The idea of creating an online shop seems complicated and time-consuming; however, it can be super profitable when done right.
To deal with all the hardships of setting an eCommerce store, you need a good eCommerce website builder. With the right eCommerce website builder, you can start an online shop, attract customers and make sales immediately.
Many easy-to-use website builders can help your business to stand out.
In this guide, I’ve compiled a list of the best eCommerce website builders from around the web. Since every business has specific needs for them, I’ve also included the pros and cons of each website builder.
Website builders are essential because they are an excellent option for small business owners who have limited budgets, skills, and time to set up their websites. They let you create a beautiful website fast at an affordable price so you can use the money you saved to grow your business.
So, here are the best eCommerce website builders to use in 2023:
Without further ado, let’s start with the first one.
1) Shopify
Shopify is an eCommerce platform that makes it very simple to build an online store without any coding skills or a big budget. Over one million businesses prefer Shopify for its beautiful designs and helpful marketing tools.
You can create a Shopify store with 100 professional templates with built-in features, such as domain hosting, abandoned shopping cart recovery, and other powerful tools. With Shopify, you can get more customers, make more sales, and manage your day-to-day operations. In addition, you can sell products through your eCommerce store and across various marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and Etsy through Shopify’s partner integrations.
Shopify pricing (monthly costs for yearly subscriptions):
- Basic Shopify $26: You can sell unlimited products and get access to features such as abandoned cart recovery and gift cards. However, Shopify charges a 2% transaction fee unless you use Shopify Payments.
- Shopify $71: It offers more features such as professional reports and international pricing. Transaction fees are 1% unless you use Shopify Payments.
- Advanced Shopify $266: In addition to all features, you get advanced reports and automatically calculated shipping rates. Transaction fees are 0.5% unless you use Shopify Payments.
Pros of Shopify:
- Easy to use: Shopify requires no coding knowledge, and it offers quality beginner guides to starters.
- There are many designs options, and they respond to mobile as well. You can choose from already existing themes or create your own from scratch.
- Shopify is user-friendly but also easy to scale. Thanks to its features like Shop Pay, customers registered to another Shopify store can shop from your website without signing up again. This feature puts Shopify ahead of its competitors such as WooCommerce or Bigcommerce.
- Support: Shopify offers 24-hour support to its users.
Cons of Shopify:
- Shopify’s URL structure is not SEO-friendly.
- Although Shopify is trying to improve its language options, it’s still not perfect. You might need other supporting translation tools.
- Transaction fees: Unless you use Shopify Payments which is not available worldwide, you have to pay transaction fees.
2) Shift4Shop
Shift4shop is an all-inclusive eCommerce platform and, according to its site, “integrates every feature you need for creating a complete eCommerce website, with no need to install the software.” Shift4Shop is a comprehensive solution designed for advanced users who want to manage their site experience completely.
Shift4Shop supports multichannel eCommerce; this means that you can sell on mobile and eBay, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Shopzilla.
With this website builder, you can sell both physical and digital products, and since Shift4shop is hosted platform, you don’t have to install any software or need to know about anything server-related. Instead, you can focus on managing your store and making sales.
Shift4Shop pricing:
- Nano Plan ($9.99/month): You get support for up to 25 products, a maximum of 2,000 visitors per month, and 1,000 newsletter sends.
- Mini Plan ($19.99/month): You’ll gain support for up to 200 items, a maximum of 4,000 visitors per month, and 1,000 newsletter sends.
- Starter Plan ($35.99/month): You’ll receive support for up to 1,000 items, a maximum of 8,000 visitors per month, and 2,000 newsletters send.
- Professional Plan ($65.99/month): You’ll get support for up to 10,000 items, a maximum of 20,000 visitors per month, and 5,000 newsletter sends.
- Professional Plus Plan ($99.99/month): You’ll gain support for a limitless number of items, a maximum of 50,000 visitors per month, and 20,000 newsletter sends.
Pros of Shift4Shop:
- Built-in Features: 3dcart provides an incredible amount of features for its users
- Flexibility: 3dcart’s significant feature set brings you flexibility during your experience with the platform. Additionally, you’ll get flexibility in your design, selling options, and payment processing.
Cons of Shift4Shop:
- Not beginner friendly: it’s not a great e-commerce website builder for beginners because the platform also has over 200 built-in features, which can be hard to manage for online sellers who are just starting.
- Pricing: Although 3dcart offers basic features at an affordable price, if you want specific advanced functions, such as abandoned cart tools, loyalty programs, or customer groups, you will need to pay for a more expensive plan.
3) Weebly
Weebly is another website builder that can help you to build your website. Square acquired it in May of 2018 and is now part of the Square suite of business tools.
Weebly is a great website builder for small businesses and portfolios. It’s easy to use and comes with apps and features to help improve your website, from SEO to eCommerce. You can build a simple but stylish website with Weebly’s drag-and-drop editor quickly with no coding needed.
Weebly is an excellent choice for blogs, online stores, and business sites.
Pricing:
Weebly offers a domain name for free for the first year, and it costs $19.95 from the second year onwards. In addition, it provides 40 free themes that are mobile responsive.
Pros of Weebly:
- Easy to use and beginner-friendly
- Great for small businesses, offers all the essential tools you need to build a great business site or an online store
- Its customizable templates are stylish and mobile responsive – and you can switch between them.
- Weebly’s help and support center has super helpful SEO guides for coding advice and tips on optimizing keywords and boosting your site’s ranking.
Cons of Weebly:
- Drag-and-drop customization is easy but limited– unless you can code with Weebly Code Editor, you might have issues with Weebly because of its lack of creative options.
- You can’t restore your website on your own, so only the Weebly support team can restore your site for you if your site goes down.
- Weebly doesn’t have ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence). ADI is a website building assist that automatically uses data you provide to create a website for you and save you time. However, with Weebly, you have to make your site manually.
4) Squarespace
Squarespace is a website builder that has a lot to provide to your business. Although Squarespace is not the easiest-to-use builder on the market, you can still get used to it in a short time – it’s just more complex than Weebly.
Squarespace has the best template designs on the market, and they are perfect for creative minds who want to create a website with an impressive design, which is important since there are more than 1.8 billion websites on the Internet.
And first impressions are everything.
Squarespace also has a wide range of features. With its social media integration, you can link accounts from over 20 social platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Squarespace is good for SEO as well, although it’s a bit challenging for beginners.
For support, you can chat live Monday to Friday, get support 24/7 via social media (Twitter) and email.
Pros of Squarespace:
- Squarespace has beautiful templates for desktops, tablets, and mobile devices.
- With Squarespace mobile applications, you can edit pages, blog posts, and eCommerce functions.
- You can restore deleted posts and pages for up to 30 days.
Cons of Squarespace:
- It can be tricky for beginners, so it’s not the fastest nor easiest website builder to create a website.
- Squarespace editor can be a little too manual – for example; you have to save your work after each edit because it doesn’t autosave on its own.
5) Bigcommerce
BigCommerce is one of the most scalable eCommerce website builders on the Internet. Moreover, with its impressive range of built-in sales tools, it is impressively robust.
According to a search, an estimated 60% of people’s interactions with businesses are through the Internet, which means that Bigcommerce is an excellent option for you.
BigCommerce’s primary focus is business growth, so if you are planning to scale your store, Bigcommerce has your back. It doesn’t collect any transaction fees, unlike Shopify, one of its biggest competitors. In addition, Bigcommerce offers unlimited products, storage, and staff accounts.
You sell on platforms like Facebook, Instagram through its multichannel selling, and its professional reporting tools will help you too.
Bigcommerce has lots of features that I couldn’t list here; however, note that it might be overwhelming for you if you’re a beginner or a small business.
Pros of Bigcommerce:
- You can scale quickly – BigCommerce is one of the best eCommerce website builders to grow your business.
- It offers lots of features – BigCommerce has more built-in features than any other eCommerce website builder on the market.
- Great to strengthen your SEO – Bigcommerce gives you great tools so you can make your store rank with Google
Cons of Bigcommerce:
- It’s not beginner-friendly as other options – BifCommerce uses terminology some might find complex, which can make BigCommerce a little challenging to use
- It’s not practical nor simple – BigCommerce is robust and offers many features, but it might become challenging.
- It’s not for startups – If you are selling less than 15 products, BigCommerce might be more than you need.
6) Wix
Wix is a website builder that has over 200 million users across 190 countries worldwide. It’s trendy because it is easy to use and allows everyone to create a professional-looking website without coding skills.
And Wix makes the job very easy.
Wix’s app market gives you hundreds of free and paid integrations that you can install with a single click, and all of their annual plans include a free domain for the first year.
With Wix, you can connect your site to your social account and add social media buttons to your website, optimize your SEO with the custom plan offered by the Wix SEO Wiz tool. In addition, with Wix’s all-in-on Marketing & Customer Management Suite Wix Ascent you will get all your marketing needs such as email marketing, live chat, and Wix automation as well.
Pricing:
Wix offers a free plan.
Combo – $14/month (for personal use)
Unlimited – $18/month (for entrepreneurs and freelancers)
Pro – $23/month (complete online branding)
VIP – $39/month (first priority support)
Pros of Wix:
- Edit professionally – the Wix editor shows you how your edits change the design of your storefront.
- Many apps to choose from – you can choose from 250+ free and paid apps to add extra functionality to your online store with Wix.
- Multichannel selling – you can use Wix’s built-in ability to sell on social media platforms to display your brand to millions of new potential customers.
- Beginner-friendly – Wix’s interface is easy to use, and with the drag-and-drop editor and mobile responsive templates, you can get used to it quickly.
- Professional eCommerce tools – from abandoned cart recovery to catching customers who have left items in their checkout, Wix offers you tools to optimize your website.
- Translation option – With Wix, you can grow your business globally by creating multilingual versions of your website.
Cons of Wix:
- No stock management notifications – Wix won’t alert you when your stocks are running low, which makes it difficult to scale
- Creativity over functionality– While Wix offers a complete creative experience, it might get in the way of best practices of eCommerce design.
7) GoDaddy
GoDaddy is a very beginner-friendly website builder, and it truly is the fastest option for creating a website. First, you need to enter the details, then GoDaddy‘s special design assistance makes a unique website for you to customize and improve.
GoDaddy has simple layouts and offers guidance on adding elements to your site make to quickly start building your website. The website builder is well known for being the world’s largest domain registrar, which is still its focal point. However, GoDaddy is also expanding its website builder, and now they are offering tools that will help their users grow more quickly.
Pricing: (when billed annually)
Basic- $9.99/month
Standard – $14.99/month
Premium – $19.99/month
eCommerce – $24.99/month
Pros of GoDaddy:
- You can create a website and make it live quickly.
- beginner-friendly
- Its pricing plans are very cheap compared to its competition.
Cons of GoDaddy:
- It has limited creative freedom
- some of its features are bland
- Its websites aren’t as visually pleasing as other website builders.
8) Volusion
Volusion is an eCommerce builder with its strengths and weaknesses.
Volusion‘s vital strengths are its backend features – for example, its sales features, which include:
- Extensive stock management with its low stock alerts, product status, and so much more.
- Recommended product feature
- Mobile application for store management
- Barcode generator that will allow to you make custom barcodes for your products
Pricing:
- Personal: $29/month
- Professional: $79/month
- Business: $299/month
- Prime: custom pricing
Pros of Volusion:
- Excellent analytics tools: Volusion is a builder for people who cherish data and analytics rather than design.
- A multitude of payment methods: Volusion is a better choice compared to Weebly’s limited options.
- Powerful backend management: Volusion’s inventory, mobile app, and shipping are top-notch.
Cons of Volusion:
- Not very stylish – Volusion is not that great for design and customization; it focuses on backend management instead.
- Lack of blogging tools – Volusion doesn’t offer any blogging features.
- Pricing – Volusiopn’s pricing is almost the same as Shopify’s but lacks the features Shopify offers, so it’s hard not to compare them.
9) Big Cartel
Big Cartel is an eCommerce builder that allows you to make an online store for free. It’s more convenient for selling unique products such as paintings rather than wholesales because Big Cartel‘s sales features are straightforward.
BigCartel is great for small businesses that aren’t trying to scale as quickly as possible. BigCartel’s onboarding process is very beginner-friendly with its reminders and prompts so you can set up your store seamlessly, and it’s a safe choice for starting your small business.
Big Cartel accepts three payment methods (Paypal, Stripe, Square) and requires apps for many of your eCommerce functions. For example, it would help if you had apps or third plugins to sell digital products, create promotional pop-ups, access more advanced analytics tools, provide drop-shipping.
Pricing:
Big Cartel has a free version.
Personal – $9.99/month (Sell up to 25 products)
Diamond plan – $19.99/month (Sell up to 100 products)
Titanium plan – $29.99/month (Sell up to 300 products)
Pros of BigCartel:
- You can set your store up and sell online for free
- Provides clear navigation and user-friendly prompts
- Perfect for selling individual pieces, so great option for artists
Cons of BigCartel:
- Its themes are basic, and customization options are a few
- You have to know how to code to improve your website with this builder
- Its features lack quality and complexity
10) Magento
Magento is a well-known eCommerce platform when it comes to self-hosted solutions. It was released in 2008, acquired by eBay, and then was sold to Adobe Systems in 2018.
Compared to its competition, Magento is designed more with developers in mind rather than beginner e-storefront operators, which can be challenging for some. Still, Magento offers flexibility for developers, and with it, you can generate complex data sets, so if you’re interested in coding, it’s a good alternative.
Pros of Magento:
- Endless customization options.
- 1,748 product extensions.
- With Magento, you will have full control over your eCommerce store.
- Magento helps you improve your content/product according to your customers’ demands, offering them a better experience.
- Magento gives powerful insights so you can analyze how’s your business is so that you can plan and optimize.
Cons of Magento:
- Magento is very complicated for non-coders.
- Magento can be expensive for smaller businesses.
- It doesn’t provide point-of-sale (POS) support.
11) Kibo
Kibo is a website builder with advanced eCommerce tools. It is ideal for teams who choose to design and build the store themselves rather than using templates.
Kibo is best for the teams who know how to code. If you don’t know how to code, you will probably have a hard time using Kibo.
With Kibo, you can manage multiple stores on one platform, create a visually impressive website and personalize your customers’ experiences.
Pricing:
Custom priced.
Pros of Kibo:
- Easy to upgrade: With Kibo, you can add new features to your store without paying too much or interrupting your customer’s shopping experience on your website.
- Great mobile design: Kibo allows you to create a unique mobile website for customers to easily shop however they prefer whenever they want.
- Packed with built-in SEO tools: You can easily reach your customers with Kibo’s URL routing customizations, editable page titles and descriptions, and more.
Cons of Kibo:
- Kibo is still relatively new, so you come across bugs or issues with the platform.
- Coding skills necessary.
12) Zyro
Zyro is an eCommerce website builder that offers a wide range of tools at an affordable price. However, it’s not for the larger stores or businesses that want to scale quickly because Zyro‘s tools aren’t as scalable as the other website builders I’ve listed above.
Zyro’s e-commerce plans require no commission fee, so you get to keep all of the money when you make a sale. This is very rare among website builders.
In addition to this unique feature, Zyro’s e-commerce and e-commerce Plus plans also provide almost 50 payment options, including PayPal and American express, order tracking, shipping and tax management, gift cards, discount coupons, inventory management, and more.
With Zyro, you can sell physical and digital products, services, and recurring subscriptions. What you want to do is up to you!
Pricing:
- Basic – $8.90/month (currently 67% OFF) for personal brands
- Unleashed – $12.49/month (currently %85 OFF – $2.90) for businesses
- eCommerce Basic – $23.49/month (currently %62 OFF- $1.90) – Start selling online
- eCommerce – $8.90 (currently %64 OFF – $8.90) – Grow your business
Pros of Zyro:
- No Commission: You keep 100% of the revenue from your sales
- AI branding tools: A wide range of tools to make your job easier
- Easy design with templates: Zyro has a grid system and drag-and-drop builder, which will streamline your website design process.
Cons of Zyro:
- You might find it hard to add additional information when uploading the product
- Once you’re done and your website is live, you can’t switch templates which means that your decision is final and irreversible.
Conclusion
Now, all you have to do is choose the right website builder for your business and start making a profit!
You can create a functional website with any website builder that puts your small business online; however, these website builders I’ve listed above will not only help you to build your shop but also make it glorious!
Don’t forget to also check out our top eCommerce tools list.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an e-commerce website builder?
An eCommerce website builder is the easiest and fastest way to start selling products online. With their features such as drag-and-drop page editors, you can create an entire website without any coding.
How much should I pay for an eCommerce website?
It depends on the features and services of the eCommerce website. However, you can compare pricing listings in this article and choose the best eCommerce platform for your business.
How do I build an ecommerce website?
After deciding your brand’s name and choosing a domain for your website. You should pick an e-commerce platform suited for your needs and build your e-commerce website. After that, you should set up shipping, marketing, and tax tools to improve your website, and finally, you should test everything. Then, you’re ready to launch!
