The 6 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Businesses

Sabrina Dougall
A head shot of Natasha Willett - a blonde woman in a work shirt with a blue background

Our site is reader-supported – by clicking our links, we can match you with a potential supplier, and we may earn a small commission for this referral.

The overall winner in our research is Wix. It's user-friendly and offers strong SEO features, along with improved sales tools.

Recently, we tested the best ecommerce platforms for small businesses, examining how they've improved or dropped off since we last reviewed them.

We looked at the factors that matter most to small business, such as value for money, SEO (search engine optimisation) functionalities, marketing tools, ease of use, and sales features. We also asked everyday users to try the platforms, too.

Below, you’ll find our comparison table followed by individual reviews for each platform.

Swipe right to see more
0 out of 0

Wix

Squarespace

Square Online

Shopify

BigCommerce

GoDaddy

Score
4.7
Score
4.6
Score
4.5
Score
4.1
Score
4.0
Score
3.9
Best For

A website that works well

Best For

Combining design with impressive sales features

Best For

Value for money (option to sell for free)

Best For

Sales-specific features

Best For

Multichannel selling

Best For

Speedy website launch

Price Range
Incl GST
Price Range
Incl GST
Price Range
Incl GST

A$0–$85

Price Range
Incl GST

A$8-$3,000+/month (incl GST)

Price Range
Incl GST

A$43–$444/month

Price Range
Incl GST

A$24.95 (first year)

A$36.95 (afterwards)

Transaction fees

0%

Transaction fees

0-3%

Transaction fees

1.9-2.2%

Transaction fees

5%-0.15%

Transaction fees

0%

Transaction fees

0%

Key Features
  • Around 900 design templates
  • Loads of website functions
  • Sell on Facebook, eBay, Amazon, and more
  • Tools to boost search engine visibility
Key Features
  • Stunning templates
  • SSL security
  • Unlimited product listings
  • Members area and subscriptions
Key Features
  • Pickup and delivery
  • Order fulfilment
  • Sell on social channels
  • Accept PayPal (on Plus plan)
  • Connect with Square card reader
Key Features
  • Website design tools
  • Sell products or services
  • Order tracking
  • Inventory management
  • Self-hosts its sites
  • Shipping discounts
Key Features
  • Unlimited products, file storage and bandwidth
  • Sell on Amazon, Walmart and eBay
  • Limited product filtering
  • Limited inventory locations
Key Features
  • SSL security
  • Email marketing
  • Take appointment bookings
  • Social posts
  • Phone support
Free trial
Free trial
Free trial
Free trial
Free trial
Free trial

Wix (4.7/5)

Best overall

Shooting up from 4.3/5 to 4.7/5 in our most recent research, Wix is today's winner. Since our first round of testing , Wix now lets you sell via Instagram and Facebook, and use drop shopping services.

It's also the best ecommerce platform for small businesses looking to appear higher on the search engine results pages, getting you higher visitor traffic and more sales, thanks to its SEO Wizard tool providing step-by-step tutorials and helping you track your site’s SEO success with regular performance updates.

There are 71 ecommerce-specific templates available, with in-built capabilities such as checkout buttons and industry-specific features. It's no wonder Wix scored the highest in our ‘website features‘ category, with 4.6/5.

Syncing your physical inventory with your online store is far easier on other platforms, and you might find the sheer creative freedom Wix offers to be overwhelming at first, however, Wix is our overall winner for a reason – it's powerful, great for SEO, and simple to use.

Pros

  • Brilliant SEO features to help your small business grow
  • Lots of creative freedom to help you design the exact storefront you want
  • You can add product videos to help improve the buying experience
  • There's no need to look beyond Wix for ecommerce features to help your small business grow

Cons

  • The amount of creative freedom can make it hard to adhere to ecommerce best practices
  • You can’t switch templates after publishing your site
  • Editor page can seem clustered and overwhelming at times

Wix pricing

Wix offers a 14-day free trial period on its premium plans, of which there are three ecommerce-specific options. Check out our in-depth Wix pricing guide or take a look at the table below for a quick overview:

Swipe right to see more
0 out of 0
Price (Paying Annually)

$32 per month

Price (Paying Annually)

$44 per month

Price (Paying Annually)

$58 per month

Best For

Starting a small online store

Best For

Selling internationally or subscriptions

Best For

High volume selling online or large-scale dropshipping

Key Features
  • List unlimited products
  • Take online payments
  • 20GB storage
  • 5hrs video
  • Facebook and Instagram sales
  • Abandoned cart emails
Key Features
  • 35GB storage
  • Sell subscriptions
  • Prices in local currencies
  • Print shipping labels
  • Automated sales tax for 100 transactions/month
  • 10hrs video
Key Features
  • 50GB storage
  • Customised data reports
  • Rewards for loyalty
  • Unlimited dropshipping (via Modalyst)
  • Unlimited video hours
  • Priority support
Transaction Fees

0%

Transaction Fees

0%

Transaction Fees

0%

Wix is our top choice for small businesses looking to get online

Squarespace (4.6/5)

Best for combining design with sales features

What impressed us most in our second round of testing was Squarespace's improvements on user experience, shooting up from a 3.4/5 to a 4.2/5 ease of use score. It's now the easiest platform to build an online store with.

With its sleek, ready-made templates to help your products stand out, you really don’t need to spend hours making a beautiful Squarespace store.

Squarespace is also great value for money, supporting the sales of physical, digital, and service-based products, and the ability to sell through Instagram on its affordable price plans.

However, it only supports two payment processors (compared to Shopify’s 100+ integrations) – which might restrict your options.

Pros

  • Excellent sales for features for a ‘non-ecommerce specific’ website builder
  • Best-designed templates of any platform we tested
  • Excellent value for money

Cons

  • Limited stock monitoring capabilities
  • Supports just two payment processors (Stripe and PayPal)
  • Could offer more ecommerce-specific templates

Squarespace pricing

Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial when you sign up to one of its ecommerce plans.

Plus, you can save 10% on your subscription by using code EM10 at checkout.

Swipe right to see more
0 out of 0
Price (Paying Monthly)

Business

Price (Paying Monthly)

Basic Commerce

Price (Paying Monthly)

Advanced Commerce

Price (Paying Annually)

A$27.50/month

Price (Paying Annually)

A$37.40/month

Price (Paying Annually)

A$57.20/month

Best For

New entrepreneurs and small business owners

Best For

SMBs looking to sell online

Best For

Medium-sized ecommerce businesses

Key Features
  • Sell unlimited number of products
  • Free Google account for one year
  • Google Ads extra credit
  • Sell gift cards
Key Features
  • Product waitlists
  • Sell on Instagram
  • Ecommerce analytics
  • Product reviews
  • Display stock levels
Key Features
  • Abandoned cart recovery
  • Sell subscriptions
  • Commerce APIs
  • Advanced shipping features (including a real-time cost calculator)
Transaction Fees

3%

Transaction Fees

0%

Transaction Fees

0%

Squarespace has the design tools to help your business stand out online

Square Online (4.5/5)

Square Online is one of the very best ecommerce platforms for small businesses. It has all the essential features on its free plan including multi-channel selling making it one of the best free ecommerce platforms, too.

The ability to sell for free is a big draw. Instead, you pay 1.9% per transaction, which is relatively high compared to the competition in truth. It's still the best value for money platform we tested, scoring 4.6/5 in that category.

It does only support one payment processor on its cheapest plans (Square POS), while BigCommerce and Shopify support over 100. You’ll also likely find the design options to be quite restrictive. 

Overall, Square Online is a no frills approach to selling online. It covers the basics very well, but doesn't go much further than that.

Pros

  • The best value for money platform we tested
  • Offers multi-channel selling on its free plan
  • Excellent in-built dashboard providing insights on sales and customer behaviour

Cons

  • Lack of prompts or tips to help you get started (unlike Wix)
  • Expensive transaction fees when you don’t use Square’s payment processor
  • Not the most logical of layouts, using some jargon in the backend

Square Online pricing

Square has four price plans to choose from:

Swipe right to see more
0 out of 0
Price (Paying Monthly)

Free

Price (Paying Monthly)

Professional

Price (Paying Monthly)

Performance

Price (Paying Monthly)

Premium

Best For

Starting your first online store

Best For

Establishing your SMB

Best For

Growing your SMB

Best For

Scaling up your business

Key Features

Sell unlimited products

Instagram and Pinterest integration

2.2% transaction fees

Key Features

Custom font uploads

Password-protected pages

Free custom domain for one year

2.2% transaction fees

Key Features

Customer reviews on your site

Abandoned cart recovery

Accept PayPal

2.2% transaction fees

Key Features

Advanced ecommerce analytics

Real-time shipping

1.9% transaction fees

Square is the best value for money platform for small businesses

Shopify (4.1/5)

Best for sales-specific features

Shopify is one of the most comprehensive ecommerce platforms on the market, offering the most amount of sales features of any platform we tested, including access to 1,200+ apps. So, why doesn’t it get full marks?

In truth, Shopify is better suited to larger online stores with more complex inventories – it's a powerful solution that might be overkill or too expensive for most small stores, with price plans starting from A$7 per month. It also enforces transaction fees if you don’t use Shopify Payments – two things which may hinder the growth of your small business.

However, Shopify's backend is really easy to navigate, outperforming the other platforms such as Woocommerce (as discussed in-depth in our comparison between the two), in our customer score category, with 4.8/5. 

Pros

  • Excellent multi-channel integration (sell across all the big social media channels, and Amazon, eBay, Buzzfeed, and more)
  • Offers largest choice of sales-specific features of any platform we tested
  • Despite fewer in-built features, you can choose from 1,200+ apps to enable your store to do almost anything

Cons

  • Shopify imposes transaction fees if you don’t use its own payment processor (unlike BigCommerce, which charges zero fees)
  • You’ll need to reformat your whole website if you decide to switch templates
  • Cost of installing apps can quickly add up
  • Design is far less intuitive than on Wix and Squarespace

Shopify pricing

Shopify offers a 14-day free trial period, so you can test its sales tools and build your entire online store before spending a penny. If you’re happy with Shopify after that period, you’ll then need to upgrade to one of Shopify's price plans:

Swipe right to see more
0 out of 0
Price (Paying Monthly)

Starter

Price (Paying Monthly)

Basic

Price (Paying Monthly)

Shopify

Price (Paying Monthly)

Advanced

Price (Paying Monthly)

Plus

Price (Paying Annually)

$7/month

Price (Paying Annually)

$42/month

Price (Paying Annually)

A$114/month

Price (Paying Annually)

A$433/month

Price (Paying Annually)

From $3,000/month

Best For

Adding a buy button to your existing website or social media

Best For

Starting a small online store

Best For

Growing your business

Best For

Larger online stores

Best For

High volume merchants, large businesses

Key Features
  • Get “shoppable links” (URLs)
  • Product pages
  • Basic order management
  • Online credit card rate: 5% + 30¢
Key Features
  • Create an online shop
  • Unlimited products
  • 24/7 support
  • Online credit card rate: 1.75% + 30¢
  • Sell in 33 currencies
Key Features
  • Abandoned cart recovery emails
  • Five staff accounts
  • Online credit card rate: 1.6% + 30¢
  • Shipping discounts
Key Features
  • Third-party calculated shipping rates
  • 15 staff accounts
  • Online credit card rate: 1.4% + 30¢
  • Custom international pricing
Key Features
  • 99.99% uptime
  • Built-in AR, video, 3D media on product pages
  • Automation for complex processes
  • Faster checkout
Shopify's sales-specific tools are unrivalled by any platform we tested

BigCommerce (4.0/5)

Best for multi-channel selling

At no extra cost, BigCommerce allows you to sell your products via Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping, and Pinterest. It's also perfect for online clothing stores thanks to its industry-leading inventory management features.

BigCommerce also provides useful SEO prompts when you add products, and imposes zero transaction fees (unlike Shopify).

However, as a small business owner juggling different tasks, you might find BigCommerce time-consuming and tricky to use, especially compared to the user-friendly platforms Wix and Squarespace. We actually rate BigCommerce as one of the top platforms for large companies instead.

Pros

  • The only platform that allows you to send transactional emails
  • No extra transaction fees, unlike Shopify
  • Superb multi-channel integration with social media platforms and online marketplaces

Cons

  • Our research participants said the interface was slightly challenging to navigate
  • The only platform we tested that doesn’t provide a mobile app
  • Relatively restrictive design control, especially compared to Wix or Squarespace
  • Geared towards large online stores

BigCommerce pricing

BigCommerce offers a 15-day free trial period, after which you’ll need to sign up to one of its three core plans:

Swipe right to see more
0 out of 0
Price (Paying Monthly)

Standard

Price (Paying Monthly)

Plus

Price (Paying Monthly)

Pro

Price (Paying Annually)

A$43/month

Price (Paying Annually)

A$117/month

Price (Paying Annually)

A$444/month

Best For

Starting a small or medium-sized online store

Best For

Growing your online store

Best For

Scaling your business to new heights

Key Features

Sell an unlimited number of products

Multichannel selling

Coupon creation

Reporting tools

Accept 100+ currencies

Receive real-time shipping quotes

Key Features

Abandoned cart recovery emails

Customer loyalty programmes

Store credit card payment details

No transaction fees

Key Features

Product filters for sizes and colours

Dedicated SSL security

Google reviews

No transaction fees

Prices converted from USD to AUD based on conversion rates on April 13, 2023.

BigCommerce's multi-channel integrations can help your small business reach new audiences

GoDaddy (3.9/5)

Best for speedy setup

Running a small business is hard work. You might be struggling for time, or lacking the creative inspiration required to build an online store from scratch – which is where GoDaddy comes in.

It uses an ADI (artificial design intelligence) approach – first asking you a few questions, then generating a new website within minutes, with a new layout and proposed images. Simply put, GoDaddy is easily the best ecommerce platform for small businesses who are extremely tight on time.

That said, GoDaddy’s website features lack the quality to help your website stand out online (in stark contrast to Squarespace), and you won't be able to sell digital products.

Pros

  • Fastest and easiest-to-use platform we tested thanks to its ADI function
  • Allows you to create up to five backup copies of your website to give you peace of mind when making changes to your site
  • No surprise fees, just the set price plan and the usual credit card processor fees

Cons

  • Very limited creative control due to the ADI function creating the site for you
  • Features lack depth and quality compared to every other platform we tested
  • Doesn’t support the sale of digital products

GoDaddy pricing

GoDaddy offers a generous one-month free trial period and one ecommerce-specific price plan:

GoDaddy can build your ecommerce store for you within a few minutes

Expert verdict

Building on our extensive period of research and hands-on testing, we’ve selected and reviewed the best ecommerce platforms for small businesses. Having read our review, you’re now ready to choose your platform – great news!

Here’s a quick roundup of our top three…

  1. Wix came out on top thanks to its strong SEO features, improved sales features, and creative freedom.
  2. Squarespace is the better option if you want to build a beautiful online store that outshines the competition, offering industry-leading design tools and templates.
  3. Square Online is the best value for money option, combining ease-of-use with the option of a totally free plan – a killer combo for small businesses.

Of course, we know that not everyone will find their perfect solution in one of these top three platforms. In that case, you should also check out Shopify for its sales-specific tools, BigCommerce for its multi–channel selling, and GoDaddy for its speedy setup features.

Whichever platform you’ve chosen, though, we wish you and your business the best of luck for the future!

How We Test Ecommerce Website Builders for Businesses

We tested eight market-leading ecommerce website builders to evaluate them in terms of functionality, usability, accuracy, and aesthetics so we can make the most useful recommendations to Australian businesses.

Our rigorous testing process means these products have been scored and rated in seven main categories of investigation and 47 subcategories – in fact, we covered 341 areas of investigation in total. We then gave each category score a ‘relevance weighting' to ensure the product's final score perfectly reflects the needs and requirements of Expert Market readers – and that's our product testing algorithm in a nutshell!

Our main testing categories for ecommerce website builders are:

Website Features: the capabilities and functionalities offered by an ecommerce website builder, e.g. blog functionality, SEO capability, and marketing capacity.

Sales Features: the sales capabilities and sales functionalities offered by an ecommerce builder, including shipping, inventory capacity, and payment options.

Design: the aesthetic appeal and visual layout of a website created using the ecommerce product. It encompasses aspects such as page templates and customisable themes.

Customer Score: external customer opinion; the feedback and ratings given by customers who have used a particular ecommerce website builder – the market position and reputation the builder holds.

Ease of Use: how user-friendly and intuitive a website builder is for people with varying levels of technical expertise.

Value for Money: the balance between the cost of a builder and the benefits it provides. It considers factors such as pricing plans, subscription models, and available features.

Help and Support: the assistance and resources available to users when they encounter issues or need guidance while using an ecommerce website builder. This can include tutorials, knowledge bases, and email or chat support.

 

Written by:
Sabrina Dougall
Sabrina Dougall Web Marketing Expert

Sabrina is a business journalist whose career began in news reporting. She has a master’s in Investigative Journalism from City University London, and her work has appeared in The Times, The Daily Express, Money Saving Expert, Camden New Journal, Global Trade Review, and Computer Business Review. She specializes in writing about SEO (search engine optimization). Having run her own small business, Sabrina knows first-hand how critical digital marketing is to building a client base and local reputation.

Reviewed by:
A head shot of Natasha Willett - a blonde woman in a work shirt with a blue background
Natasha Willett Head of Research

For over 9 years Natasha has worked as a mixed method researcher working across a range of sectors from insurance and policy development, to business services and software. As a member of the Market Research Society, Natasha is an advocate for high ethical, commercial and methodological best practices.