The best ecommerce website builders, the best website builders, and the best small business website builders feature many providers that rank among all three lists. When you come to build an ecommerce website, there are plenty of platforms available offering the ability to build a website that can sell products online, giving your company another sales and revenue platform.
Building a website with an online store and ecommerce functionality also provides you with the ability to sell both online and offline, either via email or via shipping to customer mailing addresses. Perhaps the best thing is that none of this requires advanced technical know-how: the best website builders make it all easy for you.
We’ve outlined our picks for the best ecommerce website builders below, having evaluated top services on their ecommerce-specific functionalities, customer support, pricing plans, and much more.
The top 3 ecommerce website builders right now
The best ecommerce website builders of 2023 in full
Wix can be used to build websites of all stripes, especially ecommerce websites. Every paid plan comes with a free domain name, a drag-and-drop site builder, and hundreds of themes and templates to choose from.
Ecommerce-specific features include abandoned cart recovery, automated sales tax, and subscription management. There’s even a booking platform that you can use to monetize your services and host events.
The best thing about Wix? It doesn’t charge any commission fees per transaction. It also doesn’t impose any limitations on the number of products you sell or transactions you complete within any given time. Wix also offers unlimited bandwidth. And there are dedicated tools for handling marketing and analytics. 24/7 customer support is available for all business subscribers via phone and chat.
There are four business-specific plans to choose from for ecommerce sites. Business Basic, which costs $23 a month, should be enough for most small or medium businesses. It offers 20GB of regular storage and five hours of video storage. Of course, you can upgrade your plan at any time.
Business Unlimited and Business VIP offer 30GB and 50GB of regular storage respectively, although the rest of the features are mostly the same. Business VIP also offers priority support. In addition, there’s a dedicated plan for enterprise users for $500 a month.
Read our Wix review.
BigCommerce is a great option if you want to leverage every possible channel to maximize your sales. It integrates easily with platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Google Shopping, Amazon, and eBay. The website builder is extremely versatile, while also being very easy to use thanks to its drag-and-drop mechanic.
There are a lot of features to choose from, which advanced users will definitely appreciate. These include customer management, bulk pricing, and more. Most of the features are built into the platform, so you don’t have to worry about getting third-party apps or extensions either.
However, there is a flip side. Because of its many features, BigCommerce can feel a bit intimidating to beginners in the industry, who might be overwhelmed by the sheer number of options it offers. You can easily end up paying more for features you don’t even need, which can be a problem if you’re operating on a small budget.
BigCommerce is best suited to growing ecommerce businesses that are hungry for more sales. For a more laid-back approach, a different platform with fewer features and a lower price tag might be the best option. BigCommerce Standard costs $29.95 a month, and there’s a 15-day trial and 24/7 customer service included.
Those interested in even more features, such as abandoned cart saver, product filtering, and price lists, can easily upgrade to a higher tier plan. BigCommerce charges $79.95 a month for its Plus plan, and $299.95 a month for the Pro plan.
Read our BigCommerce review.
Shopify is more expensive than Wix, but for good reason. With over one million stores currently running on its platform, Shopify is easily the most powerful website builder with ecommerce features. Each plan comes with tons of features, including web hosting, unlimited bandwidth, a built-in CDN, over 70 themes and templates, and 24/7 customer service.
You also get specific tools for dropshipping, abandoned cart recovery, shipping rate management, and customer account management. Another unique feature with this platform is that it handles all ecommerce transactions in house for free. Shopify normally charges 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction, but those charges are only levied if you use third-party payment gateways to process transactions.
You can also use Shopify Payments, the platform’s built-in payment gateway, which is available free of charge. What’s more, Shopify features a built-in app store that you can use to integrate your online store with hundreds of third-party applications.
Basic Shopify costs $29 a month, and comes with the aforementioned transaction fees. You can also upgrade to higher-tier plans for more features like gift cards, professional reports, advanced report building, and career shipping. These plans include Shopify ($79 a month) and Advanced Shopify ($299). Payments can be made on a yearly basis up to three years in advance.
Read our full Shopify review.
Squarespace is one of the most popular website builders, and is especially loved by people within the creative community. This is because it comes with award-winning site templates that can fit just about any kind of business. These are very polished and intuitive, but it also offers quality ecommerce features at the price of regular subscription plans.
Its highly functional drag-and-drop editor can be used to design pretty much any kind of ecommerce store, and you can sell products, services, and digital goods. It has built-in tools for website SEO and blogging, an analytics dashboard showing site performance in great detail, and lots of apps to choose from. You can even inject your own code if you’d like to use an unsupported third-party app, though there’s no centralized marketplace for one-click app installations.
For online stores, you’d have to go for at least a Business plan for $18 a month, while larger and more dedicated online stores can choose from Basic Commerce and Advanced Commerce for $26 and $40 a month, respectively. These plans also come with 0% transaction fees and customer account management.
Read our comprehensive Squarespace review and browse our Squarespace promo codes page for the latest offers and discounts.
Founded in 1999, Volusion is one of the first names to offer a website builder with ecommerce. As of 2021, it had sold services worth $28bn and hosted more than 30,000 online stores.
Like BigCommerce, Volusion is packed with features and is therefore meant for advanced users who have some experience running an ecommerce store. Its systems aren’t easy to get used to, but it does have a knowledge base with lots of resources on getting started.
With Volusion, there’s a limited choice of free templates on offer, and the paid templates are extremely expensive. A few features worth mentioning include abandoned cart recovery, product categorization, and customer data migration.
Volusion has its own payment platform called Volusion Merchant Program, but it’s only available in the US. For users from other countries, Volusion allows you to accept payments via credit card. Paypal and Stripe are also available as payment options.
Volusion costs $29 a month for the Personal plan. It includes a limit of $50,000 in sales a year and 100 products. For users who want more, Professional ($79 a month) offers up to $100,000 in sales and 5,000 products.
There’s also a $299 a month plan called Business, which allows for $500,000 in sales and an unlimited number of products and also includes priority support. Finally, custom pricing is available for enterprise users who require unlimited levels of everything.
Read our full Volusion review.
Weebly is a fairly good hosting provider and website builder with a forever-free plan. Under this plan, you can launch a basic ecommerce website completely free of cost. Users who require more features can always upgrade as the need arises.
The drag-and-drop builder requires zero coding knowledge, is easy to use and quite functional, and paid plans are quite affordable too. All in all, Weebly is an excellent choice for entrepreneurs who are looking to expand their business online with an ecommerce store. There are also features for shipping and inventory management, and dedicated tools for email marketing, analytics, and SEO.
Finally, Weebly allows you to add tags to indicate when products go out of stock. It offers three paid plans and a forever free plan, starting at $12 a month for a Pro subscription. Business and Business Plus cost $25 and $38 respectively, and both come with inventory management, tax calculation, and shipping calculation features.
Weebly is developed by Square and is integrated into their POS system. Your site utilizes this, so you can manage customers from a unified dashboard. It’s worth noting that long term, there’s a pivot towards Square’s own ecommerce store builder, with new customers already funneled towards it. Existing Weebly customers will continue to be supported in terms of features and functionality.
Read our detailed Weebly review.
Zyro is the website builder for beginners from Hostinger, one of the best web hosting services. It features a very simple interface and a low starting price, both of which are perfect if you’re just starting out in website development and don’t want to make a heavy commitment just yet. The drag-and-drop interface is super intuitive and helps you set up a website with just a few clicks.
There’s quite a collection of themes, separated into nine categories depending on your business niche. You can connect your store to and sell products on Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon. Zyro’s biggest selling point, however, is artificial intelligence, which it uses to develop your brand identity, via a business name generator, a slogan generator, an automated content creator, a logo maker, and a heatmap.
The content generator helps you create ready-to-publish content for your website with a few clicks, which comes in handy if writing isn’t your kind of thing. Most importantly, all of this is offered at a pretty cheap price, allowing you to easily opt for the best plan in the bunch without sacrificing too much.
With Zyro, the basic plan costs just $1.89 a month. Then there’s Unleashed for $3.09 a month, eCommerce for $8.99 a month, and eCommerce Plus for $14.99 a month. While the Basic plan offers only 1GB storage and 3GB bandwidth, Unleashed, eCommerce, and eCommerce Plus all come with unlimited storage and bandwidth for your online store, as well as a free domain for one year.
The eCommerce and eCommerce Plus plans also offer shipping and inventory management features. However, eCommerce Plus is the only plan that allows for unlimited products per online store.
Read our full Zyro review.
| Website builder | Cheapest ecommerce plan | Storage | Bandwidth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wix | $23 a month | 20GB | Unlimited |
| BigCommerce | $29.95 a month | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Shopify | $29 a month | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Squarespace | $12 a month | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Volusion | $29 a month | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Weebly | $12 a month | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Zyro | $2.90 a month | 1GB | 3GB |
Ecommerce website builder FAQs
What is an ecommerce website builder?
An ecommerce website builder is a website building platform that is specifically tailored towards creating online stores for businesses.
They include many of the same elements and tools as standard website builders but specialize in providing sales-specific features, plugins, and more for successful online commerce.
How to choose the best ecommerce website builder for you
When choosing from the best ecommerce website builders, scale is a key factor. The best option for you and your business depends largely on your current situation and growth potential.
For those starting out, Wix and Squarespace offer some of the best plans. Weebly is ideal if you want to test the waters, while Shopify and BigCommerce are the top choices for bigger stores and enterprises.
It’s best to weigh up each provider’s pros and cons and decide for yourself which features are most important. Those worth looking into if you’re serious about an online store include abandoned cart recovery, shipping calculation, and inventory management.
Your choice of builder should also offer a choice of payment platforms, while its drag-and-drop functionality and interface will undoubtedly also be significant factors.
How we review the best ecommerce website builders
Ecommerce builder comparisons
In reviewing the best ecommerce website builders, we take a largely-similar approach to how we review all website builders.
First of all, we test the website builder and website editor by creating a custom site. By doing this, we can see how complex or simple the builder and editor are, so that you’re better-informed as to which platform is right for you. Once the site is live, we test the uptime and response time over a two-week period: that way, we can ensure that the builder’s hosting performs as it should, and keeps your site online.
When it comes to specific ecommerce builder elements, we examine ecommerce tools, features, or plugins that the builder provides, creating an online store and seeing how these functionalities compare to those offered by competitors. Additionally, any service-specific areas that we think are worth testing out are given the once-over.
For ecommerce, customer service and support knowledge and responsiveness is very important should you want to avoid any issues you can’t solve. We test both of these with every ecommerce builder, to give you a comprehensive overview of their aptitude for problem-solving and attentive responses.
Last but certainly not least, we study in detail what each paid package offers you, explaining pricing in depth so that you’re as well-informed as possible about any potential hidden or extra costs that might apply in the future.
See our testing methodology page for more information.
Next steps with website builders
Learn more about whether you should invest in a small business website builder; and our tips for building an enterprise website, should you want to increase your online presence further.
If you’re looking for another option, WordPress offers ecommerce functionality as well. You’ll need to find a builder or plugin from among the best website builders for WordPress, and you’ll likely need the best WordPress hosting too. It’s also worthing noting that one of the top ecommerce tools for use with WordPress is WooCommerce.
Finally, when it comes to the website builders we’ve discussed above, if you’ve chosen one and want to know how to create a site with them, learn how to make a website with Wix, how to build a website with Squarespace, and how to build a website with Shopify.
