Best Ecommerce Website Builder

Best Ecommerce Website Builder

Ecommerce has become an increasingly important part of consumers’ lives, especially in the wake of the global pandemic, which saw a decade’s worth of ecommerce adoption occur in just a few months. With selling online now a more important part of doing business than ever, many merchants are quickly scrambling to modernize websites or get online for the first time. Today, ecommerce website builders make selling on the web a straightforward and affordable proposition, making them the top choice for most small businesses. But not all ecommerce site builders are the same, and the one a merchant chooses will impact everything from the content they publish to their fees to their payment options and beyond. The following is a quick overview of four of the most popular options on the market today, and what a merchant can expect from each.

 

Wix

Wix is arguably the most popular website builder on this list for one main reason – it’s extremely easy to use. Wix is a drag-and-drop editor designed specifically to make it as fast and easy as possible to create a professional-looking website with zero design skill or experience.

The downside of that ease of use is that Wix is simple. From an ecommerce perspective, it doesn’t have an enormous amount of functionality included. Wix will allow users to create basic stores, but it’s really only suitable for smaller ecommerce businesses that don’t need a high level of customization or many advanced sales or reporting tools. Inventory control is one notable weakness that makes Wix less than ideal for more complex ecommerce applications.

Cost: On top of its many benefits, Wix is also cheap, with a free plan available for the simplest applications and monthly rates starting at well under $20 when on one of the company’s regular sales. 

Payment Processing: Wix does not include a built-in payment processing system which means ecommerce users have full choice when selecting payment systems and are not subject to overinflated fees, as is the case with some competitors. 

 

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is a top ecommerce solution that has been used by major brands ranging from Sony to Ubisoft to Casio and beyond. Whereas Wix is a website builder first with ecommerce capability as an added benefit, BigCommerce is all about selling online. 

The specialized nature of BigCommerce means that it offers a very wide set of ecommerce features, ranging from advanced inventory management to a library of ecommerce themes to cross-platform selling through social media channels, easy digital wallet integration, and much more. Unfortunately, all that specialization also makes BigCommerce harder to work with, which will make it a less optimal solution for beginner users or companies looking to develop ecommerce sites at minimal cost. 

Price: BigCommerce plans start at $29.95 per month, which is very reasonable considering how powerful the platform is and how much is included in the core system. 

Payment Processing: BigCommerce offers open processing, allowing users to access dozens of payment options including all the top merchant gateways and third-party processors like PayPal and Square.

 

Shopify

Shopify is arguably the most famous ecommerce platform on this list, and for good reason. Shopify hit the market with a boom thanks to its extremely feature-rich and effective payments platform that made it possible for even the smallest sellers to get up, running, and selling quickly. It’s grown steadily since and, today, huge brands like Netflix, Sephora, Red Bull, and Penguin books use the platform. While it still attracts smaller users, those kinds of large ecommerce businesses tend to get more from Shopify for their money. 

One of Shopify’s most notable features is its exceptional inventory management. Stores with complex inventory needs will be hard-pressed to find a better turnkey ecommerce solution. Shopify also offers many other advanced features like cross-platform selling, very decent built-in analytics, plenty of third-party add-ons, and more. There are, however, some major downsides, especially for smaller businesses and resource-strapped users. Shopify’s templates are not cheap, so switching site designs can be fairly expensive. Third-party apps, while plentiful, can also add up quickly too, and users may find a basic Shopify installation requires a number of paid apps to hit the same level of functionality as some of its competitors. In short, Shopify is an ideal solution for companies with high-end needs looking for a high-end ecommerce solution that they’re willing to pay a premium for. 

Price: Shopify’s most basic plans start at $29 per month, but after including the price of professional themes and the third-party plugins necessary to maximize performance, the average store can expect to pay significantly more. 

Payment Processing: Shopify offers plenty of flexibility in processing options, however, it pushes its own platform – Shopify Payments – extremely heavily. As a result, users opting for traditional merchant accounts or third-party processing options pay Shopify 2% on every transaction on top of their actual transaction fees. In essence, Shopify charges 2% for the option to use a third-party payments provider – something almost no other ecommerce platform does. 

 

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is unique on this list in that it’s the only system based on a much larger content management system – in this case, the WordPress CMS. WordPress is one of the most popular website platforms available, hosting over a third of all websites in existence. WordPress built its popularity as a blog platform with extreme flexibility, allowing users to put up an attractive website very quickly, with as much or as little customization as wanted. Today, the platform is widely used for professional and business websites, including ecommerce sites. 

WooCommerce is an ecommerce plugin suite designed to piggyback on the WordPress back end. It enables effectively any WordPress site to become a highly functional ecommerce store and provides users with a huge variety of third-party plugins designed to push functionality and make doing business online easier. However, its dependence on WordPress can be seen as both a benefit and a drawback. For instance, WordPress development can be extremely low cost due to its ubiquity, but it also locks business owners into frequent and potentially troublesome updates due to its open-source nature. 

Price: Like WordPress, WooCommerce itself is free, but accessing professional themes and the top ecommerce plugins all come at a cost that could see the average site easily pay $20 to $30 per month. And, because WordPress is self-hosted, users need to think about hosting costs, which can drive prices up significantly. 

Payment Processing: WooCommerce is another open platform when it comes to payment processing, putting no limitations on a merchant’s options for receiving payment. 

 

Ecommerce Payment Processing

Regardless of what ecommerce platform a merchant chooses, they’ll need to figure out how to get paid. While certain platforms – like Shopify – offer native payments, those payments are often extremely expensive, with fees rivaling those of third-party processors like PayPal, Square, and Stripe at 2.7% or more. 

A far better option for the vast majority of merchants is a traditional merchant account, which is slightly harder to sign-up for but carries significantly lower fees than third-party payment processors. Certain merchant accounts, like the ones offered by BAMS, offer interchange-plus pricing – a system designed to dynamically adjust transaction fees to ensure merchants always pay the lowest fee possible, instead of the highest. That ensures merchant profitability is always protected even at the expense of the processor’s – a rarity in the industry.

To find out more about how a BAMS merchant account can integrate seamlessly with your ecommerce platform and slash your monthly statement, get started with your free five-point price comparison today