The 7 Best Ecommerce Platforms & Website Builders 2022

Wix is a hugely popular drag-and-drop website builder and ecommerce platform, with over 110 million users worldwide. Wix knows a thing or two about creating websites and online stores!

Wix came third in our sales features research, and took the top position in the website features category. Need we say much more?

There are three Wix plans which are totally dedicated to ecommerce. The cheapest Wix ecommerce plan is the Business Basic at $23 a month, granting you access to a superb range of ecommerce features. 

Some of our favourite ecommerce features include:

• Abandoned cart recovery – send automatic emails and regain lost sales by encouraging customers to finalize purchases 
• Multi-channel integration – sell on Instagram without installing any apps
• ‘Buy now’ and ‘Add to cart’ buttons – create an easier shopping experience and increase sales
• Printable shipping labels – develop your brand image by personalizing your packaging
• Store card details – customers can pay-on-the-go using their stored card details in the ‘wallet’ area of the checkout
• Dropshipping – use a third party company and save the hassle of packaging and shipping yourself
• Integrations with Shipstation – provide a seamless shipping experience for your customers using apps like Shipstation

Better still, all Wix websites automatically come with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates. This is really important as it means customers can safely submit their details through your website.

In our research, Wix also ranks highly in our categories for value for money and customer support. 

Even on the Basic plan, you’ll get support via phone, email, and social media, as well as access to a forum and an in-depth knowledge base. It’s also the only builder to give you helpful on-page support while you’re creating your store. 

You can create a really strong brand for your online store by creating a highly customized storefront. Because of Wix’s drag-and-drop editor, it’s super easy to add product videos and other cool features to create the ultimate shopping experience. With Wix, you also know exactly how your online store will look to customers while you’re editing, making customization really easy.

Another way to add ecommerce features to your Wix online store is to use apps like Wix Stores and Ecwid.

While Ecwid lets you sell on Facebook, Wix Stores unlocks tons of great ecommerce features for your website, such as the ability to send automated confirmation emails to customers, and creating discounts.

And you don’t have to stay at home to run your business. The Wix Mobile App lets you manage your store on the go. This is a fantastic feature as it gives you more flexibility in managing your brand.

On the downside, Wix does have pretty basic inventory features and lacks a stock level management alert system. 

Overall, though, Wix does a great job of combining the ease and design of the traditional website builder with a range of excellent ecommerce features.

Wix is ideal for users of all tech abilities, offering amazing value for money along with the best help and support of any ecommerce builder. So, you can start flexing your ecommerce muscles without worrying!

Shopify is the best ecommerce platform for large stores, selling over 10 products. It powers over 600,000 online stores and has over 1 million active users worldwide. More than $100 billion has been sold on Shopify – so it must be doing something right!

Our research confirmed this. Shopify came second in sales features, with lots of high quality tools to support your store. Here’s a few of the main sales features:

• Sell physical and digital goods and services
• Abandoned cart recovery is built-in, helping catch incomplete sales
• Online invoice generator makes billing and collecting money easier
• Sync with 10 other sales platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon
• Over 100 different payment gateways to choose from (including Shopify Payments and Google Pay)
• Sell unlimited products
• Stay on track on the go with Shopify’s mobile app
• Easily customize your checkout with your own logo, brand colors and fonts

You can see why Shopify scored so highly in this area. Features like these don’t just make running your online store possible – they make it easy and enjoyable too. Put simply, Shopify was designed to help people build an online store. That’s why it’s packed with these high quality sales features, which were specially created to support your ecommerce business.

Despite its impressive features, however, Shopify isn’t the easiest to use. It came fifth in our ease of use testing, with many users finding its front and backend interfaces tricky to navigate.

Still, that wasn’t enough to reduce its user popularity.  It received the highest customer score of all the builders we tested, and an impressive 93% of Shopify customers told our researchers they were satisfied with the ecommerce platform.

Shopify is perfect for, well, everyone! Whether you’re just starting out or have a large business that’s scaling fast, Shopify covers all selling bases. With a 14 day free trial (no credit card details required) and over 100 themes to choose from, there’s nothing to lose!

Squarespace is a dream for creatives. If you’re looking to make your online store as visually effective as possible, this is the choice for you! Stunning templates, combined with a strong inventory system and lots of quality features, make Squarespace an attractive choice for thousands of online stores.

It shone for design flexibility in our research, coming joint first, alongside Wix and BigCommerce. Squarespace has a smaller but comprehensive selection of online store templates, covering an impressive range of industries from fashion to food & drink.

It also came first in our ease of use testing, meaning that it’s the easiest builder to get to grips with. It is worth knowing that there’s a slight learning curve, to begin with, but once you’ve got the basics down, building a store with Squarespace is easy peasy!

But what about the business side? Squarespace is a really strong all-round choice for combining a stylish storefront with classic ecommerce features, such as creating discounts and promotional pop-ups.

Promotional tools is an area where Squarespace really stands out. You can add different types of discounts to the products in your store, from individual products to entire orders. Other great sales tools and features include Squarespace’s inventory system.

Squarespace also allows you to sell unlimited products on any of its ecommerce price plans. Plus, you have the option of either uploading them in bulk or one at a time.

By combining this with in-house stock management, revenue reports, and email alerts about stock levels, Squarespace is more on the level of ecommerce specialist Shopify than its fellow ecommerce website builders.

This means your store won’t just look good with Squarespace: it’ll pack a punch too! But if you want speedy growth on a large scale, you might find Squarespace too small too soon – shipping and payment options are limited when compared to Shopify and BigCommerce.

With its professional templates, Squarespace will really show off your products and let your storefront shine. It’s a solid choice for your online store, as long as you don’t outgrow its range of ecommerce features.

In 2018, the payment processing giant Square bought Weebly (one of our highest-rated website builders). The result is Square Online, which combines powerful payment processing with an easy website building platform.

Unsurprisingly, Square Online’s interface is very similar to Weebly’s. That being said, you’ll enjoy Square Online’s fresh features, and you can even take advantage of its free ecommerce plan to see if it’s really such a great fit.

When we tested Square Online ourselves, we were particularly impressed by its quick and simple editing process. You can have a functioning ecommerce site set up after just a few clicks around your user dashboard.

Sales features like mutlichannel integration, plus quick access to insights about revenue and traffic, are what give Square Online such great value for money. That, and the speed with which Square Online can help you get online and start selling.

Adding products and product variations is extremely easy, and Square Online’s paid plans let you include small labels like “on sale” or “only a few left!” to create a sense of urgency around special deals.

The tradeoff for Square Online’s speed and ease of use is its lack of design customization. It’s true that you’ll have everything you need to create a simple store that emphasizes your products, but if you want to create a layout with your own personal creative flair, you may be better off with a design-oriented builder like Squarespace.

BigCommerce is a well-known ecommerce platform which boasts some well-known names – including Clarks and Ben & Jerry’s – as clients. And it’s no wonder! Online stores backed by BigCommerce have been recorded as growing at almost double the industry average.

In our research, BigCommerce came top for website features. This is because of the range of high-quality inhouse features it offers, such as customer reviews, email marketing, and search filters. BigCommerce also scored highly in sales features, allowing for international payments and multi-channel selling.

In fact, BigCommerce has more features than any of its competitors. Everything you need is already built into its library of themes and ready to make your online store succeed. This makes it the best choice if you’re looking to really grow your online store into a large and successful business.

The main drawback of BigCommerce is its ease of use, or lack thereof. It uses a lot of complex terminology in its descriptions, which won’t appear user friendly to anyone who doesn’t have good knowledge of such specialist terms.

Add this to a confusing editing interface and BigCommerce becomes a less than ideal choice, particularly if you’re looking for an easy to use ecommerce platform. Indeed, it received low customer scores in our research because of its lack of user-friendly language and difficult editor.

On the other hand, if you’re confident and tech-savvy, BigCommerce is an excellent choice. You can automatically sell physical and digital goods as well as services. And you don’t need apps to enable these – you can just start selling!

BigCommerce wants to see your store grow and succeed. You can upload products in bulk to save you time, and there’s no limit on the number of products you can sell. You can keep track of your products and customers using BigCommerce’s analytics reports. This is an important strength of the platform, with these reports available:

• Store overview
• Real time reports
• Customer reports
• Abandoned cart reports
• Merchandising reports

Abandoned cart recovery is already built in, plus you can customize the email that gets sent out to customers. You can even combine this with coupon codes to entice your customers back to your store.

BigCommerce should be used by anyone wanting to rapidly and remarkably grow their online store. Don’t use it if you are a beginner, either in business or in tech! It’s not the easiest to use, and its prices reflect the number of tools and features you get.

You will only get great value for your money if you’re using those features! After all, you wouldn’t buy a whole toolkit, then only use it to prop the door open. BigCommerce has every tool in the box, and is the perfect choice if your business is ready for a boom.

Zyro is a relatively new website builder on the ecommerce scene and has been designed to mimic competitors like Wix and Shopify. However, it does this with only varying degrees of success. Saying this, it has plenty about it that will appeal to the right user, so it’s worth taking a look!

Overall, Zyro scored 3.6 out of 5 in our research and testing. Its strongest area was its design functionalities. In this category, we awarded it 4.6 out of 5. This is thanks to its attractive templates, but also largely because it gives users so many options when it comes to customizing their store pages.

Usually, ecommerce builders offer a standard product design, but Zyro goes much further, allowing users to amend the layout of product pictures and text, as well as determining how many products are displayed per page. You can also completely customize your checkout page for an experience that’s unique to your online store.

In terms of its sales features, however, Zyro doesn’t really have the goods to hold its own in the company of more well-known names. We scored it 3.4 out of 5 in this area, which, whilst by no means bad, is not the best score on the board.

Although it supports the sale of both physical and digital products, as well as services, Zyro only allows you to sell up to 2500 items on its most expensive Advanced Store plan. This is limiting for larger stores or smaller ones with the ambition to grow.

It supports both PayPal and Stripe, as well as 14 additional US-based payment processors, but you’ll need to be prepared to pay a 1% transaction fee unless you upgrade to the most expensive plan.

Despite this, we were particularly impressed that Zyro can be connected with a POS (Point of Sale) device. Not many website builders offer this, and it’s a big bonus if you want to sell your items in real life, too.

You can also connect your online store to a number of social media platforms. Zyro supports integrations with Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Pinterest, and Whatsapp. It also works seamlessly alongside marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, and Google Shopping, too.

Unfortunately, however, it doesn’t come with a mobile app for on-the-go management.

Although Zyro is generally one of the easier builders to use, we found that certain areas of its backend store manager weren’t very intuitive when trying to create an online store. You’ll need to switch between the two dashboards and this makes it difficult to visualize how it’s all going to come together in the end.

Plus, unlike Wix, Zyro doesn’t come with any helpful hints and tips to help you out whilst you’re building. This would be particularly helpful when trying to create more advanced site elements, like popups. If you get stuck, you’ll need to use the on-page chatbox. The staff are very responsive, but sometimes it can be difficult to get the exact information you need.

Because Zyro’s ecommerce offering is still fairly new, there are a lot of tools missing that you’d expect to see on a more mature ecommerce builder. Despite the low price of its starter plan, we don’t consider it to be especially good value for money because of this. Its competitors offer more for what you pay.

That’s not to say that Zyro is a bad ecommerce builder. In fact, it has a lot going for it, not least the fact that we anticipate a host of improvements and innovations to come flooding in over the next few years.

At the moment, however, Zyro is best suited for hobbyists or those who are just testing the ecommerce waters. Those with more fully established ecommerce businesses will find themselves frustrated by Zyro’s limitations and basic sales functions.