An eCommerce website builder is the quickest and simplest approach to begin selling online. Within a single platform, these tools support inventory, shipping, payments, and everything else you need to manage an eCommerce site.
When Does Investing in an eCommerce Website Builder Make Sense?
In most circumstances, using an e-commerce website builder is the most convenient and time-saving method of selling things online. They include everything you need to manage orders, shipping, and more, and they have drag-and-drop page editors so you can design a whole website without touching a single line of code.
If you have a WordPress site, you can use the WooCommerce plugin to add e-commerce features without having to start from scratch. Alternatively, you may manage inventory and put “purchase now” buttons on your existing website with the Shopify Lite plan.
eCommerce website builders are the quickest, easiest, and cheapest option to start selling your things online unless you’re a developer or already have a website.
Best eCommerce Website Builder Options to Consider in 2022:
Wix – the best website builder for the majority of people.
BigCommerce – the best platform for rapid growth.
Zyro – fantastic for customer tracking and analytics at the best price
Squarespace – ideal for painters, photographers, and other creative professionals.
Shopify – ideal for anyone who requires more assistance.
Weebly – For small businesses that wish to stay small
Shift4Shop is the best option for complete customization.
WIX
Wix is a drag-and-drop website builder that transforms non-designers into website creation experts. You receive everything you need to build and launch your online store with it, including a free domain name, a powerful drag-and-drop site editor, and nearly 1,000 pre-made templates for any type of online store you can think of.
Wix’s best feature is that it doesn’t charge any additional transaction fees, which means you keep all of your hard-earned cash (aside from standard payment processing fees).
It’s also quite easy to understand and use. Once you’ve mastered it, you’ll be able to simply make adjustments, update your site at your leisure, add new products, and handle your orders.
There are no restrictions on the number of products you may sell or the amount of money you can make from your online business. Other companies put a limit on these to force you to upgrade to higher tiers, but Wix doesn’t. On the lowest tier, you could conceivably make millions and sell thousands of different things.
However, the most major limits are storage space and included functionality, so upgrading is a good idea (although you won’t notice these constraints if you’re just getting started).
The most basic subscription includes 20 GB of storage (more than enough for most companies), abandoned cart recovery, and the option to sell on social media. Wix’s online booking platform can also be used to sell services and lessons, hold public or private events, and manage online orders for delivery or pick-up in-store.
Wix’s templates are all professionally designed, modern, SEO-friendly, and mobile-friendly. As a result, site visitors will have a great purchasing experience regardless of the device they’re using.
As you prepare to launch, you may use Wix’s SEO tools and capabilities to ensure that your site shows in search engine results, increasing traffic to your online store and increasing sales. To assist you to get started creating your brand, there are also social media marketing tools, basic email marketing features, and a logo builder.
Even if you opt for the cheapest plan, you will receive everything you require to get started. And then you can start growing.
You can easily and effortlessly upgrade to higher tiers from your account dashboard if you require more advanced capabilities. There will be no downtime when you upgrade, and your site will continue to provide excellent shopping experiences to your visitors in the interim.
Priority customer service, the ability to sell memberships and subscriptions, automated sales tax, shipping discounts, and a built-in customer loyalty program are just a few of Wix’s more complex capabilities.
BigCommerce
Even if you opt for the cheapest plan, with BigCommerce you will receive everything you require to get started. And then you can start growing.
You can easily and effortlessly upgrade to higher tiers from your account dashboard if you require more advanced capabilities. There will be no downtime when you upgrade, and your site will continue to provide excellent shopping experiences to your visitors in the interim.
Priority customer service, the ability to sell memberships and subscriptions, automated sales tax, shipping discounts, and a built-in customer loyalty program are just a few of Wix’s more complex capabilities.
Automation, personalizing the client experience, and delivering upgraded tactics to acquire new customers are the keys to rapid growth. BigCommerce combines the strengths of all three to help you grow your business quickly.
This website builder’s work revolves around these three areas.
You may also sell on numerous platforms, such as Facebook and Pinterest, choose your own payment gateway, and eliminate transaction fees, allowing you to keep more of what you earn.
Every plan comes with an infinite number of items and staff accounts, allowing you to onboard your whole workforce as well as any product in your catalog without ever having to pay extra. You can also link your store to Amazon and eBay, which are both massive markets.
A single-page checkout procedure, which helps enhance conversions, is one of BigCommerce’s notable features.
Customers can also pay using a variety of payment options, such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Amazon Pay, making it simple to pay using their preferred method.
You get basic eCommerce features like discounts and coupons, enterprise-grade reporting tools, product ratings and reviews, a built-in blog, and real-time shipping quotes from several carriers regardless of the plan you choose.
The software grows with you as you require more advanced features.
Conversion audits, abandoned cart emails, complex segmentation, and in-depth SEO optimization skills are available on higher tiers, allowing you to boost your growth even further.
With inquiries or for personalized site audits and tailored advise, you can contact them at any time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. A rich community-driven forum and comprehensive product documentation are also available to assist you.
SQUARESPACE
Do you rely significantly on visuals and branding to help sell your work online as a photographer, artist, or creative? Because visitors can’t engage with what you’re selling, you’ll have to rely on photographs, videos, and your website to do the heavy work.
Squarespace is our #1 suggestion if this describes you.
It’s designed primarily for creative, highly visual websites, and it comes with dozens of ready-to-use themes. But the best thing is that these templates place your online store’s aesthetics front and center.
The majority of them take relatively little customization on your side, but you may use Squarespace’s straightforward what-you-see-is-what-you-get site editor to personalize the design you choose.
It’s completely drag-and-drop, and changing the colors of your entire site takes only seconds. So all you have to do now is brand yourself, add your photographs and videos, and put up your product listings, and you’re ready to go.
You can use the online booking tool to sell premium places on your calendar for custom work or consultations in addition to normal products.
On the advanced e-commerce plan, you can also offer memberships and subscriptions, which is a fantastic feature. If you plan to sell stock photography subscriptions, digital assets, or other recurring revenue products, this is a great option.
When you’re ready to begin promoting your store, Squarespace provides a number of tools to assist you in spreading the news through social media, where you may engage with potential consumers.
You can simply share your brand story and sell your products straight within Squarespace thanks to its social media capabilities. As a result, your consumers will never have to leave the page to make a purchase from you, making the transaction a snap.
If you’re on Instagram, Squarespace can help you create shoppable posts so that your followers can see your products with just one tap.
Every subscription includes tax tools, the option to generate discounts, gift cards, mobile inventory management, and shop administration, as well as in-person payments if you sell at pop-up events or art fairs.
ZYRO
The most well-known feature of Zyro is its ease of use as a website builder. The same beginner-friendly simplicity applies to its eCommerce plans. Most users can be up and running in less than an hour with the help of 24 professionally designed templates and an intuitive drag-and-drop builder.
Importing products and adding inventory will almost certainly take longer than creating your store.
On the back end, Zyro’s site builder stresses ease of use while still providing comprehensive marketing, monitoring, and targeting features. In fact, it’s the greatest deal we’ve seen for such comprehensive data.
If you want to succeed in eCommerce, you need to know how your customers act, where they come from, and what they’re responding to or ignoring in your marketing.
The eCommerce solutions from Zyro make it simple to utilize in conjunction with Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Facebook ads, and other retargeting strategies. You can fine-tune your efforts based on concrete behavior and data, thanks to Google and Facebook’s abundance of information on who your audience is and what they do on your site.
With this information, you can optimize your store based on the information you have about the people who visit your site.
For example, you can rearrange things on your Zyro site according to how they’re selling, run a promotion if one of your high-ticket items is creating a lot of abandoned carts, or focus your marketing efforts on the channels that are bringing in genuine customers.
Just a reminder, this is in addition to the Zyro builder’s extremely user-friendly inventory and order management features.
In addition, Zyro enables accepting payments from a variety of sources straightforward, including Stripe, PayPal, and standard credit cards, among others. Not every e-commerce platform makes setting up and using online payments as straightforward as this.
The two eCommerce options offered by Zyro are reasonably priced, especially if you just have a modest number of products or services to market.
Their most affordable eCommerce plan allows you up to 100 products and includes everything listed above. You may get it for a bargain if you commit to four years in advance—just $9.90 per month—or you can get a decent price if you commit for one or two years.
The eCommerce Plus plan from Zyro costs a little more ($14.90/month for the same four-year period), but you get up to 2,500 goods. Product filters for your web store, translation into additional languages, and integration with your Amazon, Facebook, and Instagram stores are all included.
In any case, you’ll get a lot of useful tools for creating, growing, and marketing your online store at one of the best prices in the category.
SHOPIFY
If you’ve never constructed a website before, customer service is crucial to make the process go as smoothly as possible. Shopify has the greatest customer service of all the builders on our list, providing support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. All of the representatives are competent, pleasant, and willing to go above and above to assist you.
Even if you have no prior expertise, this, along with a feature-rich platform and a drag-and-drop page builder, makes it simple to start and launch your online store.
The greatest part is that you aren’t on your own. Shopify’s customer service staff is here to assist you at any time of day, whether you have a general business or strategy question or a technical concern about the backend of your website.
You can contact them using a live chat at any time. Their response speed is practically instantaneous in our experience, so you never have to wait for hours in a full-fledged panic state for a response.
A vast community forum with questions and answers from Shopify professionals and current customers is available in addition to world-class support.
You can also use a variety of free and premium shop themes to get started with the design.
You may have a well-designed online store with shipping, taxes, inventory management, fulfillment, and support for social media sales and in-person sales all in one location without ever touching a line of code.
If you can’t find an answer, you can search through previously asked questions or ask your own. Most inquiries are answered within a few hours, so you’ll never have to struggle to establish or run your online business on your own.
Shopify also provides an extensive knowledge base with articles, podcast episodes, courses, and how-to guides written by Shopify.
Do you have a question about how to complete a task?
It’s likely to have a guide on it. If you still can’t figure things out, you can always reach out for help.
Aside from assistance, each Shopify plan includes all of the necessary features. The platform is jam-packed with useful features you’ll need as you build your online store, from built-in marketing tools and digital gift cards to shipping discounts, infinite products, and support for 133 currencies.
Shift4Shop
If you’re a seasoned website developer or have one on your team, the other solutions on our list will feel rather limited because you won’t have much control over how your website appears or performs.
As a result, Shift4Shop (previously known as 3DCart) developed a totally infinite eCommerce website builder for anyone seeking total flexibility.
Shift4Shop provides everything you need to create a genuinely unique online shopping experience, whether you like to start with a template and customize it to your heart’s content or entirely code and develop from scratch.
You get access to Shift4Shop’s Core Templating Engine when you sign up, which makes creating custom themes easier than ever before. You can even create a unique mobile app for convenient buying on the go with the platform.
Every subscription comes with an infinite number of goods, bandwidth, product variants, and a fully functional built-in CRM.
As a result, even the most basic plan offers more than many other higher-priced plans, and it is limitless in terms of the number of products and traffic your online store can receive. Furthermore, it is one of the few solutions on our list that has a bulk discount option.
This is a must-have tool for anyone selling products both wholesale and directly to consumers (or other businesses).
The option to modify your checkout page is one of Shift4Shop’s unique features.
This is something that no other eCommerce website builder we’ve looked at allows, so it’s a great method to speed the ordering process for your customers.
Even on the most basic plan, you get full FTP access, the option to use REST APIs for a completely integrated experience, and support from Shift4Shop’s team of developers and engineers if you have questions or run into problems.
The corporation has also recently changed the way it handles pricing.
Shift4Shop provides a completely free end-to-end eCommerce platform with full access to all of its features. The only condition is that you must utilize Shift4Shop as your payment processor and be located in the United States.
Weebly is the most simple and straightforward eCommerce website builder on our list. That’s great news for small enterprises, independent sellers, and local firms looking for a simple, no-frills way to set up an online store.
Because of the global pandemic, many businesses, particularly those that rely heavily on walk-in consumers, such as restaurants and small shopkeepers, have had to convert to online sales over the last year.
As a result, Weebly has become a popular choice for newbies, latecomers, and those who find themselves unexpectedly wanting to add eCommerce—and for good cause. You can list your products, construct an online store, and send it to your customers in less than an hour.
Without fussing too much with the platform itself, you can easily add new products, delete out-of-stock products, push updates, and track your inventory levels.
There’s no need to waste time fussing with your web store to get it to work the way you want it to, whether you’re relying primarily on online sales or utilizing it as a supplement.
Every Weebly plan (including the free one) includes an integrated shopping cart, a quick shop option that allows customers to check out in seconds, and automatic tax calculations. At checkout, you can choose from an unlimited number of products as well as in-store or delivery choices.
You can also design personalized coupons, provide digital gift cards, and monitor inventory in real-time as customers place orders.
You may also use your website to improve local SEO and collect leads to expand your email list.
All of this is included in the free plan. You get everything you need to open and run a small business without ever having to pay a dime.
With that said, a free account does not allow you to connect a custom domain name. You may or may not find this to be a deal-breaker.
If it is, you can pay $6 per month to upgrade to a premium subscription.
One thing to keep in mind is that both the free and Personal ($6/month) plans display Square advertisements on your website, which isn’t a big concern if you’re a tiny local business or selling items as a hobby. But they’re actually quite unobtrusive. There are no pop-ups or in-line advertisements. It’s just a small light or dark bar at the bottom of your site (you choose the theme).
You can get an ad-free website, a free domain name for the first year, no transaction costs, and unlimited storage space if you upgrade to a higher tier (beginning at $12 per month).
For smaller businesses, the free and Personal plans are more than adequate, so we recommend starting there. The Professional package is the ideal option if you want your own domain and no transaction costs.
However, in terms of features for the price, the Performance plan pales in contrast to the other providers on our list. You can get a better package with better overall value elsewhere if you’re seeking for top-tier performance.
If you require more than Weebly’s Professional plan can provide, we advise you to search elsewhere.
How to choose the best eCommerce website builder?
You can do the assignment with any of these eCommerce builders. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do it in a creative manner and with a final product you’re proud of.
While they may appear to be identical on the surface, it’s the small—and seemingly insignificant—differences that distinguish one eCommerce platform from the next.
To help people make a decision, we developed a methodology that dives into these nuances in order to help you narrow down your options. The first three criteria will help you in narrowing down your top three options, while the fourth will help people make the best decision for your new online store.
Limitations and Pricing Structure of the Plan
Depending on the platform you choose, eCommerce website builders provide different plans with different constraints. It’s a little perplexing at times. BigCommerce, for example, has a cap on how much money you can make online in a year. The introductory plan only works if your annual sales are less than $50,000. Squarespace, on the other hand, charges 3% transaction fees (on top of processor fees) and disables certain functionality unless you choose an eCommerce-specific subscription. You can, however, have an infinite number of sales. Unless you upgrade to a higher plan, Wix only calculates sales tax for the first 100 transactions each month. You can only write 1,000 product reviews. Others, like Zyro, may limit the number of products you can list or the number of individuals who can use your account. Every plan has dozens of unique constraints that differ from platform to platform, so study everything before making a decision. These limits may appear insignificant when you’re just getting started. However, it’s essential to select a platform that can provide you with the flexibility you require as your company expands. Consider additional features like configurable checkout pages, abandoned cart recovery emails, and loyalty programs that you may require in the future. When you’re ready, make sure you know how much it will cost to use those features. Most platforms also have add-ons, plugins, and apps that can be used to enhance the functionality of your online store. Some are free to use, while others need a fee. So, when calculating your monthly payments and deciding which platform is right for you, don’t forget to factor in those extra charges. In addition to plan restrictions, several website builders impose extra transaction costs. We’ve already discussed Squarespace, but Shopify and Weebly also charge additional costs when processing purchases. Shopify’s basic plan costs 2%, the midgrade plan costs 1%, and the enterprise plan costs 0.5 percent. So, even at the highest level, unless you use Shopify’s built-in payment processor, you’ll be stuck paying extra fees (instead of PayPal, Stripe, Square, etc.). It can be a significant disadvantage, especially if you start negotiating lower processing fees as your business grows. You can either pay the additional fee permanently or use Shopify’s payment processor instead. Unless you’re on Weebly’s Professional plan, which starts at $12 a month and goes up from there, you’ll be charged an extra 3%. Wix, Shift4Shop, and BigCommerce, on the other hand, are your best bets if you’re seeking a platform with no additional transaction costs across the board.Platform Policies and Technical Support
We highly recommend Shopify if you’re looking for an eCommerce website builder with excellent technology and customer service.
It outperforms every other option on this list, and its customer service representatives are usually prompt, friendly, and competent. We’ve never had to wait for more than a couple of hours for a reply.
Apart from Shopify, the majority of eCommerce website builders have a bad reputation for poor customer service and technical assistance. The good news is that they will enough for the majority of users.
Community forums, on-demand training manuals, implementation instructions, and video tutorials can help you solve the majority of your difficulties. So there’s a good chance you won’t have to contact them at all.
The most serious concerns we’ve seen have to do with unclear cancellation and refund policies. So, the level of support is adequate in its policies that are lacking.
Many people, for example, neglect to turn off auto-renew. When the renewal period comes around, they’re hit with an unexpected price. To make matters worse, most platforms have policies that state that such errors are not eligible for a refund.
Other users neglect to terminate their free trial before it ends and are unable to obtain a refund due to a policy in place (somewhere) that addresses this circumstance.
Reading the fine print before making a final decision is the best way to avoid snafus like these. Each platform is distinct and has its own set of policies. It is your responsibility to ensure that you understand them before signing up.
In terms of support quality, the majority of support teams will respond… eventually. The primary issue is how long it takes them to answer, especially because some builders claim to provide live help 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
24/7 support, in our experience, implies you can contact them at any time, but it does not ensure a prompt response.
You may have to go through 17 phone menus before realizing you can’t speak to a live person.
Alternatively, you may be linked to six different people before reaching someone who can assist you.
As a result, we strongly advise contacting any platform you’re considering via a variety of support methods, including live chat, phone, and email. Make a note of how long it takes to receive an answer and how good it is.
This, along with client reviews, are frequently the only indicators of how good customer service is.
