selling across channels
- Automatic sales and inventory management, enabling you to manage your products and orders from one central location
- Multiple payment options, including Google Pay and Venmo, for easy and convenient transactions
- Integration with Square Point of Sale to connect your online and brick-and-mortar businesses
- Pricing for the ecommerce plan starts at $24.99/month.
8. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress that enables users to add ecommerce functionality to their websites. As such, it’s not a standalone website builder, and it’s recommended that users work with a developer when using this platform.
WooCommerce offers a range of features to manage inventory, tax, payment, and shipping on your website. Like WordPress, WooCommerce’s features can be extended through thousands of plugins, themes, and dedicated extensions created specifically for
WooCommerce. Additionally, WooCommerce is known for having a large community of developers that can be accessed for more advanced changes to your online store.
Here are some possible revisions:
- Built specifically for WordPress, allowing for seamless integration with its ecosystem
- Responsive design ensures your store looks great on any device
- Full control over your customer and business data, with no third-party access
- A large global community with over 350 contributors offering support and resources
- The fully open-source platform gives you complete control over the look and functionality of your website.
9. Volusion
Volusion is an ecommerce website builder that has been around since 1999. It is a straightforward option to get your business online with basic site-creation tools such as homepage and product page creation, integration with over 30 payment gateways, and unlimited product selling. However, some users find it challenging to navigate the builder.
The standout feature of Volusion is its data analysis capabilities. You can easily access and understand inventory and analytics to see how your online store performs and where improvements can be made.
Volusion also has a native “suggested products” feature in its stores. However, Volusion does not support selling digital products such as ebooks, music, or art. If you need to sell digital products, you may want to consider another builder.
Features of Volusion include:
- Drag-and-drop content blocks for customizing page layouts with images, texts, reviews, and other elements.
- Zero transaction fees on all plans offered by Volusion.
- Mobile-responsive themes for seamless shopping experiences on smartphones and tablets.
- CSS editor for tailoring website elements to your specific business needs.
- Recurring pricing options tailored for subscription-based businesses.
The Final Verdict
There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to choosing the best e-commerce website builder for your business. Each platform has its own unique features, pricing, and limitations. It’s important to evaluate your business needs and goals before selecting an e-commerce website builder.
If you’re looking for a reliable e-commerce website development partner, consider Scrum Digital. Our team of experienced developers and designers can help you build a custom e-commerce website that meets your unique business requirements. Contact Scrum Digital today to discuss your e-commerce website development needs.
