5 best e-commerce website builders

Need a simple shopping cart? A complete storefront solution for your existing website? Or maybe you’ve got a strong Instagram following and want to monetize with a new site? There are a lot of solutions and approaches out there. But finding the best e-commerce website builder can be a challenge — especially if you’re just getting started.

This list will show you a handful of solutions together with their strengths and how to use them.

1. Wix

• Plans/pricing: Free with ads and no e-commerce support; plans start at $17 per month
• Get started guide: Wix Tutorial – How to make a Wix website

Wix is the most popular entry-level general website builder. It’s a great tool for those who need a web presence but don’t have a lot of technical know-how or a huge budget to hire a web designer. It’s easy to learn and to use, and it’s packed with features so it can grow with you as your needs change. One of those features is, of course, an e-commerce solution.

2. Weebly

• Plans/pricing: Free with e-commerce support; plans start at $10 per month
• Get started guide: Weebly Website Builder – An in-depth guide

Weebly is another popular website builder. Although similar to Wix, it doesn’t have as many features. It does, however, have a strong e-commerce focus. Plus, it’s worth noting that the financial transaction company Square recently acquired Weebly — making it an ideal choice if you’re already using the service or plan to expand to a bricks-and-mortar presence. Square provides affordable transaction hardware like card swipers that has made it a long-time favorite among small businesses.

3. Shopify

• Plans/pricing: Free 14-day trial; plans start at $24 per month
• Get started guide: Intro to Shopify

Shopify is a premier e-commerce platform with loads of fans and tons of plug-ins. While its primary purpose is to be an online storefront for your business and isn’t as intuitive to use as Wix or Weebly, you can easily start building a website. Shopify’s own template language, Liquid, provides a low barrier of entry compared to raw web development and is also ideal for people who are building storefronts for clients. But the thing that really separates Shopify is how flexible it is — integrating tools, like adding a satisfaction survey to your shop with Jotform, is super simple.

4. WooCommerce

• Plans/pricing: Free to use but hosting, themes, and other services may cost money; payment gateway charged at a competitive per-transaction rate
• Get started guide: How to build an online store on WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a WordPress-based storefront. It’s the most popular open-source e-commerce solution and the most popular among WordPress plug-ins. In fact, if you search for e-commerce in the WordPress plug-in store, WooCommerce comes up first. And of the over 50 pages of results, most you’ll find are actually WooCommerce plug-ins that aren’t meant to stand on their own. If you already have a WordPress website, this might just be the right tool for you.

5. Ecwid

• Plans/pricing: Free to try; plans start at $21 per month
• Get started guide: Ecwid video guides

Ecwid is a chameleon e-commerce solution. It has its own website builder, but while every other name on this list is designed to give you a complete storefront solution, Ecwid was designed to be added to another site tool like Wix or WordPress. You can use it to add a storefront to your social media pages on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. You can also sell on Google and Amazon. It even connects to POS systems like Square and Clover. But the really amazing thing is that you can connect all those services to one central e-commerce shop.

Photo by Azwedo L.LC on Unsplash