The Best eCommerce Website Builders Of 2024

No comments
Last Reviewed:

Welcome to eCommerce, where anything is possible, and every business can become a global sensation. However, to bring this dream to life, you need the best eCommerce website builder to help design stunning storefronts and curate engaging customer experiences that keep them coming back for more.

Compare Top eCommerce Platform Leaders

Compare the Best eCommerce Website Builders

Select up to 5 Products from the list below to compare

  Product Analyst ScoreUser Sentiment ScoreStart PriceFree TrialCompany Size
Shopify 100

89%

Great
$29
Monthly
Yes
Small
Medium
Large
BigCommerce 97

86%

Great
$29.95
Monthly
Yes
Small
Medium
Large
Adobe Commerce 96

83%

Great
$2,000
Monthly
Yes
Small
Medium
Large
Wix 90

87%

Great
$16
Monthly
Yes
Small
Medium
Large
SquareSpace 88

91%

Excellent
$16
Monthly
Yes
Small
Medium
Large

With the global rise of eCommerce, plenty of website builders are available, but all are not the same. To cut through the noise, we’ve created this guide to help you find the best web builders based on your business requirements and technical expertise.

Whether you’re an aspiring or an established entrepreneur, by the end of this article, you’ll have all the knowledge required to make an informed decision and grow your business. Let’s get cracking!

Best Ecommerce Website Builders

Choosing the right website builder is a crucial decision and demands in-depth research. To save you the hassle, our analysts dive deep into the market to compare the top products and prepare a comprehensive list of the best eCommerce website builders.

In this section, we’ll explore each product’s top features, limitations and what makes it better. Here are our top picks:

Wix

Wix is a versatile and intuitive drag-and-drop website builder that allows you to design your site for free! Yes, you read that right. You can design and launch a website without paying a penny, but you need to upgrade to a paid plan if you want to sell products on that site and add eCommerce features.

Its cheapest plan starts at $27 monthly and offers a free customizable domain for one year with unlimited bandwidth and 20GB of storage space.

It provides a wide range of customizable templates to create websites for entertainment, consumer services/goods, design, health, wellness and fitness, travel and tourism, real estate, IT, fashion, and other industries.

You can use the mobile app to manage your business on the go, add new products, fulfill orders and track inventory. Wix also enables you to track website analytics, including site visits, sales, top products and conversion rates.

On top of that, Velo by Wix allows you to integrate with third-party tools and create custom solutions, including ERP and fulfillment services. You can also connect the platform with Printful and Printify to print products on demand and sell custom merchandise with brand logos, colors and designs.

Managing Multimedia and Defining Publishing Rules in Wix

Centralize your multimedia and define publishing rules from a unified dashboard. Source

Top Benefits

  • Better Features for Service Businesses: Use the appointment booking module to create websites for restaurants, hotels, tattoo parlors and fitness centers. It offers built-in reminders, double booking alerts, and membership and subscription packs.
  • Faster Time to Market: You can use Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) to create custom websites within minutes. Just feed the AI with information about your desired website, what it should include and design preferences to generate custom-made professional websites.
  • Simple Payment Processing: Use the native payment processor or connect with a preferred gateway by integrating with over 50 popular processors, including PayPal, Stripe and Venmo. The best part? Wix doesn’t charge additional processing or transaction fees when you use a third-party payment processor.
  • Improved Lead Generation: Design custom forms to collect contact details, feedback and service reviews. The platform also tracks abandoned carts and allows you to send recovery emails with special promos and discounts.
  • Wider Audience Base: Wix supports selling on Google Shopping by connecting with Adscale, which enables cross-channel advertising. You can automatically create and optimize ads on YouTube and other channels.

Primary Features

  • Website Designing: Choose from over 500 mobile-friendly templates to create custom storefronts, product pages and checkouts. Use intuitive drag-and-drop tools to adjust the design, layout, content, sections, images, videos, links and descriptions. You can add dimensions to your site with scroll effects like parallax, reveal, zoom-in or fade-in scrolling. It offers a live chat feature, custom domain names and free hosting. You can also create personalized emails to match your domain and brand.
  • Marketing and SEO: Built-in SEO (search engine optimization) tools and actionable setup plans help index your site on Google within 60 seconds. You can modify default meta tags, URL structures, slugs and structured data markup to create and apply your own SEO logic across pages. It also supports automated email campaigns and marketing automation that targets shoppers with personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram. Design promo codes, discounts and other marketing campaigns to boost your overall sales. Its blogging platform enables content marketing teams to boost your site’s ranking on search engines.
  • Product Information Management: You can arrange products based on category, style, sale, variants and attributes. Define relations and taxonomies between products to create bundles and offer customers a smooth navigation process. You can also define custom rules to suggest products in the people also searched for and people who bought this also bought that sections.
  • Cart and Checkout: Set up shopping carts that allow customers to add and save products for future checkouts. You can set up free shipping rules, custom shipping rates, express checkouts and automated sales tax calculations. Access customer card payments and provide secure payment gateways.
  • Store Analytics: You can generate customizable reports to track site traffic, revenue and product engagement. Customize dashboards to analyze revenue, marketing campaigns and customer base. Wix automatically sends events to Google, enabling you to view actions like product clicks, add to cart, payments and purchases through Google Analytics.

Limitations

  • You can’t switch templates after launching a site. A few minor adjustments are possible, but major design overhauls require you to start from scratch again.
  • Wix requires third-party integrations to manage large enterprises that need in-depth inventory and shipping management and robust procurement features.
  • It only offers 20GB of file storage and five hours of video storage with its Business Basic plan, which can prove inadequate if you use high-resolution images and video tutorials.
Price: $$$$$
Deployment:
Platform:

Company Size Suitability: S M L

Shopify

Shopify is one of the first eCommerce platforms and still remains the king of the eCommerce website building space, with over a million sites powered by the platform. It’s one of the best all-in-one solutions that can handle small and large businesses.

SMBs (small and mid-sized businesses) can use the intuitive drag-and-drop website builder to design sites from scratch or use the plug-and-play Shopify widget to add eCommerce functionalities to an existing website. On the other hand, enterprises can avail of Shopify Plus with a headless architecture that helps design and create multiple unique websites and storefronts connected to a decoupled backend. You can manage them all using a centralized backend connected via API.

Shopify offers a website builder with its basic plan starting at $348 yearly (or $39 monthly). It also offers a mobile app to customize your website, create marketing campaigns, design analytics dashboards and track KPIs (key performance indicators) remotely.

Another standout feature is Shopify Flow, which allows you to define automation for administrative tasks and processes. You can use triggers, conditions and actions to set up an automated sequence of actions for special events and cases.

Tracking All the Essential KPIs in Shopify

Keep track of all your orders, fulfillment, site engagement, revenue and other metrics from a dashboard. Source

Top Benefits

  • Better Branding: You can personalize your website from top to bottom with brand logo, colors and slogans. It offers native options and business name generators to help you create a brand identity. You can also personalize the domain name with suffixes (.com, .org and .net) to match your brand identity. It also provides automatic generators for domain names, QR codes, and terms and conditions.
  • Easier Checkouts: Your customers can use the guest checkout option to make direct purchases without having to create accounts and dish out personal information. They can skip the cart and go directly to the payments page with a dynamic checkout button that leads them to their preferred payment option based on past purchases.
  • Extended Capabilities: Use the Shopify app store to choose from over 8000 third-party integrations to add extra features like dropshipping, print-on-demand, personalized pricing, social media marketing, product reviews, marketing automation, email drip campaigns and tax calculators.
  • Improved Communications: Shopify Inbox lets you chat with customers using the mobile app, track their shopping carts and set up automated messaging campaigns. It also helps identify conversations likely to lead to a sale with automatic message classification.

Primary Features

  • Design Toolkit: Use free and paid customizable templates and drag-and-drop tools to create professional websites. Every website supports unlimited products and connects with multiple sales channels and online marketplaces. You can also unify online and offline buyer journeys by connecting your website with a POS (Point-of-Sale) system.
  • Content Management System: A centralized module helps create and market content on various online channels. You can edit pictures and videos, write blogs, create social media posts, and design email campaigns. Create the content and plan its publication using staging tools and integrated calendars.
  • SEO and Marketing: You can auto-generate canonical tags to prevent duplicate content from appearing in search results. The platform automatically generates the website’s sitemap.xml and robot.txt files, making it easier for search engine spiders to crawl and index your website. It also supports automated omnichannel marketing campaigns.
  • Analytics: Get a detailed view of the store’s engagement, revenue, orders and performance. You can track store performance across every sales channel and social media from a unified dashboard.
  • Order Fulfillment: Shopify boasts a robust order fulfillment module compared to other eCommerce web builders. You can manage, monitor and move inventory across multiple locations and automate recurring procurement cycles with multi-step workflows. When you use Shopify Shipping to fulfill your orders, you receive discounted shipping rates with major global and regional carriers. You can print shipping labels, fulfill orders in bulk, create USPS SCAN Forms and arrange pickups with UPS and DHL with a few clicks. It also allows you to check statuses and track shipments.

Limitations

  • It doesn’t include email hosting features.
  • There’s no native way to accept appointments and bookings for services.
  • If you use third-party payment gateways, Shopify charges a 2% fee for each transaction on top of the external gateway’s processing and transaction fees.
Price: $$$$$
Deployment:
Platform:

Company Size Suitability: S M L

Squarespace

Squarespace is an excellent choice for businesses relying heavily on images and artwork to sell their products. It helps put your visuals front and center of your website and offers the most aesthetic and visually appealing templates out of all the eCommerce web builders on this list.

Similar to Wix, it was traditionally just a website builder and recently started offering eCommerce features. You can design and use a normal website for free for 14 days. Paid plans start from $16 monthly, and eCommerce features are available in the Business, Commerce Basic and Commerce Advanced plans, starting from $23, $27 and $49 monthly, respectively. Additionally, each plan offers a free custom domain and fully-managed cloud hosting.

Most of its templates require minor editing and are ready to go out of the box. You can also customize each using an intuitive WYSIWYG editor with drag-and-drop tools.

On top of physical products, you can take appointments for services using a native reservation management system called Tock. It allows you to sell subscriptions and memberships in the Commerce Advanced plan, which is ideal for selling stock photography, music, art, training videos and other digital assets.

Its social media integrations help tell your brand’s story on every popular social network. You can create shoppable posts for Instagram and Facebook that let customers check your catalog and offerings with just a click without leaving their social media dashboards.

Website Templates in Squarespace

Use visually stunning templates to give your website that extra glossy touch. Source

Top Benefits

  • Customize Easily: You can apply custom cascaded style sheets (CSS) using the built-in CSS editor with centralized storage for image and font files for CSS assets. Customize the solution by connecting with popular third-party apps like Google Workspace, OpenText, Mailchimp and Zapier. You can use the API to design custom integrations with external modules of your choice.
  • Create a Community: Create a community with your audience using customer-facing tools. It allows you to accept or cancel online customer bookings, send reminders and schedule appointments for services provided. You can also sell subscriptions and create members-only pages with gated content accessible to subscribers and community members. But you should note that member areas and subscription packages are available at an extra cost and not included in any pricing plan.
  • Introduce Additional Revenue Streams: Create a donation block on your website and suggest donation amounts. These blocks appear as Donate buttons on the page, and you can customize the button text and design and add custom forms to collect specific information from donors.
  • Allow Flexible Payments: Although it doesn’t have a native payment processor, Squarespace offers integrations with Stripe, PayPal and Apple Pay. Stripe integration lets you add Afterpay options to your site, meaning customers can pay for a product in installments through EMIs. But you can only add Afterpay as a payment option for physical goods, not digital assets.

Primary Features

  • SEO: SEO title formats help create a consistent structure of how your pages look in browser tabs, search engine results and social posts. The system automatically generates robots.txt files and integrates with Google My Business to sync locations and prioritize your page to local audiences.
  • Product Information Management: You can sell unlimited products, including digital content, blogs and services. Sort and organize product tags, categories, labels, discounts, attributes and taxonomies and create unique product pages with multiple layout options. You can also import and export your catalog details in CSV format.
  • Inventory and Order Management: The platform offers quick views into your inventory and stock levels. You can add product SKUs (stock-keeping units) and variants and organize your inventory in warehouses, fulfillment centers and physical stores. It lets you easily print shipping labels and automatically send tracking links to customers upon order confirmation.
  • Cart and Checkout: The platform supports abandoned cart recovery and express checkout, allowing customers to directly purchase a product without adding it to their cart or creating personal accounts. You can set up shipping methods based on custom rules to automate tax and shipping rate calculations.
  • Store Analytics: Commerce analytics allows you to track revenue, orders, units sold, abandoned carts and sales funnels. It provides insights into total spending, average order value, cost per acquisition and returns on advertising spend. Use the site analytics module to monitor page views, unique visitors, traffic sources and other KPIs. Get insights into keywords that drive traffic to the site from Google and other search engines with acquisition analytics.

Limitations

  • It doesn’t offer backup options, and deleted content is tough to recover.
  • The platform doesn’t support multiple currencies.
  • It takes longer to design and launch a website due to the wide range of website-designing tools and options.
Price: $$$$$
Deployment:
Platform:

Company Size Suitability: S M L

Adobe Commerce

Adobe Commerce is the ultimate eCommerce website builder for large enterprises and multi-branded businesses. Built on the Magento platform, it offers flexibility and scalability to manage and grow your business with headless architecture and multi-store management features.

It’s an omnichannel solution that supports multiple business models, including B2B, B2C, dropshipping, private labeling and white labeling. You can use the native AI, Adobe Sensei and PWA studio to design branded customer experiences across every type of web-browsing device, including desktops, mobiles, tablets and IoT devices.

Adobe Commerce doesn’t publish its pricing plans and offers bespoke quotes based on your business’s annual gross merchandise value (GMV) and average order value (AOV). According to our analysts, the estimated cost ranges between $22,000 to $125,000 annually.

Alternatively, you can consider using the Magento open-source version of the platform. It’s the free version of Adobe Commerce with an open API that requires you to build features and functionalities from scratch. However, you should note that designing your custom features requires in-depth technical knowledge and coding expertise.

Designing Responsive eCommerce Websites in Adobe Commerce

Design responsive product pages that run smoothly on every type of web-browsing device. Source

Top Benefits

  • Streamline Customer Navigation: The platform uses AI and machine learning to offer personalized search results based on a customer’s search and navigation history. It can recognize synonyms and similar items to redirect customers to their desired products even if their search term isn’t accurate. You can define rules to suggest related items in the people also searched for section and advertise seasonal sales and top-selling products on your website’s search bar.
  • Know Your Audience Better: Automatically create profiles for website visitors. You can add attributes, navigation history, personal details, checkout preferences and other information to each profile. This allows the AI to streamline navigation during repeat visits and give customer service representatives a real-time view of a customer’s history to help resolve issues faster.
  • Improve Product Recommendations: The native AI suggests relevant products based on shoppers’ profiles, behavior, trends and preferences. It offers different recommendation algorithms based on shoppers, items and contextual popularity.
  • Increase Revenue: You can set up multi-tiered pricing rules for your catalogs based on customer profiles, locations and other metrics. Define and set conditions for a pricing rule and triggers to automatically display products with a special or promotional price.
  • Simplify B2B Buyer’s Journeys: The solution supports integrated customer quoting and cost negotiation features. On top of that, it offers B2C features like smart search, product recommendations and customer profiling to streamline a B2B buyer’s journey.

Primary Features

  • Website Designing: Use pre-built customizable templates or create your own to design a branded website. It allows you to change the page layout from three-column to two-column, and the main area’s content expands to fill the void. You can drag and drop every content element and edit inline text. It also offers content-editing tools to preview content and schedule publishing date and time.
  • PWA Studio: You can design progressive web applications (PWA) with responsive themes and unique templates that can deliver your brand’s content and catalog on every web-browsing device. Use various performance optimizers and design strategies to load content faster on any network.
  • Multi-site Management: Manage multiple brands and product lines across geographies. It centralizes all your content, products and digital experiences in one place. You can set different pricing structures, showcase catalogs based on customer segments, and customize checkout and fulfillment options according to customer locations.
  • Inventory and Order Management: Track inventory across locations and set up alerts to notify you when stocks are running low. The platform can also automate procurement based on custom rules. You can define preferred product configurations across channels and create product-checking workflows to ensure quality. Upon order confirmation, the platform automatically determines the closest fulfillment center to the customer’s location and triggers a custom shipping and order fulfillment workflow.
  • Business Intelligence (BI): You can create dashboards and visualizations to track sales, searches and best-selling products. The native BI module automatically turns unorganized data into visualizations and offers insights into the best ways to grow and scale your business.

Limitations

  • It doesn’t have a native Android or iOS mobile app.
Price: $$$$$
Deployment:
Platform:

Company Size Suitability: S M L

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is another industry stalwart that offers ideal solutions for selling products on multiple online channels with a centralized system for managing orders, payments and inventory. It’s an open SaaS eCommerce platform that supports multi-storefronts, unlimited products, file storage and bandwidth with each plan.

The entry-level plan starts at $29 monthly and can help you design up to three storefronts with intuitive drag-and-drop tools, HTML toolkits and CSS editors. But this plan doesn’t include features like abandoned cart recovery, product filtering, customer reviews and API support. Also, you can’t register a domain name through the platform and must buy it externally.

All these factors combined make BigCommerce a less attractive option than our previous picks for small and micro organizations looking to start their eCommerce business from scratch.

That said, it offers robust automation, personalization and analytics that are perfect for mid-market and large enterprises rapidly growing their business. The vendor also places a revenue limit on each of its plans.

The starter plan caps out at $50,000 annual revenue, which means once you cross that threshold, you must upgrade to a higher tier. The good news is that you’ll be able to afford the higher-tiered plan due to your revenue growth. BigCommerce justifies the increased subscription fee with various advanced features, priority support, and lower transaction and credit card processing fee.

Managing Websites in BigCommerce

Edit and manage each section of your website with minimal mouse clicks. Source

Top Benefits

  • Flexible Site Designing: WordPress integration allows bloggers and developers to design and build the site on the platform and connect it to the eCommerce engine with pre-built plugins.
  • Streamlined Customer Journeys: Customers can view product details at a glance without visiting the product page by hovering the cursor over an item. They can also use search and filtering options to quickly find what they’re looking for.
  • Easier and Flexible Checkouts: It supports a single-page checkout process that boosts conversion rates. Unlike previous options, BigCommerce has a one-page design that simplifies checkouts with minimal mouse clicks. It also connects with every popular payment gateway and can accept cryptocurrency payments through integration with BitPay.
  • Improved Business Visibility: Integrations with Amazon, Facebook, Google Shopping, eBay, Walmart, TikTok and Instagram help you promote and advertise your business on every popular channel used by your target audience. It also offers courses and coaching on search engine optimization and audits to improve your site’s visibility on search engines.

Primary Features

  • Site Designing: You can customize the site experience with server-to-server checkout API and SDK (software development kit). It also supports a headless commerce architecture in React.js/Vue.js (F/E framework), allowing you to discover, test and onboard headless solutions within the control panel. Use Stencil command-line interface (CLI) to develop, test and preview site changes in a local environment before publishing without downtime.
  • Cross-channel Ecommerce: Manage multiple brands from a single account for different customer segments and geographies. It allows you to market your business and sell products across marketplaces, social media networks and websites. You can also unify the online and offline buying experience with a native POS system.
  • Segmentation and Product Recommendation: You can divide your target audience into multiple segments and showcase unique pricing, catalogs and promotions for each segment. It supports custom rules to personalize customer experiences across sites and segments.
  • Globalization: The solution helps your business sell to a global audience. It supports over 100 currencies and offers local payment methods through the user-preferred gateway. You can configure your front end in any language using apps and APIs for third-party translation services. It also supports cross-border fulfillment and integrates with ShipperHQ to provide quotes for cross-border shipping.
  • Return Processing: You can create a returns policy page and portals for customers to file requests. Customers can explain why they are returning a product, and what’s the best course of action they would prefer (refund, return or replacement).

Limitations

  • The built-in blog doesn’t support RSS feeds.
  • The platform limits pricing plans by annual sales volume.
Price: $$$$$
Deployment:
Platform:

Company Size Suitability: S M L

How We Choose Products

Our team of writers and analysts at SelectHub is committed to giving you the best recommendations based on our data. To make our list, products had to meet two criteria:

  1. Closely match the topic
  2. Earn a top-5 analyst score in our selection platform

Our analyst scores are based on an in-depth research process using primary and secondary sources. This includes SelectHub Analyst Briefings, direct communication with vendors, and reviewing materials such as user reviews, product brochures, specification sheets, case studies, user manuals, and technical documentation.

Our platform’s Scoring Engine processes the research and computes the analyst score. The score also factors in platform settings such as industry and company size.

Learn more about our research methodology and editorial standards

Factors To Consider

All of the options on our list are great eCommerce web builders that can get the job done. But that doesn’t mean you can pick any one of them and guarantee success for your business.

There are minute details that separate each platform from the next. You need to carefully assess your business requirements along with each platform’s intricacies to identify the ideal solution. Here are a few factors you should consider during software evaluation:

Factors To Consider while Evaluating eCommerce Website Builders

Plan Limitations

Building an eCommerce website can be overwhelming due to the limitations of their web builders.

For example, BigCommerce sets an annual sales cap of $50,000 for their entry-level plan. Squarespace imposes 3% transaction fees but allows unlimited sales. It also removes some of its features unless you opt for top-tier plans. Meanwhile, unless you upgrade to a higher plan, Wix stops calculating transaction tax after your first 100 sales and supports only 1,000 product reviews.

There are plenty of such discreet limitations varying from platform to platform. They may seem irrelevant when you’re just starting. But make sure to read through and note these limitations, as it can help you choose the best web builder that offers the flexibility required to grow your business.

Technical Expertise

Building a successful eCommerce website from scratch is not a simple task, and you do not want to get stuck with a platform that doesn’t match your coding and technical expertise.

If you’ve never built a website, consider web builders that design the entire thing with drag-and-drop tools and leave room to grow them into more advanced features. Wix and Squarespace are strong contenders for complete beginners. Shopify also falls under the bracket, but it takes longer for novices to get used to the platform due to its wide range of capabilities and features.

On the other hand, Adobe Commerce and BigCommerce are extremely flexible, customizable and developer-friendly platforms that can design a website exactly how you want it. You just need to face a steep learning curve or hire an expert.

Vendor Support and Policies

Nobody likes to navigate multiple automated phone menus only to realize that no human customer service representative is available. Or have your call transferred to different people before finally reaching someone who can answer your query or solve your problem.

Vendor support is a crucial factor to consider while evaluating software. We recommend contacting a platform’s support lines through chat, text, call and email. Take note of how long they take to respond and the quality of their responses to determine if they have an adequate post-purchase customer service policy.

Other than that, you can research online customer reviews to gauge how well a vendor provides customer service. Based on recent reviews on different channels, Shopify has one of the best support teams that are usually timely, friendly and knowledgeable.

You can also consider getting into a service level agreement (SLA) with your vendor to standardize response times and quality.

Usability

Managing an eCommerce business is like flying an airplane — there are many moving parts that demand your attention as a pilot, and the last thing you need is a complicated interface that you aren’t comfortable using.

The only way to find out what’s comfortable for you is to try out products. You should consider demos and trial periods to get a feel of the solution’s interface.

Start by designing a page or two to understand each website builder and its tools. Then, move on to creating product pages and playing around with pre-built themes to see if they suit your brand’s tone and image.

While designing your website, be attentive to your gut feeling. Do you feel the tools are intuitive? Is it easy for you to make small changes or regular site updates? Does the website builder’s structure frustrate you or feel overwhelming? Does any task feel burdensome to do on this platform?

Test out trial periods and ask yourself the same questions for each platform on our list. If any of it feels frustrating or burdensome, you should remove them from your shortlist without a second thought.

Compare Top eCommerce Platform Leaders

Key Questions To Ask

Preparing an eCommerce requirements checklist before diving into the market can help sift through the sea of options and prevent you from getting swayed by flashy features and marketing techniques. Ask yourself these questions to identify your business requirements from an eCommerce web builder:

Key Questions to Ask while evaluating eCommerce Website Builders

  • What type of products do you sell? Physical products have different selling and marketing requirements when compared to digital assets or services.
  • Which backend tools do you require? BigCommerce is great at inventory management, while Shopify has out-of-the-box features for dropshipping. Carefully choose and prioritize your backend tools.
  • What’s your expected time-to-market? Some platforms help you launch a website as quickly as possible, while others give you the flexibility to design a site however you like. It’s a trade-off.
  • What are your future plans? It isn’t easy to switch between eCommerce platforms and web builders. Choose a solution that can keep up with your business growth plans.
  • What’s your budget for software, additional features and payment processing? You must realize that most vendors have hidden costs for integrating third-party software, processing credit card and online payments and connecting to third-party payment gateways.

Software Comparison Strategy

Choosing the best eCommerce website builder for your business can seem like a complicated task. But what if we tell you there’s an easy way to do it?

At SelectHub, we’ve devised a comprehensive nine-step methodology that streamlines the software evaluation process from start to finish. We call it lean selection and here’s a brief rundown of the steps:

eCommerce Website Builders Lean Selection Methodology

  • Establish: Take an internal survey to determine why you want an eCommerce website builder and not custom-build a website.
  • Collaborate: Form a committee of your business executives, stakeholders, department heads and IT staff.
  • Define: Determine and prioritize the requirements each member of the software selection committee has from the new website builder.
  • Distribute: Review potential vendors based on how they can meet your requirements and shortlist the best ones.
  • Justify: After gauging the features offered by vendors, determine if your business still wants to get a new eCommerce website builder or hire developers to custom-build the website. If you’re convinced about getting a website builder, move on to the next step.
  • Prove: Request shortlisted vendors for demos, use cases and feature demonstrations to prove that they can actually fulfill your needs.
  • Rank: Score and rank vendors based on the total cost of ownership and their demo scores.
  • Negotiate: Review the contract and policy of the top vendor on your list. Seek additional legal help if necessary. If you or the vendor can’t compromise, move on to the next vendor on your list and repeat the process.
  • Sign: Sign the contract of the vendor that best meets your requirements and offers a sound policy.

If you’re interested to learn more about the process, check out our book on lean selection.

Compare Top eCommerce Platform Leaders

FAQs

An eCommerce website builder is an online tool that helps you create a professional-looking online store without knowing how to code. It allows you to choose from a variety of templates, customize website design and add products or services using drag-and-drop tools.

These are intuitive platforms with a user-friendly interface that offers built-in SEO tools to optimize your website for search engines. They are perfect for anyone looking to start an online business quickly and easily.

It’s important to know the cost and investment required to build an eCommerce website before you start building one. But it’s not possible to point towards a single amount and expect the tool to meet every business’s needs within that budget.

Generally, you can expect the cost to start from $4,000, which can rise beyond $35,000 yearly. You can consider using a free eCommerce website cost calculator for a rough estimate. Here are some broad factors that can affect the cost:

Architecture

Before you launch your dream eCommerce website, you need a few investments to create a safe and reliable architecture. This includes buying a domain (your website’s online address), a web-hosting service (the data repository) and an SSL certificate (security for your online store).

Most eCommerce platforms and web builders include these services in their plans. But if not, you can expect costs to range between $200 to $1,000 for building your website architecture.

Software

The primary factor affecting the cost of your online store is the software you use to run and manage it. It could be a single all-in-one solution or multiple disparate systems to handle website designing, marketing, management, fulfillment, accounting and customer service.

Overall, the cost of eCommerce platforms can start from $200 and go beyond $20,000, payable yearly.

Creative

Beyond building and designing your website, you need to pay to fill it up with engaging and unique content that makes a customer’s journey through your site enjoyable and enriching. You could write copies and create multimedia yourself, but as the saying goes, time is money, and you end up paying for your content through finances or time.

If you’re looking to outsource content creation services, your costs can range between $500 to $5,000 and will include:

  • Copywriting fees
  • Professional product photography fees
  • Costs to create videos and other multimedia elements

Payment Processing

Although not a start-up cost to build a website, payment processing fees take up a significant portion of the total cost of launching and managing an eCommerce website. Each payment gateway has a 0.5-1.5% processing fee, and you may have to pay an additional amount to the eCommerce platform for each transaction, depending on the vendor.

For example, Wix and BigCommerce don’t charge transaction fees on top of a payment gateway’s processing cost.

On the other hand, Shopify has an additional 1-2% fee for each transaction if you’re using an external payment gateway. But it doesn’t charge extra if you use their native processor, Shopify Payments.

Custom websites are the ones that web developers and designers build from scratch according to your requirements and specifications. They offer more control, scalability, flexibility and ownership over the website architecture and functioning than online stores built on eCommerce web builders.

But custom websites have a higher development cost. On top of that, the complexity of running and maintaining the platform, hiring and training IT personnel, and constantly looking for security breaches make custom website building a daunting and demanding operation.

With website builders, you pay not only for the features but also the vendor’s years of expertise in creating and launching successful eCommerce stores. They include the industry’s best practices in the platform and update it according to market trends. This helps you be more nimble in the face of change when compared to someone with a custom-built website.

Compare Top eCommerce Platform Leaders

Next Steps

Building an eCommerce website is now easier than ever with intuitive drag-and-drop tools, stunning pre-built templates and robust backend functionalities. We discussed some of the best eCommerce website builders available in the market, each with its unique set of features and benefits.

With user-friendly interfaces, customizable templates and powerful eCommerce tools, these website builders make it possible for anyone to create a professional-looking and successful online store in a few days. So why wait? Find the best-fit platform using our free comparison report, and start your eCommerce journey today!

Which platform do you think suits your business best? What are your thoughts on website builders vs. custom-built storefronts? Let’s start a conversation below in the comment box!

Riddhiman RoyThe Best eCommerce Website Builders Of 2024

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *