Ecommerce is no longer a buzzword but an accepted part of our daily life. We are used to shopping for a tee-shirt on our mobile devices while watching television! And so are your customers.

But as the owner of an e-commerce store, what are you looking for in an eCommerce website builder?

Principally the features that most want are:

• Reliability and uptime
• Shopping cart with recovery through basic CRM
• Inventory management
• Tax calculator.
• Multiple currency usage
• Integration with plenty of payment gateways
• Flexibility off design
• Very easily optimizable product pages

We looked at the best eCommerce website builders and decided that five of them made the cut. They all were exemplary, but some had slight advantages over the other.

Five Best E-commerce Site Builders

1. Shopify

Shopify is a trendy shopping site builder which lets you set up and manage an online store. It is one of the best eCommerce platforms you can rely on.

You do not need any understanding of coding to use Shopify. The WYSIWYG editor is utterly simple to use, so for anyone wondering how to build website for online store, Shopify offers a solution that doesn’t require you to write even a single word of code.

The main attraction is over a hundred templates that are perfectly categorized according to your needs. It is also possible to customize the storefront.

Advantages:

• Over 80 payment gateways are accepted, making global e-commerce really seamless.
  
  
• Complete integration with Facebook for your Shopify store makes social commerce a reality.
  
  
• Ability to use over 20 different languages. It makes it possible to customize a local store just the way you want.
  
  
• A very well designed abandoned cart recovery system that lets you persuade customers to complete their purchase at a later date.
  
  
• Complete and detailed marketing reports, including analysis of sales by region and other criteria.

Priced between $29 and 299, Shopify provides premium features with all the plans, including selling through social media and discount coupon code generator.

You could also use Shopify Lite that is for businesses using Facebook as a sales platform.

2. BigCommerce

BigCommerce powers over 70,000 e-commerce sites and is next to WooCommerce and Shopify in size. With a large variety of custom features, it enjoys a high reputation and hosts prestigious stores such as Skull Candy and Ben & Jerry’s.

Advantages:

• The chief advantage is the ease with which you can launch a store. There is a 14-day free trial (no credit card needed), and all you need to do is register at the site and start eCommerce website building with no hassle.
  
  
• Beautiful and elegant themes make BigCommerce stand out from the rest of the crowd. The themes are both free and premium and would satisfy even the pickiest of the lot.
  
  
• Ecommerce solutions provided by BigCommerce can be tweaked any way you prefer. You can add lines of code to the HTML and create an online shop that is perfectly suitable for your needs.
  
  
• BigCommerce is designed to be SEO friendly and makes adding product pages and meta tags an easy task.

The prices are reasonable, from $30 per month to $250 per month. You get a free domain name and hosting, an unlimited number of pages, and most important of all zero transaction fees.

3. 3Dcart

3Dcart is a SaaS model e-commerce solution meant for both small and large businesses. It is, in fact, the oldest online shopping platform and has been around for twenty years.

Advantages:

• Since it is SaaS and cloud-based, you do not have to worry about backup, updates, patches. Just like Google Mail (a SaaS example), you access it through a browser, and all the changes you make are recorded and backed up automatically.
  
  
• You have the option of a one-page checkout and working with multiple currencies.
  
  
• Use 3Dcart for an unlimited number of products and categories.
  
  
• The Startup Plan is priced at a mere $19 per month. It is limited to sales of $50,000 each year.
  
  
• The Basic Plan at $29 per month has a ceiling of sales at $100,000 per year.
  
  
• Plus Plan costs $79 per month and can handle sales up to $200,000 annually.
  
  
• The Pro Plan art $229 per month is for sales up to $400,000 yearly.

Above this level of sales, merchants have to migrate to Enterprise Edition with pricing from $499 per month. What may seem a little lacking is the themes. There are not as many as in other newer services. Most of them are quite plain vanilla online store themes with no visual appeal.

4. Wix eCommerce Website Builder

When it comes to online shopping, Wix is an unusual choice when compared to BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Shopify.

However, it is used by many merchants because Wix is a huge and reliable brand, and many web developers are used to working with Wix.

Advantages:

• Wix has an e-commerce module that allows access to various types of product catalogs and checkout pages. The shopping module has one-click integration with almost every Wix template.
  
  
• The Wix editor keeps you informed on how every little change is affecting the design of your storefront. The editor is really user-friendly and can make a web designer out of anybody.
  
  
• Wix is also excellent for developing a great brand by providing a seamless shopping experience. Every template is optimized for use on a mobile phone.
  
  
• Online stores must be always up and running. Wix has an excellent uptime record and offers reliable hosting. There is also constant tech support available for your store.
  
  
• Wix allows payment by a variety of methods, including Paypal and credit cards, but charges no extra fee for processing.

At only $29, Wix is remarkably affordable. Of course, any module and plugin that you buy have an extra charge, but that is true for all shopping site builders.

5. Squarespace

Squarespace is known for helping build cool websites. What many don’t know is that it is also perfect for small and medium e-commerce business.

It is not visually attractive templates alone that make Squarespace a great choice. It is suitable for any simple e-commerce endeavor such as niche boutiques and vendors that look at low sales volume with a high price and return.

Advantages:

• Squarespace is an excellent platform for anyone looking to take their sales online, but it is especially suited for those who want to focus on visuals. This includes art dealers, suppliers of custom labels, packaging, custom printed attire.
  
  
• Any site using Squarespace is well optimized and would rank high in Google search. The editor has a section devoted to page design with a massive array of options to choose from. If you feel overawed, you can copy paste a particular page into different product pages.
  
  
• You can display variations of the same product (like different sizes of a shirt), list an unlimited number of products, use a content manager that lets you sort your inventory, and lets you know which items are fast-moving.

There is, however, no separate app store if you want a lot of different plugins. You have to use inbuilt analytics, contact forms, currency converter, and other features.

Squarespace Online Stores is priced at $26 for basic and $40 for advanced plan.

Conclusion

We have explored the pros and cons of several e-commerce store builders. It remains without a doubt that the best is Shopify. It has grown over 10 times in the past three years, and that has been due to its versatility.

In our experience, the next best is BigCommerce. Though not as big as Shopify, it nevertheless powers thousands of sites globally.

The main criteria you should use — if the platform is capable of SEO precisely the way you want it. That results in more lead generation and more revenue. Everything else is secondary to that consideration.