Best Ecommerce Platforms 2025. Start selling today.

Shopify is the undisputed contender for the #1 eCommerce solution on the web. It’s achieved this status with good reason. Instead of focusing on website building, Shopify is all about online selling.

Features

Some of its best features include:

• SEO and marketing: Access various SEO tools, such as canonical tags for your product pages and clean URLs. Sell on Facebook, create targeted discounts for loyal customers, and send automatic transactional emails.
• Mobile app: Manage your store on the go with Shopify’s mobile app. You can even use this to fulfill orders and manage your inventory.
• Storefront: Choose from over 70 professional templates designed specifically for eCommerce. You can customize these further with your own colors, fonts, logos, and images.
• Products: Organize products with SKU, establish product categories, set up product variants, and create unlimited listings with everything you need to create high-converting product pages.
• Blogging: Shopify comes with a robust blogging engine so you can promote your store through content marketing.

Ease of Use

So, how intimidating is it to enter Shopify for the first time and start working?

Not intimidating at all – is the answer.

In fact, Shopify is one of the easiest to use ecommerce platforms out there, especially if you're a business that's just getting their ecommerce adventure started.

As soon as you sign up, you'll see a user-friendly dashboard, and you'll be taken by the hand through all of the main steps on your way to configuring your store and making it available to the public.

It's all done with the click of a button. After that, you can adjust the order of the sections by dragging and dropping them into place. It's a relatively easy way to completely adjust the look and order of the modules on your page. We like this feature for all experience levels, but especially beginners.

The company is pretty much hell-bent on making their interface the easiest in the industry. What's interesting is that they are walking a fine line, since it's still a platform that can also satisfy those more experienced with coding.

I don't really see any beginner or intermediate developer having a problem with Shopify. At the same time, most advanced developers are going to be just fine since Shopify also comes with many features that those types of users require.

Pricing

Shopify doesn’t offer a free plan. Instead, you can try its services for free for 14 days before opting into one of three premium plans. For those that only need payment processing and a simple checkout, for $5 a month (Shopify Starter), you can add a buy button to any of your existing websites.

The rest of the Shopify pricing plans are as follows and are billed monthly:

Shopify Basic- $29/mo:

• An eCommerce website and blog
• Unlimited products
• Two staff accounts
• 24/7 support
• Up to four inventory locations
• Marketing automation
• Basic reports

Shopify: $79/mo:

• Five staff accounts
• Up to five inventory locations
• Standard reports

Advanced Shopify: $299/mo:

• 15 staff accounts
• Up to eight inventory locations
• Advanced reports
• Third-party calculated shipping rates
• Custom pricing by market (for international businesses)
• Duties and import taxes are displayed at checkout

Shopify also charges a transaction fee on payments when you’re not using Shopify Payments. This fee is 2% on the Standard Shopify plan but declines to 0.5% with Advanced Shopify.

Templates and Design

One area where Shopify really excels are the themes and designs available. The company offers some of the most professional-looking themes of any ecommerce platform. At the time of writing, there are eight free themes available and more than 60 paid ones (in the range of $160-$180 a piece).

That being said, each theme is not just “a single theme,” but actually comes with a handful of styles and theme features included, fully customizable

Inventory

Inventory management is an important part of running your store, and Shopify has you covered in this area too. Once you are ready to add inventory to your store then all you need to do is press the Products tab in the sidebar on the dashboard.

Transfers, Inventory, Collections and Gift Cards are seen as tabs in this area as well. I like the Inventory tab because it features all of the items in your store, all organized into a clean and manageable list. The product page also offers several options for things like SEO, shipping and the imagery that users are going to see when landing on this product page.

SEO & Marketing

Shopify is also quite capable where SEO is concerned – more so than Wix and Weebly. Like the others, editing meta descriptions, titles, tags, and image alt texts is possible. On top of this, Shopify auto-generates canonical tags for your product pages and creates social media sharing and linking options.

Shopify also integrates with advanced SEO tools to help you level up your SEO game. In fact, there are as many as 127 SEO apps in the Shopify app store. Some notable examples include Reload SEO and SPO.

Payments

Traditionally if you wanted to accept payments, you would have to use a third-party payments processor like Stripe, PayPal, or others that would charge a certain fee per transaction. Shopify has created their own payment processor called Shopify Payments (Powered by Stripe). If you decide to sign up for this program then all transaction fees will be lifted.

Shopify has one of the biggest lists of supported payment gateways out there. This doesn't mean you'll use them all, but it opens up more opportunity for people from all over the world. It also gives you a chance to research which of the payment gateways are going to work for your particular business.

Security

Security should be taken very seriously when you run an ecommerce site. After all, you're going to be dealing with credit card info of your customers', their order details, your own product details, and many more sensitive pieces of data.

Shopify knows this and understands the responsibility. Shopify has its system hosted on a Level 1 PCI DSS compliant server. In other words, your data, and the data of your customers is always secure. In addition, all pricing plans (besides Lite) offer 128-bit Free SSL certificate at no added cost.

Shopify provides their customers with a 99.98% uptime guarantee and helps you avoid losses due to your store being unavailable. Furthermore, Shopify takes care of backing up your store securely and then gives you access to those backups if needed.

Overall, Shopify is very security-conscious and seems to always stay up-to-date with what's going on in the world of online security, and implements all the best practices.

Customer Support

Shopify offers excellent 24/7 phone and live chat support, making its team one of the easiest to reach. On top of this, it runs a forum with over 900,000 Shopify merchants. This enables you to connect with and get support from your peers too.

In addition, a wide range of tutorials, videos, and guides are available online, all thanks to the platform’s global popularity. Resources even include webinars that go in-depth into its features. 

Features

Wix is an intuitive website builder and eCommerce solution that features a modern dashboard from which you can access everything you need to run your business. For example, you can access marketing and SEO features, automated workflows, inventory management tools, customer orders, product listings, and email campaigns from the convenience of Wix's admin area. 

Wix also provides an intuitive drag-and-drop editor. This enables you to quickly customize your web design. Everything is designed to be beginner-friendly. However, to extend your site’s functionality, many apps are available for you to download and use.

That said, below, we've listed some of Wix’s most noteworthy features:

• Customizable themes: Over 800 templates can form the basis of your website.
• Sell on online marketplaces, too: You can sync your online store with Amazon, eBay, and your Facebook and Instagram shops.
• Automation: Automate and track the entire customer journey.
• Analytics: Review data like site visitors, leads, customers, contracts, ad campaigns, etc.
• Online payments: Accept all major debit and credit cards 
• Shipping rates: Automatically calculate shipping rates and taxes
• Marketing: Refine your Facebook ad campaigns with AI, create videos, and access basic email marketing tools. You can also preview and edit social media posts and access templates to create better social content.

Ease of Use

Wix is often hailed as one of the most intuitive website builders on the web, and for a good reason. With a comprehensive drag-and-drop editor comprised of simple elements, you can create a website in just a few minutes and populate it with your own content. Moreover, you don’t have to start from scratch. Plenty of professional-looking templates are available that only need your own images and copy to shine. 

Wix also offers ADI to help you with your theme choice. This asks you a few simple questions about your business and then generates a website with a theme that suits your needs and industry. From there, you can customize your site.

Wix also includes a help button with every website element. This leads you directly to the relevant self-help documentation in Wix’s knowledge base. This makes it simple for new users to quickly acquaint themselves with all Wix’s features.

Pricing

Wix has a wide range of flexible pricing options available. This includes a free plan which you can use indefinitely to build and test your website, albeit with limited storage, bandwidth, and features. To accept customer payments on your Wix site and add an eCommerce store, you need to opt for one of Wix’s three Business Plans. These are all billed monthly with no annual billing options. 

The tiers are as follows:

Wix Business Basic Plan: $23/mo

• 20 GB of storage space
• Customers can create accounts
• You can list and sell unlimited products
• Access to abandoned cart recovery functionality
• You can host five hours of video content
• Access to 24/7 customer care

Wix Business Unlimited Plan: $27/mo

You get everything about, plus:

• You can sell subscriptions
• 35 GB of storage space
• You can host ten hours of video content
• Automated sales tax calculated for 100 transactions per month
• You can trade on marketplaces
• Dropshipping with Modalyst (up to 250 products)
• You can sell in multiple currencies

Wix Business VIP plan: $49/mo

You get everything in the previous two plans, plus:

• 50 GB of storage space
• Unlimited video hours
• Priority customer care
• Automated sales tax for 500 transactions per month
• Unlimited dropshipping with Modalyst

Templates and Design

You can choose from over 800 mobile-responsive themes, categorized by their use cases. For instance, portfolio, fashion, restaurants, sports, eCommerce, etc. These are neatly organized and easy to browse. However, once you’ve chosen a theme, you can’t change it later without losing all the content on your site and repopulating it again. So choose wisely!

Once you’re decided on a template, you can customize and expand upon it using Wix’s o intuitive drag-and-drop website editor. A wide range of elements is available. For instance, galleries, images, videos, animations, text boxes, titles, etc. Each element comes with further customization options, enabling you to fine-tune the color, font, sizing, alignment, and other aspects. 

The results are always neat because Wix snaps elements into place using its grid formation. Lastly, you can easily add code snippets to customize elements more granularly. However, you can’t access your site’s full HTML and CSS code.

Inventory

Selling products successfully on the web is about more than just listing the items you have available and making your products look good. You also need to deliver the best possible experiences to your target audience, and that means focusing on things like inventory management and shipping.

Inventory management tools are helpful when you need to keep track of what you’ve actually got in stock for your customers. You don’t get the best inventory management tools from Wix, but they will help you to manage your store more effectively. You can even mass-import products that you want to sell using a CSV document too.

Wix is also there to assist with product management. The Wix stores application ensures that you can manage your inventory however you choose, tract your product numbers and so much more.

From a shipping perspective, Wix does a lot of things to make your life simpler. Shopping can be tough to manage, particularly when you’re delivering to areas that have unique demands. Wix offers options to manage your shipping through integrations with leading apps like Ship Station. This means that you can easily track and handle shipping requirements in no time.

SEO & Marketing

You can edit the meta tags, titles, and descriptions, review your site preview on search engines and add alt-text to your images. Plus, one useful SEO feature Wix provides is an SEO wizard. This walks you through how to optimize your website’s SEO by suggesting actionable steps and linking you to what you need to alter to improve. Beginners can easily ensure essential SEO best practices are met this way.

Payments

The Wix Ecommerce payment options have drastically improved over the years, as the company adds new payment gateways on a regular basis, along with a simple process for connecting and onboarding.

Dozens of gateways are provided, including 2Checkout, Stripe, and Square. Therefore, you can decide on the payment gateway of your choice and accept credit card payments and other payments like PayPal.

Wix supports all of the traditional payment gateways that your customers probably use, including Stripe, Square, PayPal, and many others. There’s about 15 different payment processing options to explore but do remember that there are some limitations on what Wix can support. It’s not suitable for Apple Pay or Amazon, for instance.

Security

Wix has full SSL secure payment support. Therefore, your customer information is protected with 256-bit SSL encryption.  In addition, Wix only works with payment gateways that offer the highest level of protection. This means they all have PCI DSS Level 1 protection.

Customer Support

Wix offers 24/7 customer support via phone and email on its premium business plans. Business VIP users additionally receive priority support. On top of this, a wide range of helpful resources is available. Another excellent support feature is the help buttons located around Wix’s editor linking to relevant articles in their knowledge base.

Features

Next to Shopify, BigCommerce has the cleanest dashboard and clearest directions for getting your online store built within a few minutes. In fact, the dashboard looks surprisingly similar to Shopify's, with modules for accepting credit cards, customizing your store and more.

Here are the other features you can find in BigCommerce that make it a contender for the best ecommerce platform:

• Unlimited products, orders, file storage, and bandwidth
• 24/7 live chat support
• Point of sale
• Visual store builder
• Migrate your store and import products
• Accept payments via PayPal powered by Braintree, Stripe, Apple Pay, Pay with Amazon and dozens more
• Manage orders and inventory
• Sell via Facebook, Pinterest, eBay, Amazon and Square POS
• Multiple marketing features
• API
• Multi-layered hosting security and DDOS protection
• Level 1 PCI-compliant hosting
• HTTPS
• Get found on product comparison sites
• Encourage return visits with email marketing
• SEO features

Overall, BigCommerce is a nice alternative to Shopify if that's what you're looking for. The feature set is just as vast and impressive with roughly the same pricing (that is until your sales grow too much, at which point Shopify is the cheaper option).

Ease of Use

When you launch your website with BigCommerce they have some nice tutorials and steps to get you started. However, our tests, and the feedback from readers, show that the new Stencil framework from BigCommerce is more friendly for advanced developers. That's great news for stores that can hire a solid developer. However, non-technical users are finding it difficult to make small tweaks, something that's necessary for the average inventor or entrepreneur.

BigCommerce has the features needed for developers, but it's not quite there for the average non-techie. The first page you see when landing on the dashboard is a list of steps you should take to complete your store within a few seconds. For example, you can add products, setup shipping settings and manage your tax rates.

Pricing

In terms of pricing, check out the four plans below:

• Standard Plan – For $29.95 per month you get unlimited products, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, credit card and PayPal acceptance and no transaction fee! You have to be earning under $50k per year to user the Standard package – so it will only be suitable for smaller ecommerce sites. The BigCommerce Standard plan also lacks some advanced features, like segmentation, and abandoned cart recovery.
• Plus Plan – For $79.95 per month you receive all Standard Plan features, no transaction fees, real-time carrier shipping, great payment providers, an abandoned cart saver, advanced customer segmentation and a checkout that is hosted on your own domain. The BigCommerce Plus plan is suitable for medium-sized online stores generating up to $150k each year. Choosing this plan will allow you to access a few more advanced features. The “Abandoned Cart Saver” is also available here, which enables you to reach out to users who didn't complete their purchase.
• Pro Plan – For $299.95 per month you receive all Plus Plan features, no transaction fees, Google customer reviews, product filtering and an available dedicated SSL. Warning: This plan starts at $299.95/mo for less than $400k in online sales. After that they require at least $150/mo for each additional $200k in sales. In short, they'll get you if you surpass that $400K mark. The BigCommerce Pro plan also comes with Faceted search, which allows online shoppers to filter and sort products. This plan will also enable store owners to install third-party SSL certificates.
• Enterprise Plan – This requires you to contact BigCommerce for custom pricing, but you can expect all of the Plus Plan features, along with a dedicated SSL and IP address, setup and data migration, priority support, product filtering, advanced reporting tools, Google trusted stores and more. As many of our users have pointed out, it seems as if BigCommerce is pushing many more successful customers to go with this plan. So, if you're making more than $125,000 in revenue per year (or over 3,000 orders per year,) you may end up being charged anywhere from $900 to $1,500 per month.

After numerous emails and comments from our readers, it looks like they have dramatically increased prices for their more successful customers (making more than $125,000 a year in revenue).

This is a huge blow to both BigCommerce customers and our view on the company as a whole. Sure, you still get some of the fixed prices that we'll outline below, but once you surpass a certain point in sales you're going to get slammed with insanely high monthly rates.

Templates and Design

If you go to the BigCommerce Theme Store you can get an idea of what you would be working with if going for BigCommerce. In general, it’s a pretty nice store, with both free and paid options for varying budgets.

BigCommerce offers a pretty impressive array of responsive templates that you can rely on for making the most out of your online store's design. There are 12 free themes to choose from, and they're all clean and modern looking, so it's a good start.

Additionally, there are over 100 paid themes available, with prices ranging between $145 and $235 depending on what you need. Most themes also come with different variants so that you can adjust according to your preferences.

Inventory

The inventory is a standout feature, since you have the options to upload quick products, setup inventory tracking and update your stock levels within a few minutes.

Use the flexible product rules and inventory tools so that you don’t get bogged down by a bunch of rules that only pertain to one or two industries. In the past, I’ve seen it where a system will make it hard for clothing companies to add something as simple as sizes. Customization is the key with their inventory, so you have no need to worry.

SEO & Marketing

SEO is another strong point with BigCommerce, considering its unique content delivery network loads your website pages much faster than the competitors. This improves the environment for users, and search engines take notice as well. It's a pain to find the settings for modifying your SEO, but it's all in the product area.

Payments

One great thing about BigCommerce, is that you aren't forced to choose one particular method of payment for your customer over another. Instead, you can essentially hook your store up to any payment processing strategy you like.

The platform supports over 60 payment gateways, meaning that you can choose to process payments through your store, instead of sending them away to a place like PayPal. Offline payments are supported, and you also receive cool features like multiple currencies, customizable shipping rates, secure checkouts and shipping label printing.

Security

All sites hosted on BigCommerce are level 1 certified PCI compliant, so your customers don’t have to worry about their personal and financial information. Your company infrastructure is also protected with an enterprise grade network architecture.

I particularly enjoy the fact that you can choose to either share an SSL certificate or buy your own. Life needs more options like that. Basically, a shared SSL means that your checkout isn't hosted on your own website. It looks like it is, but the customer goes through a different route. It's similar to Shopify.

Like I said, BigCommerce has the option for a dedicated SSL certificate, so if you have the cash you can go with that.

Overall, security is one of the strong points with BigCommerce.

Customer Support

If BigCommerce does one thing better than the rest, it’s online customer service. Feel free to go to the customer support page and see what I’m talking about. This type of support involves online forums, tutorials, videos and a knowledge base. That's great for those who want to complete their own research.

When you sign up with BigCommerce you receive help through the phone, live chat, email and the forum. However, readers have mentioned that the phone and live chat isn't that helpful. Sometimes you get stuck on the phone for a long time and other times it seems like the representatives aren't trained properly.

With all that said, the community is more powerful than most other ecommerce platforms, and a favorite is the BigCommerce University, a series of fun and informative videos for making your site work to bring in more money.

Squarespace is a unique website builder often hailed by designers and artists because it knows how to showcase imagery in the best possible light. For example, Squarespace optimizes your images, displays full-width photography, and highlights stunning designs. 

Features

Rest assured, every Squarespace feature is tried and tested thoroughly. You’ll find everything you need to build a website and online store in its toolkit.

That said, here are some features to highlight:

• A flexible editor: Most website builders allow you to choose a theme that dictates your site's general look and layout. However, you're often out of luck if you don’t like that theme for a particular part of your site. Squarespace offers more flexibility. While you choose an overarching theme to start with, you can comprise your site using several templates. That way, you can use layouts that work best for specific pages and sections. The editor also features a drag-and-drop interface, though many elements still need editing per section from the sidebar. 
• Image editing: Squarespace allows you to automatically resize and optimize images for web display, lets you crop and frame your works, and enables you to fine-tune image attributes like contrast and saturation.
• Templates: Squarespace offers around 110 themes (although this isn’t as plentiful as other builders), each expertly designed. They’re hands down some of the best on the market! 
• SEO: Squarespace comes with a range of helpful SEO tools built into its platform. For instance, automatic sitemaps, image alt-texts, automatic markup, clean URLs, and more.
• Client scheduling: Squarespace provides the tools you need to schedule client appointments and/ or book tables for your restaurant.
• Analytics: Access website, commerce, acquisition, and engagement analytics from one dashboard
• eCommerce: Sell products, services, digital goods, and subscriptions. Create product variations and product subcategories, and easily manage your product catalog with powerful merchandising tools. For example, you can display discounts, product zooms, and limited availability labels.

Ease of Use

Squarespace provides a range of professionally designed, stunning templates that can quickly be modified for your use. While much of its interface is drag-and-drop, the editor works slightly differently from standard website builders. For example, it’s more segment-oriented, so it doesn’t allow you to drag and drop elements wherever you want. Instead, you’re limited to the rules of the template and its preset rows and columns.

That said, you’re not stuck with a single theme for your website. Instead, you can create templates for individual pages and/or sections and apply them to different parts of your site. 

Finally, Squarespace also comes with useful but unusual features, including a more complex image editor. As a result, it has a slightly steeper learning curve than other website builders.

Pricing

Squarespace doesn’t provide a free plan but offers four premium packages. In addition, you can opt for annual billing to save 25-30% a year. To enable Squarespace to fully support eCommerce, you need to opt for either Commerce plan, which we’ve focused on below. Prices are based on annual billing:

Basic Commerce: $27/mo

• A free custom domain for one year
• Unlimited bandwidth
• 30 minutes video storage
• SEO features
• Unlimited contributors
• 24/7 customer support
• Access to premium integrations and blocks such as OpenTable or ChowNow
• Complete website customization with access to CSS and Javascript code
• POS
• You can list and sell unlimited products
• You can accept donations
• You can accept and sell gift cards
• Customers can create accounts
• Powerful eCommerce analytics such as best-selling products, sales trends, conversion from visitor to purchase, etc
• Merchandising tools like related product display and product waitlists.
• Easier inventory management with spreadsheet bulk editing
• You can sell products on Instagram.
• Benefit from limited availability labels
• 0% transaction fees

Advanced Commerce: $49/mo

You get everything above, plus:

• Commerce APIs
• Advanced discounts (these can automatically apply to qualifying orders at checkout or for limited use)
• You can sell subscriptions
• Benefit from shipping discounts

Templates and Design

Squarespace is often dubbed the best website builder for creatives because of its incredible design and image capabilities. It has around 110 themes spanning 15 categories, including eCommerce, portfolios, blogs and podcasts, events, entertainment, memberships, etc. While this is significantly smaller than what competitors offer, each of Squarespace’s templates is designed to be as effective and good-looking as possible, and the choices are genuinely stunning. In addition, many Squarespace themes suit full-width images and work wonders for showcasing photography and illustrations.

Not to mention, the section editor that facilitates modular templates rather than having to stick to site-wide templates offers a great deal of flexibility.

One of Squarespace’s best design functionality is its image editor, which lets you tweak your images inside your internet browser. For example, you can add filters and tweak your pictures' saturation, contrast, and other vital aspects. In addition, you can crop and rotate photos, and all images are automatically optimized to load as fast as possible.

Inventory

Squarespace eCommerce supports multi-dimensional product variants (size, color, weight). They do not limit your number of SKUs or products, so it's not unthinkable to assume that you could run a large store with the platform. The inventory management is made easy with the ability to send shipping notifications and handle refunds right from the dashboard. There are also options for updating stock and quickly printing shipping labels.

Finally, the real-time shipping and barcode scanning comes together to show that Squarespace seems to have graduated from supporting only small stores.

SEO & Marketing

Squarespace comes with a solid range of SEO features built-in. This is important because, with so few integrations, you’re relying on what Squarespace provides. For example, like with Wix, you can edit each of your page’s meta titles, descriptions, and tags. In addition, you can generate clean URLs, and you’re guaranteed clean code.

Furthermore, Squarespace lets you review clicks per domain keyword to help you fine-tune which keywords to optimize your site for. You can also follow an SEO checklist to ensure you’ve not missed anything. 

You can hide specific pages from search engines and generate sitemaps automatically. Squarespace also auto-generates SEO-friendly product pages with readable URLs for your eCommerce.

Payments

Squarespace Commerce only offers a few payment options, but they're some of the most popular on the market. As the default payment gateway, Stripe has been integrated with Squarespace and serves as the main payment solution for you to choose from. However, you also have the option to go with either PayPal or Apple Pay. All major credit cards are accepted, regardless of the payment gateway.

Security

Squarespace has proven that it can handle high traffic volumes on your website while also protecting customer information. SSL security is included with both primary commerce plans, and it's prominently shown to your customers in the browser bar, so that they're more likely to trust you.

They offer a 2048-bit SSL encryption, which is the highest standard for online security. Not only that, but all payments that go through Stripe are PCI compliant.

Customer Support

Squarespace offers 24/7 email support and limited live chat support if you need direct access to an agent. This is available Monday to Friday between 4 am and 8 pm EST. 

You can also access the Squarespace help center, where you’ll find many resources about websites, templates, eCommerce, and all of Squarespace’s features.

Scores based on our in depth Square Online review.

Scores based on our in depth Webflow review.

Scores based on our in depth Sellfy review.

Scores based on our in depth Ecwid review.

Scores based on our in depth Weebly review.